Jonas Schützeneder

News podcasts have emerged as a relevant medium, contributing to the collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of information in mass media discourse. This paper presents an analysis of the sociodemographic backgrounds, professional profiles, role perceptions, and values of news podcasters based on an online survey of 195 participants in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The results reveal that news podcasters are predominantly male, middle-aged, and academically educated with no journalistic socialization or journalistic working experience. In terms of self-images and values, news podcasters emphasize the importance of education, information, and entertainment, while rejecting conventional concepts like criticism and control. Overall, they demonstrate a strong orientation towards the needs of their audiences and strive to be responsive to their preferences. Yet, the monetization of content through financing models such as sponsoring or native advertisement is not established on a broad scale. These findings shed light on the unique characteristics of news podcasters and provide insights into their status in a rapidly changing media environment.

This study provides insights into the role of political social media influencers (PSMI) as relatively new actors in political communication. It examines their content and motives in the context of elections. Considering the German federal election in 2021, it uses content analysis of 20 PSMI offers with 301 pieces of content and a supplemental online survey to explore how PSMI communicated on various platforms/formats (Instagram posts/videos, podcast episodes, TikTok, YouTube) in the 2 months before the election. The findings show that the PSMI in this sample, who were all nominated for an award, provided (basic) political knowledge for a broad target audience without significant prior knowledge. In line with this, the findings further reveal that while the content of the PSMI overall was characterized by a high density of information, their density of opinion or self-presentation was comparatively low, with platform affordances influencing these characteristics. This corresponds to the motives stated by the PSMI in the supplemental online survey. While the findings for the PSMI in our sample are to some extent in line with role conceptions of journalists in Germany—the sample spans from professional journalists to influencers without any connection to journalism—they diverge in other respects from routines of the profession. The findings of our country-specific contribution allow for a more systemic understanding of PSMI, especially in the context of elections, by highlighting that they can add to information sources available by offering (basic) political education, especially for a young target audience on social media.