19.06.2026
Akteulle Publikationen des Forschungsbereich Medien und Öffentlichkeiten
von Phoebe Maares, Tobias Heidenreich, Olga Eisele, Gregory Perreault und Kim Löhmann
Pics or it didn’t happen! EU institutions’ visual communication and user engagement on Facebook and Instagram
Autor*innen: Olga Eisele, Tobias Heidenreich und Phoebe Maares
Social media often follow a visual logic found to increase engagement, as images are more likely to attract attention, presenting information on a holistic-associative basis. For a political entity like the EU, social media are a promising route to overcome the remoteness to its citizens, identified as one of the crucial challenges to its public legitimacy. Against this broader background, our study analyses the influence of 10 years of EU visual social media communication on user engagement as an indicator of successfully creating visibility in a crucial communication space. For this purpose, we conducted an image-type analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative features of visual analysis: First, a subsample of posts was inductively analysed to identify recurring image types and subsequently used to implement a manual quantitative visual content analysis. Building on the results, we drew on a machine learning approach, allowing us to analyse over 40,000 posts, including more than 20,000 pictures. Our results emphasise the crucial influence of social media affordances in explaining user engagement with EU visual social media communication. Implications are discussed with reference to the ongoing discussion about the EU’s democratic deficit.
Der Artikel ist am 12. Februar 2026 online bei European Journal of Political Research erschienen.
A NEW HOPE? Local journalism as a mitigation hub for misinformation
Autor*innen: Gregory Perreault und Phoebe Maares
The rise of far-right extremism necessitates an evaluation of the ideal means of offering robust information quality to the public, even as hostile actors engage in expansive campaigns of misinformation. This forum manuscript centers on the role of local journalism as a means of combating misinformation, considering notable case studies from Germany and the United States. We argue that in order to enhance local journalism's ability to combat misinformation requires (1) response to misinformation through in-kind platforms and (2) response to misinformation through collaboration.
Der Artikel ist am 29. Januar 2026 online bei Journal of Applied Communication Research erschienen.
Decoding inequalities in the journalistic field: A theoretical approach to how symbolic violence shapes journalistic career trajectories
Autor*innen: Kim Löhmann und Phoebe Maares
Achieving diversity is a fraught process in the journalistic field, with persistent inequalities shaping the experiences of marginalized journalistic actors. By combining Bourdieu’s field theory and Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, we offer a conceptual framework tracing how marginalized journalistic actors experience symbolic violence and symbolic dominance in different journalistic fields around the globe. These experiences can stem from journalists’ lack of appropriate forms of capital, the “right” journalistic habitus and an understanding of the doxa shaping what journalism is: what it ought to look like and who can be considered a legitimate and authoritative member of a given journalistic field. We illustrate this conceptual framework using possible career trajectories of (marginalized) journalists to highlight various forms of symbolic violence experienced by (dis)empowered actors along the three main stages of journalistic careers—namely becoming a journalist, being a journalist and potentially leaving journalism later on.
Der Artikel ist am 16. Januar 2026 online bei Journalism erschienen.
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