What a Semester in Munich Taught Me About the Future of Media

Mathis JOFFREDO, Final Blogpost 11/01/2026

When I arrived in Munich last spring as an Erasmus student from France, I didn’t expect a media seminar to become one of the most thought-provoking parts of my exchange. But looking back now, the three field trips I took (to Radio LORA, the SZ Druckzentrum, and Media Lab Bayern) together with a guest session with Dr. Jana Rick from LMU’s own journalism research department, ended up forming something like a complete picture of where media has been, where it is now, and where it might be going. Each visit told a different part of the same story, thus I want to summarize my discovery journey in the Media landscape here in Munich.

Three places, three versions of media

The SZ Druckzentrum was probably the most viscerally impressive of the three visits. Around 100,000 copies of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, as well as several foreign titles, can be printed in full colour per hour, inside a rotating hall that is 185 metres long and 18 metres high. Standing next to those machines, watching a newspaper physically come into existence, was strangely moving and mind-blowing. There is something almost defiant about print at this scale, a daily act of production that says: this still matters, people still want to hold this in their hands. And yet the question lingered in the back of my mind the entire time: for how much longer?

Radio LORA offered something completely different: a station running on goodwill, volunteer energy, and the conviction that independent, non-commercial radio still has a role to play in a city like Munich. No giant rotary machines, no corporate structure. Just people making editorial choices because they believe in them, not because an algorithm or an advertiser told them to.

Then came Media Lab Bayern: an innovation hub for digital media that has been supporting talents, startups, and media companies from all over Germany in finding and realising innovative ideas since 2015. Slick, optimistic, startup-minded. A place that speaks the language of the future, where the challenge of journalism is treated as a design problem waiting for the right solution.

Together, the three visits embodied the large media scenery in Munich: the industrial past, the idealistic present, and the entrepreneurial future, all cohabiting in the same city at the same time.

The human cost: a conversation with Dr. Jana Rick

The visit that stayed with me longest, though, was not one of the field trips. It was the session with Dr. Jana Rick, a researcher and lecturer in journalism studies at LMU whose work focuses on something that rarely gets talked about openly in media discussions: what it actually costs, on a personal level, to be a journalist today.

Her research project Prekarisierung im Journalismus (Precarisation in Journalism), conducted between 2019 and 2024 and funded by the German Research Foundation, involved one thousand journalists in Germany. According to the study, 43% of journalists perceive their working situation as precarious, three out of five report that their working conditions have worsened since the coronavirus pandemic, and more than half (58%) think that precarious conditions threaten the quality of journalism.

That last figure is the one that stuck with me. It is not just a labour issue. It is a journalism quality issue, and therefore a democratic issue. Dr. Jana framed it perfectly: journalists produce a growing proportion of news content in insecure employment situations. Freelance workers in particular tend to have low and unstable incomes and limited access to social benefits such as pension funds and unemployment insurance. Hearing this at LMU, from a researcher who had spent years documenting it systematically, provided a different, deeper layer on everything we had seen on the field trips. The volunteers at Radio LORA, working without pay because they believe in the mission. The journalists at the SZ, working under the pressure of a declining print market. The startup founders at Media Lab Bayern, trying to build something sustainable in an industry where sustainability is genuinely hard to achieve. All of them are navigating the same underlying reality that Dr. Rick’s research describes, and this really strikes me because I really had no idea how bad things were before attending to this class.

What I actually learned

The most honest academic takeaway from this semester is that there is no single model for what journalism should be. The Druckzentrum represents scale and institutional authority. LORA represents independence and community. Media Lab Bayern represents adaptation and experimentation. All three are trying to solve the same underlying problem. It is all about keeping producing reliable, relevant information for a public that needs it.

What surprised me personally was how much the economics of journalism kept surfacing, even when no one said the word directly. At the Druckzentrum, you could feel the cost of those machines, the weight of keeping them running every night. At LORA, you could feel the precariousness of a model built on passion rather than revenue. At Media Lab Bayern, which is entirely funded by the government, the entire mission is to provide practical support to journalists, young talent, media companies, and startups to help them overcome their challenges, and to turn innovative ideas into concrete products and business models that advance the industry.

Looking ahead: AI and the changing media landsape

It would be nearly impossible to write my final blogpost in 2026 without mentioning artificial intelligence, as it’s already reshaping the entire media industry. Media Lab Bayern is actively engaging with this, running projects and workshops on how journalists can use AI as a tool rather than treat it as a threat.

However, I would be lying if I told you that I’m not sceptical of this optimism. Because I do think that AI can replicate form and produce a news article. However, what it can’t replicate is the journalist who spent weeks trying to build sources’ trust, finding the perfect scoop, or the community radio presenter who knows perfectly the neighborhood or his audience. I think that today, the value of journalism has changed. It is not a matter of words on a page or their meaning, it’s the human judgement, the relationship and the accountability behind the words that really embody what journalism is.

Moreover, new consumption habits add another layer to it. Younger audiences increasingly encounter journalism through short video, social media, and podcasts, which are formats that I think reward personality and emotion over depth. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it raises some questions about what gets lost when the institutional infrastructure of traditional media shrinks faster than new formats can replace it.

A more personal note:

As a French student spending a semester in Germany, this semester gave me a comparative lens. The German media landscape looks quite different from France’s. Neither system is without its problems, but I really had this feeling that Munich requires more than good journalists. It requires structures, funding models, and institutions that make good journalism possible and working conditions that don’t quietly push talented people out of the profession before they’ve had the chance to do their best work. That’s the conversation I’m leaving this semester with. I really would like to thank field trip presenters, Dr. Rick, and Prof Ertelthalner for this semester. I now feel more aware of the media industry on a more global scale.