Chris Liebold
At the annual conference of the German Society for Journalism and Communication Studies (DGPuK), Dr. Aynur Sarısakaloğlu from the Research group Media Studies at TU Ilmenau presented the first results of a literature study on artificial intelligence in journalism on May 20, 2023 in Bremen. On the previous day, Professor Martin Löffelholz and Johanna Radechovsky illustrated core findings of a representative survey on the optimization possibilities of municipal risk and crisis communication.
The representative survey of German municipalities and public health departments on the challenges of governmental communication to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, analyzes which factors shaped risk and crisis communication at the federal, state and municipal levels during the Covid-19 pandemic and how future crises can be better managed in terms of communication.
Based on the results of the survey, in which Kathrin Schleicher is also involved, and a presentation by Professor Hans-Jürgen Bucher and Johanne Mayer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Finn-Christopher Brüning of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities and Dr. Christoph Peter of the German Federal Center for Health Education provided insights into the communication practices of public authorities during the pandemic.
In another panel, Aynur Sarısakaloğlu explained selected findings from a detailed literature review on algorithm-based transformation of journalism. The results show that the research field continues to be dominated by scholars from the United States. However, deeper theoretical or empirical studies, for example with regard to the consequences of AI technologies for media professionals, are hardly available so far.
Particularly gratifying: The book "Terrorism as Communication" by Professor Liane Rothenberger, accepted some time ago as a post-doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics and Media at the Technical University of Ilmenau, was awarded the Theory Prize of the DGPuK. After working for many years in the Department of Media Studies, Liane Rothenberger recently transferred to the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt as a university lecturer.
