News & Entertainment

Media content is key to understanding modern communication: What consequences does the increasing commercialization of news production have? How do news and entertainment offerings influence the public’s understanding of reality and worldviews? And how does media use effect well-being and social relationships?

In its focus “News & Entertainment”, IKMZ examines the production of information and entertainment offerings, their form, use and effect. These questions are answered from media-economic, media-political, media-sociological and media-psychological perspectives. The issues of the focus area “News & Entertainment” include, among other things:

• structural, technological and institutional changes of the media providers,
• changes in the selection of media used by the public,
• the role of news and entertainment offerings in the public’s understanding of reality and their worldviews,
• the boundaries between information and entertainment and/or between journalism and fiction,
• the creation of hybrid forms such as infotainment and their effect upon the public,
• the developments in the production of news and entertainment,
• the potential loss of high-quality reporting, diversity and orientational knowledge,
• the mutual co-orientation of the media in issue cycles, surges in interest and hypes.

«News & Entertainment» is focused on by the IKMZ divisions International & Comparative Media Research, Public Sphere & Society, and Media Psychology & Effects.