Editorial Structures and Work Principles in British and German Newsrooms

Abstract

Work in newsrooms can be organized in various ways following different principles. For historical reasons, German and Anglo-Saxon newspaper offices operate quite differently. Whereas British and American newspapers favour centralized newsrooms with a high division of labour, German newspapers tend to decentralize their work by maintaining many more branch offices which produce complete sections of the paper. In addition, employees in German newsrooms have more responsibilities and perform a greater range of journalistic tasks than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. The reason is that in Germany a `holistic' understanding of journalism prevails; editorial work is regarded as an `integrated whole' not to be broken up. As the present study demonstrates, editorial work can be modelled on different organizational principles — each having advantages and disadvantages. The known and established routines of one country are neither the only ones nor necessarily the best. This article sets out to compare British and German newsroom structures, discusses characteristics, causes and consequences of the different models and evaluates them in context of the respective journalistic systems. It also demonstrates that in newsroom analyses, `open' and `closed' organizations as well as `personal' and `organizational bias' must be distinguished.