Zum Verhältnis von Journalismus und Aktivismus: Boundary work als Navigieren zwischen Komplementarität und Hybridisierung.

Discursive self-empowerment, the visibility of political attitudes and acting towards societal transformation are vernacular practices in social media. This also applies to parts of journalistic actors who advocate for equality and social justice alongside or within their professional activities. Results from qualitative ethnographic case studies on border crossers who are active in journalism and/or activism based on a feminist perspective are reported. The boundary work approach, implemented here in a comparative design that examines the perspectives of journalists and activists in an interrelationship, guides the analysis. In addition to discursive boundary work (normative imagery/role orientation), the actual positioning of the actors in their professional fields was also analyzed (practical actuality/role performance). A comparison of the groups shows a tendency towards opposing boundary work: While the activists discursively argue and justify complementary cooperation of independent, clearly separated fields of activity, the (feminist) journalists justify the hybridization of both fields. This hybridization is legitimized with the (new) norm of transparent, evidence-based partisanship, linked to the idea of community-oriented journalism with a high degree of personal approachability. On the level of practical performance, the activists show formal and stylistic overlaps with journalistic practices, contrary to the verbal demarcation, while the journalists (can) realize the hybridity that verbally has been made strong to varying degrees. The concept of boundary work is made fruitful for the praxeologically based analysis of ongoing negotiating of boundaries between professional journalism and other forms of public communication, which pose a particular challenge in digital media environments. The relational perspective of investigation here allows for a nuanced and dynamic consideration of boundary changes beyond dichotomous distinctions (journalism, non-journalism).