The future of journalism has been one of the most intensely tackled questions for many years – within the field itself as well as among scholars. This sensitizes us to the fact that future developments do not just ‘come’ into existence. Far from it – sometimes decades will pass before transformations become tangible within a social domain where they are imagined as possible futures (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). While such imagined futures are not typically realized true to their original vision, they offer an overall orientation for more general practices dedicated to transformation and change. As part of this orientation, imagined futures already have an influence on the present and effectively open up and shape avenues for genuine future developments and the future present. This interrelation is discussed with particular vigour in the discourse on the development of media technologies (Castells, 2001; Rid, 2017; Streeter, 2010; Turner, 2006). From this research, we can start to understand the deep influence certain ‘individual pioneers’ and ‘pioneer communities’ have on (the futures of) technology-related developments (Couldry & Hepp, 2017: 181-195; Hepp, 2016).

In this paper, we want to discuss the role pioneer journalists and the pioneer communities that they are part of may play in journalism’s trajectory going forward. Journalism serves as an ideal case study for such an undertaking. This is because the transformation of journalism is entangled with the development of media technologies and is increasingly maintained beyond the newsroom by actors outside established media organisations, who are situated more at the periphery of the journalistic field not yet being part of the mainstream. For a couple of examples, one can look at the ‘Hacks/Hackers movement’ who are engaged in data- and technology-driven journalism (Lewis and Usher, 2014), or the ‘Constructive Journalism Project’ (www.constructivejournalism.org), which are both developing new forms of media coverage that integrates solution-focused elements (Haagerup, 2014). The starting point of our paper is that such forms of pioneering are a more general phenomenon in journalism. What pioneers or pioneer communities imagine is not a collection of straightforward ‘models’ that can be readily applied to current mainstream journalism, but something that is likely to have a remarkable impact on discourse surrounding its future – something that signals developments and practices of pioneers and innovators at the periphery that push towards the centre.

About the authors

Andreas Hepp
Andreas Hepp is Professor for Media and Communication Studies with the special areas Media Culture and Communication Theory at the ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research. Hepp graduated 1995 from the University of Trier with an MA-degree in German Studies and Political Science, focusing on media communication. Between 1995 and 1997, he was a research associate in the interdisciplinary research project “Talking about Television. The Everyday Appropriation of TV“ at the University of Trier (funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). In 1997, he finished his doctoral thesis on everyday appropriation of television, combining various perspectives of Cultural Studies with sociological conversation analysis. After having done some post-doctoral research at the University of Trier, Andreas Hepp was a lecturer at the Interfaculty Institute for Applied Cultural Studies at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in 1999. Between 1999 and 2003, he worked as a research associate at first, and later on as an academic assistant (wissenschaftlicher Assistent) at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the Technical University of Ilmenau. During that time, he was also a research fellow at the Nottingham Trent University, UK, and a visiting researcher at the University of Sunderland, UK. In 2004, he finished his habilitation thesis on media cultures and globalisation. In 2003 and 2004, he was a deputy professor for media sociology and media psychology at the University of Muenster. From 2005 to 2010 he was professor for communications at the faculty for cultural studies, University of Bremen.

Wiebke Loosen
Wiebke Loosen is a Senior Researcher for journalism research at the Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research in Hamburg as well as a Lecturer at the University of Hamburg. Her major areas of expertise are the transformation of journalism within a changing media environment, theories of journalism, methodology and constructivist epistemology. Wiebke Loosen’s current research includes work on the changing journalism–audience relationship, datafied journalism, the emerging ‘start-up culture’ in journalism, as well as algorithms’ ‘journalism-like’ constructions of public spheres and reality.