IfK researchers Hannah Ötting and Florian Wintterlin honoured at the ICA 2025

(24.06.2025) For her extended abstract "Debate Spaces Audiences Actually Want? A Case Study of the Public Spaces Incubator" Hannah Ötting was honoured with the Top Extended Abstract Award of the ICA Journalism Studies Division. Florian Wintterlin received the ICA Journalism Studies Division Top Faculty Paper Award for his work on ‘Comparing News Beat Structures Across 13 Countries: From Geographic to Topical and Sub-Specialised Division of Labour’. This year's annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) took place from 12 - 16 June 2025 in Denver, Colorado, USA.

The abstract describes a work-in-progress study by the team around Bernadette S. Uth, Hannah Ötting, Henning Eichler and Vanessa Kokoschka on the Public Spaces Incubator (PSI). The PSI project was initiated in autumn 2022 by CBC/Radio-Canada, SRG SSR, RTFB, ZDF, ARD and ABC Australia and aims to create spaces for constructive, open and respectful public debate as independent alternatives to commercial social networks in order to strengthen democratic discourse.
In a previous study, the researchers interviewed participating journalists, developers and community managers from ZDF about their expectations of interactions and relationships with their audiences, on commercial platforms and through the prototypes developed as part of the PSI project.
At the ICA, the team presented the plans for a follow-up study that will focus on the audience's perspective. Specifically, qualitative interviews are to be conducted with users in order to analyse their perceptions and evaluations of the PSI tools. The expectations of recipients regarding interactions and relationships with journalists and differences in communication on commercial platforms and via PSI tools will be analysed. In this way, a possible function of innovation for the decoupling from commercial platforms will be analysed.

The paper ‘Comparing News Beat Structures Across 13 Countries: From Geographic to Topical and Sub-Specialised Division of Labour’ is the result of a cooperation of 16 researchers from 13 countries initiated by Zvi Reich. In addition to Florian Wintterlin, Mark A. Coddington, Zvi Reich, Lada T. Price, Claudia Mellado, Milda Malling, Lenka Waschkova Cisarova, Avshalom Ginosar, Rubén Gonzalez, Antoine Faure, Leticia Hernández, Archana Kumari, Dominique Marchetti, Sergio Splendore, Sarah Van Leuven and Pantelis Vatikiotis worked on the article. The aim of the study is to compare the departmental structure of news organisations internationally. The results are based on interviews with executives and an analysis of organisational charts and author details under news articles. The results indicate that the division of labour in news organisations is shifting from geographical to thematic structures and that specialisation within departments is increasing.

The abstract and the paper were selected from the papers with the highest review scores. A total of 271 extended abstracts were submitted in the Top Extended Abstract category.

The International Communication Association is the largest and most renowned professional association in the field of communication science. Several thousand members meet at the annual conference to exchange expertise. The Department of Communication Science at the University of Münster was represented this year with a total of 23 papers.

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