EDITORIAL STRUCTURES AND WORK PRINCIPLES IN BRITISH AND GERMAN NEWSROOMS

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 newsp apers favour centralized newsrooms with a high division of labour, Ger man newspapers tend to decentralize their work by maintaining many mor e branch offices which produce complete sections of the paper. In addi tion, employees in German newsrooms have more responsibilities and per form a greater range of journalistic tasks than their Anglo-Saxon coun terparts. The reason is that in Germany a 'holistic' understanding of journalism prevails; editorial work is regarded as an 'integrated whol e' not to be broken up. As the present study demonstrates, editorial w ork can be modelled on different organizational principles - each havi ng 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, di scusses characteristics, causes and consequences of the different mode ls and evaluates them in context of the respective journalistic system s. It also demonstrates that in newsroom analyses,'open' and 'closed' organizations as well as 'personal' and 'organizational bias' must be distinguished.