Journalismus ohne Eigenleistung?

Why do local editors choose certain topics while ignoring others? What makes an event newsworthy? These are the central questions underlying Kolja Bannasch's empirical study on news selection processes in local newsrooms. To answer them, he first presents the classical approaches to explaining news selection—the gatekeeping approach, the news bias approach, and the news value approach—in a nuanced manner and discusses how these primarily national and international reporting frameworks can be adapted to study news selection at the local level. He concludes that only an integrated approach is suitable for the research subject. Such an approach is applied for the first time to local reporting in Germany in the form of an innovative multi-level model, inspired by Esser's bathtub model. The empirical investigation is based on a combination of a survey of editors and an input-output analysis of press releases and reporting. Kolja Bannasch concludes that local newsrooms, provided they have the appropriate staffing, can indeed produce reporting that meets the high expectations of media in an open society, far removed from court reporting and public relations journalism.