Transparenz im Journalismus

The transparency that journalists and newsrooms can produce for their audience has long been regarded as a rather marginal criterion for journalistic quality. But new transparency models??due to the interactivity, immediacy, archiving capacity and the absent limitation of space in the internet??offer greater potentials than classical instruments in print and broadcasting. In comments, web videos, blogs, twitter feeds and social networks, journalists discuss with users and publicly account for editorial decisions. Transparency is fashionable in the digital public sphere; its evaluation, however, is not clear, but ambiguous and complex. This paper conceptualizes (self-)transparency and qualitatively classifies the available instruments in a three-dimensional matrix model. This is to facilitate the analysis of problematic areas and potential conflicts: Newsrooms demonstrating open self-reflection dismiss the ideal of ??objective journalism??. Yet, transparency is not only an ethical demand, but is also supposed to strengthen trust in journalistic products because it permits quality evaluations by the audience. An experiment shows, for the first time, that self-transparency has an effect on trust in some aspects but not as a basic principle. Analysing this interdependency, we have to distinguish between transparency of process and of product as well as between different media.     

Immigrant Struggles in New Orleans Post-Katrina

Race relations in New Orleans have often been narrowed to Black and white, especially pre-Katrina. According to the 2000 census, the city was about 67% African American, 27% white, 2% Asian, and 3% “Hispanic.” In a city with a deep history of racial tensions between Black and white, other people of color—and especially recent immigrants—often went unmentioned in discussions of city demographics. The city’s world famous culture—whether in the traditions of Mardi Gras Indians and secondline parades, or in music like jazz and bounce—is also famously rooted in specifically African cultures. Even in media coverage of the city post-Katrina, the story of immigrant experiences has remained mostly invisible. When these stories have been told, they have often fit into the old stereotypes of “model minorities” (as in the case of the Vietnamese recovery) or of low-wage workers stealing jobs (as in the case of news reports on the city’s new Latino population). However, the stories of these other New Orleanians offer an important lens through which to view the overall struggle over the city’s recovery. And the work of grassroots activists from these communities, who strived to not only work for justice for their friends and neighbors, but also to build broad multi-racial alliances, provides an inspiring example for people in other cities who are waging similar fights.     

Foreign Investors in The Netherlands: Heterogeneous Employment and Productivity Effects

Recent academic research suggests that the effects of inward foreign direct investment for productivity and employment may vary across foreign investors with different characteristics. Using a newly created dataset that integrates micro-level information from The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency and Statistics Netherlands, this paper explores the role of several of these characteristics, including e.g. the country of origin, activities and tasks, age and strategic role of foreign affiliates in The Netherlands in the 2000–2007 period. Our analysis shows that important employment and productivity differences exist for nearly all these dimensions.     

Diabetes im hohen Alter meistern

Diabetes mellitus ist eine klassische Alterserkrankung, die zudem selten allein kommt. Daher sind die wichtigsten Therapieziele für geriatrische Patienten mit Diabetes mellitus die Bewahrung der Lebensqualit?t, der Erhalt der physischen, psychischen und sozialen Kompetenz sowie Eigenst?ndigkeit.     

How a Reduction of Standard Working Hours Affects Employment Dynamics

December 1, 1996 a new law was implemented in Portugal to gradually reduce the standard workweek from 44 to 40 h. We study how this mandatory reduction affected employment through job creation and job destruction. There was considerable regional, sectoral and firm-size variation in the share of workers who were affected by the working hours reduction. We exploit this variation to assess the impact of the workweek reduction. We find evidence that the working hours reduction had a positive effect on employment through a fall in job destruction.     

Ideologie vor Eigennutz?

The case study regards the question whether economic self-interests of publishers have a significant influence on the reporting of their own newspapers with regard to crucial topics touching those interests. The conflict about the minimum wage in the mailing business is scrutinized. The newspapers engaged in the mailing business are compared with those of independent newspapers without these interests. Because the political inclination of a newspaper, even beyond the self-interests of its publisher, affects the reporting of a conflict, newspapers with different political views are chosen among economically involved and uninvolved media companies. The study is based on the “public task” of press and researches, using a quantifying analysis of contents, relevance and plurality of conflict reports. The results show that in this case the basic political orientation of a newspaper had a significant influence on the portrayal of the conflict. An additional influence with regard to the economic self-interests could not be proven significantly. Ideology seems to be more important than self-interest. However in this case political orientation and economic self-interests harmonized. Therefore it is still relevant to study the role of economic interests for the realization of the “public task”.     

Erstens: ignorieren, zweitens: diffamieren, drittens: umarmen?

Mass media are an essential factor for the success of small parties, for the media can act in a supporting or an inhibiting way towards these parties. This could be observed for the example of the German Green Party: As the Greens were becoming more and more important in the parliaments, the media changed their formerly very critical view of the party to a more factual and positive reporting. Is the party “Die Linke” now experiencing a similar process? The present study analyses the comments of three national German newspapers from 2005 to 2009, using a quantitative content analysis with the aim of bringing to light how the media acted towards “Die Linke”. The results show that commenting has hardly changed since earlier studies were published. Factual issues only play a marginal role, and the party is judged negatively in all newspapers, with the tageszeitung slightly distinct from the other two papers, though.