Journalists are described as experienced and very professional. Like in MDM 2011, most of the journalists in the main news media have graduated from university, done an editorial traineeship, or attended a journalism school. By doing so, they learned the essential procedures of news selection by the time they started their careers. Specific socialisation for each medium is not regarded as necessary, as all media agree on the concept of news journalism, which is based on routines and procedures obligatory for all news media. The processing of news, as one of the central elements of a journalist’s self-image in Germany, is a basic competence – all journalists know how to “make the news” after they have been educated. Therefore, these procedures do not need to be written down in stylebooks for the newsroom (see also Marcinkowski & Donk, 2011).
This is partly event-driven of course, but the procedures are such that we meet in the morning. […] and we as journalists are experts at sorting. This means that each of us comes to the editorial office in the morning with […] various topics. Of course, we also see what other media have done that are awake before us. […] then we sort here […], and after our 10.00 a.m. meeting for our desk we go to the 11.30 a.m. meeting with […] colleagues and then we negotiate again.
The rather strong impact of formal education of journalists in countries such as Germany – which is an example of North and Central European media systems – is also described in the current research (Hallin & Mancini, 2004: 173). Journalists do have a say in editorial meetings; however, managing editors claim to have the final say when it comes to the selection and processing of news.
There are so far no formal routines at play in ZDF to evaluate and check platform content, but journalists assert that analytical tools have become more important to understand underlying interests in social media content. The news magazine Der Spiegel established a special unit to analyse user-generated content (UGC).
Gender and diversity issues were not mentioned as regular topics in the daily editorial meetings.
