Chris Liebold
In 2025, Johanna Radechovsky, associate of the Media Studies group, presented key findings from her extensive dissertation study on German fact-checking at three renowned academic conferences—each in highly relevant thematic fields and before an international audience of experts.
The kick-off event was the Journalism Studies Symposium 2025 organized by the Research Center for Communication and Culture (CECC) at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon (May 12, 2025). The annual symposium brings together communication, media, and journalism researchers from various countries in a deliberately compact, discussion-oriented format. In the session "Imagining the information battleground," Radechovsky presented her piece "A Typology of the German Fact-Check" and discussed the empirical findings in comparison to international fact-checking practices.
This was followed in September by an invitation to the Future of Journalism Conference 2025 at Cardiff University (September 11–12, 2025). The FoJ is one of the most important international journalism research conferences; in 2025, its theme was "Conflicting Journalisms: Resistance, Struggle, and Prospects." Researchers from numerous countries examined conflict situations in journalism, the effects of polarization and digitalization, and the role of new journalistic practices. In this context, Radechovsky presented her work "Explain, justify, warn – The fact-checking strategies of German practitioners" and placed German verification strategies in the global discussions on journalistic credibility and information integrity.
The final event was the annual conference of the DGPuK Journalism/Journalism Research Section at the University of Münster (September 24–26, 2025). The conference was held under the theme of "Journalism and Boundaries" and dealt with professional, epistemic, and organizational boundaries and obstacles in journalism. Around 80 participants and a broad scientific program provided an intensive framework for exchange and research transfer. There, Radechovsky presented the quantitative typology of her study in a presentation entitled "Subject Matter Experts, Guardians, and All-Rounders – A Quantitative Typology of German Fact-Checking" and received valuable feedback, particularly with regard to the implications for journalistic role research and fact-checking structures in Germany.
With these three high profile conference contributions, the results of the dissertation reached a broad, high-caliber international and national audience of experts and were embedded in central current debates in journalism and fact-checking research.