PhD Success at ZeMKI: Anne Schmitz Completes Dissertation

We are delighted to announce that former ZeMKI member Anne Schmitz successfully defended her dissertation “Journalistic Tools as ‘Boundary Objects’”, on 18 November 2025.

Drawing on an ethnographic study, Schmitz shows how journalistic tools shape journalism already during their development. Tool development is organised, and it organises in turn: it builds on existing structures, alters them, and creates new forms of collaboration between different actors. In this way, tool development substantially contributes to the (re-)organisation of journalistic work and organisational processes, highlighting how crucial the early development phase is for understanding journalistic transformation.

The examination committee consisted of ZeMKI members Prof. Dr. Christian Katzenbach, Prof. Dr. Christian Schwarzenegger, Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp, as well as mid-level academic representatives Hendrik Kühn and Florian Hohmann. The committee was further complemented by external examiner Prof. Dr. Wiebke Loosen (Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut).

With the defence, Schmitz completed a multi-year research project that she conducted alongside her work as a research associate in the DFG-funded project “Pioneer Communities – The Quantified Self and Maker Movement as Collective Actors of Deep Mediatization.” We warmly congratulate her on this achievement!