"How do media work?" splits into four big questions. What are they, and how do they fit together?

Four lenses: what media are for (role), how they do it well (craft), what they owe the public (responsibility), and how the ground is shifting under them (change).

* Role → craft → responsibility → the pressures eroding them: the topic's four parts read as one sequence, not a list. *

The whole topic hangs on four questions a newsroom keeps answering — and they form a chain, not a list:

• Tasks and role (Aufgaben und Rolle) — what is journalism for? Holding up a mirror of reality: informing, opinion-forming, watchdog, criticism, all in service of the truth.
• Working methods / craft (Arbeitsweise / Handwerk) — how is that done well? The W-questions, naming every source, the two-source rule, weighing each source's reliability before reporting.
• Responsibility (Verantwortung) — what keeps it trustworthy? Being factual, diverse and independent with critical distance — and reading finished pieces critically (verified numbers, loaded wording, cited sources).
• Changes (Veränderungen) — what threatens all of the above? Always-on online production, shrinking newsrooms versus growing PR, algorithmic filter bubbles, and AI-fabricated fake news.

Reading them as one sequence — purpose → craft → responsibility → the pressures eroding them — is what turns the rest of this topic's scattered facts into a single mental model rather than a pile of tips.

Go deeper:

• Journalism — the whole craft — role, methods and ethics of the field in one overview.