Bereichernd oder belanglos?

Although participatory press photography has existed for decades, its institutionalization by tabloid journalism is a relatively new phenomenon. The most popular example in Germany is constituted by the “reader reporters” of the tabloid newspaper Bild. Supporters of participatory press photography hope for an enrichment of news coverage while its critics consider the photos as insignificant. This paper tries to clarify this controversy on the basis of news value theory. It presents the results of a census of reader reporter photographs and their adjacent articles. This paper tries to answer the question of whether selection and prominence of the photographs is oriented toward societal or individual relevance. It can be shown that selection is dominated by “soft” news factors while prominence is mainly influenced by “hard” news factors. The latter are also attributed to the photographs via the adjacent text. The results can be transferred to other forms of participatory journalism. They support the hypothesis of a complementary rather than competitive relation between participatory and professional journalism.