Boulevardzeitungen im crossmedialen Vergleich: Inhalte und Gestaltung des populären Journalismus by Andreas Wiesinger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Boulevardzeitungen im crossmedialen Vergleich: Inhalte und Gestaltung des populären Journalismusby Andreas Wiesinger Katherine Arens Andreas Wiesinger, Boulevardzeitungen im crossmedialen Vergleich: Inhalte und Gestaltung des populären Journalismus. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft: Germanistische Reihe 83. Innsbruck: Innsbruck UP, 2015. 244 pp. Andreas Wiesinger provides in his study of Boulevardzeitungen(popular tabloid journalism) an exemplary primer for those interested in cross-platform media studies. He takes up eight such papers from four different German-speaking countries ( Bild, Blick, Heute, BZ, Kronen Zeitung, Lëtzebuerg Privat, Österreich, and tz) and investigates how they change their faces, content, and audience address as they negotiate the boundaries between paper and online editions, as well as in social media. Starting with an overview of the press systems involved, Wiesinger then characterizes the papers in terms of content, language, and themes, focusing on how they are composed in each medium, [End Page 113]how they self-advertise and teach their audiences to read them, and what goes into their headlines. A separate chapter follows their media presences into Facebook. The author's detailed content analysis delimits cross-platform variances and provides detailed accounts of how the print and online editors work with each other and their common material, especially with respect to decisions about layout. Each stylistic analysis is carefully historicized and tied into journalism's normal functions. The result is a dynamic, readable presentation broken down into discrete chunks of text that quite easily could be used in advanced courses focusing on media literacy—or by Germanists who need to compare their own assumptions about how journalism functions with the modern dynamics of transmedial business practices. The text is laid out straightforwardly, with the initial set of chapters explaining how the press and journalism work today. Chapter 1 sets up the author's method, outlining the types of qualitative and quantitative analyses of the newspapers that he will use. Chapter 2 contextualizes the types of media he follows, tracing a history of the Boulevardpresseand its standard characteristics, including use of words and punctuation, layout style and type/image relationship, themes and narrative structures, and the techniques that their journalists use. Chapter 3 moves into the present and to accounts of how online journalism functions along the same lines. Chapter 4 introduces the effects of cross-media conglomerates on the practice of journalism. Wiesinger focuses particularly on how the twenty-four-hour news cycle has transformed traditional journalism. For instance, digital editions often conform to the so-called "RUDI-Prinzip" ( Relevant, unvollständig, direkt, interessant)—those aspects of a story that induce a reader to scroll down beyond the come-ons in the headlines (159). The result of these chapters is a useful narrative about the extreme variations of "the same news" on different platforms with different dynamics. The next chapters move into the specifics and analyses of his chosen corpus, on what Wiesinger calls the system level. Chapter 5 introduces the press systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. These sections could be potentially useful in both undergraduate and graduate courses on the topic, as could those in Chapter 6, which introduce the specific papers he addresses. Chapter 7 defines the papers' preferred thematics and storylines; on what he calls the "mesolevel," Chapter 8 extends this strand of interpretation to the lead stories, tracing how the leads, text elements, and images interact [End Page 114]in the various versions. Chapter 9 revisits these elements as they function on Facebook, framed through the acts of social networking. All five of these chapters show the specific nature of tabloid journalism in its interaction with readers. Chapters 10 and 11 address how this press operates on the micro-level, focusing more specifically on how layout, text details, and layout placement in each medium impact the reading experience. Chapter 10 takes up leads as teasers and come-ons, stressing particularly how their placement on a page or screen works to engage reader interest. Chapter 11 sketches a detailed analysis of how headlines work, in terms of their grammar, lexical choice, and the like. Chapter 12 shifts its focus back to the journalists themselves, addressing how editorial teams are organized and how they function as...