The Institute for Media and Communication Policy (IfM) was founded in 2005 as an independent research institution that is exclusively dedicated to issues surrounding media and communication policies. It was established in February 2006 in

Berlin-Charlottenburg Charlottenburg () is a Boroughs and localities of Berlin, locality of Berlin within the borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Established as a German town law, town in 1705 and named after Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, Queen consort of Kingdom ...

, but in November 2014 it moved to

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 m ...

. The institute is funded by leading German public and private media organizations.

Benefactors

The institute is financially supported by various media organizations including ARD,

ZDF ZDF (, short for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen; ; "Second German Television") is a German public-service television broadcaster based in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate. It is run as an independent nonprofit institution, which was founded by all fe ...

, RTL,

Sky Germany Sky Deutschland GmbH, branded as Sky, is a German media company that operates a direct broadcast satellite Pay TV platform in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (through Sky Switzerland). It provides a collection of basic and premium digital sub ...

Axel Springer AG Axel Springer SE () is a German digital and popular periodical publishing house which is the largest in Europe, with numerous multimedia news brands, such as ''Bild'', ''Die Welt'', and ''Fakt'' and more than 15,000 employees. It generated tot ...

, the publishing groups Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck,

Der Spiegel ''Der Spiegel'' (, lit. ''"The Mirror"'') is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of 695,100 copies, it was the largest such publication in Europe in 2011. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...

and the

Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg The Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg is the body responsible for Film Funding and Media Business Development in the states of Berlin and Brandenburg. It is also the first point of contact for international and German professionals active in the fi ...

(the regional Berlin Media and Film funding organization) among others. The Institute’s scientific advisory council consists of 25 reputable scholars, all of whom gained recognition in the field through media and communication policy-related publications.

Lutz Hachmeister Lutz Hachmeister (born 10 September 1959) is a German media historian, award-winning filmmaker and journalist. He particularly gained international attention for directing the 2005 film ''The Goebbels Experiment'', co-produced by the BBC and the ...

, a journalist and media scholar, is the founding director of the Institute. The institute has been established as a non-profit, limited liability company ( gGmbH) operates independently, and has no political, party, or economic ties.

Functions

According to its mission statement the IfM is “a forum for the media industry, research into communication and current politics”. It aims to offer “concrete models and options for the solution of mediapolitical challenges” as well as a framework for discussing these with representatives from the political sphere. Its aim is to gain recognition for the economic and public relevance as well as the strategic significance of media policies in modern politics. The principal task of the Institute is the continuous maintenance of an online media industry database (print-, radio-, TV- and online-media) compiling, amongst other, an annual ranking of the world’s most influential and successful media companies. Further research tasks include: - Establishing the theoretical and empirical foundation for a basic understanding of mediapolitical ideas and positions, as well as its specific terminologies - Research into the shifting correlation of print- and online media - Publication and editorial supervision of the “Jahrbuch Fernsehen” (German television yearbook). The institute established its good reputation by hosting high ranking colloquiums on media policy. Among the speakers were guests such as:

Greg Dyke Gregory Dyke (born 20 May 1947) is a British media executive, football administrator, journalist, and broadcaster. Since the 1960s, Dyke has had a long career in the UK in print and then broadcast journalism. He is credited with introducing ' ...

(

British Film Institute The British Film Institute (BFI) is a film and television charitable organisation which promotes and preserves film-making and television in the United Kingdom. The BFI uses funds provided by the National Lottery to encourage film production, ...

Alan Rusbridger Alan Charles Rusbridger (born 29 December 1953) is a British journalist, who was formerly editor-in-chief of ''The Guardian'' and then principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Rusbridger became editor-in-chief of ''The Guardian'' in 1995, hav ...

(Chief Editor of

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

Norman Pearlstine Norman Pearlstine (born October 4, 1942) is an American editor and media executive. He previously held senior positions at the ''Los Angeles Times'', Time Inc, Bloomberg L.P., ''Forbes'' and ''The Wall Street Journal''. Early life and education ...

(chief content officer of

Bloomberg L.P. Bloomberg L.P. is a privately held financial, software, data, and media company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was co-founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981, with Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan (Bloomberg), Duncan MacMi ...

Tyler Brûlé Jayson Tyler Brûlé (born November 25, 1968) is a Canadian journalist, entrepreneur, and magazine publisher. He is the editorial director of '' Monocle''. Early years Jayson Tyler Brûlé is the only child of Canadian football player Paul Brul ...

(founder of the

Wallpaper* ''Wallpaper'', stylized ''Wallpaper*'', is a publication focusing on design and architecture, fashion, travel, art, and lifestyle. The magazine was launched in London in 1996 by Canadian journalist Tyler Brûlé and Austrian journalist Alexander ...

magazine), Mathias Müller von Blumencron and Georg Mascolo (Chief Editors of

Ernst Uhrlau Ernst Uhrlau (born 7 December 1946) was the President of the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). After attending Gymnasium Eppendorf, he graduated from University of Hamburg with specialization in political science. In 1981, Uhrlau became an as ...

(President of the German Intelligence Service),

Viviane Reding Viviane Adélaïde Reding (born 27 April 1951) is a Luxembourgish politician and a former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Luxembourg. She is a member of the Christian Social People's Party, part of the European People's Party. She p ...

(EU-commissioner for information society and media),

David Weinberger David Weinberger (born 1950) is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the ...

(fellow at the

Berkman Center for Internet and Society The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, ...

Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Each class ...

), and technology scholars

Evgeny Morozov Evgeny Morozov ( Russian: Eвге́ний Моро́зов; be, Яўгені Марозаў; born in 1984) is an American writer, researcher, and intellectual from Belarus who studies political and social implications of technology. He was name ...

and

Geert Lovink Geert Lovink (born 1959, Amsterdam) is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open ...

. The IfM was elected one of the most important non-university institutes of media research within the framework of the programme “Germany thinks”, an initiative of the

Goethe-Institut The Goethe-Institut (, GI, en, Goethe Institute) is a non-profit German cultural association operational worldwide with 159 institutes, promoting the study of the German language abroad and encouraging international cultural exchange and ...

Cologne Futures

Since 2012 the Institute annually organizes the Cologne Futures, until 2015 by the name Cologne Conference Futures. The conference discusses changes within the media-system - described as Media-evolution - and deals with

Technology assessment Technology assessment (TA, German: , French: ) is a scientific, interactive, and communicative process that aims to contribute to the formation of public and political opinion on societal aspects of science and technology. This is a means of as ...

in theory and practice.

Richard Barbrook Richard Barbrook is an academic in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages at the University of Westminster. Early life and education Barbrook was born in Nottingham in 1956 and grew up in Canterbury, where his father taught ...

, Nick Bostrom, George Dyson, Kevin Kelly,

Kathrin Passig Kathrin Passig (born 4 June 1970) is a German writer. Life and Works Passig was born in 1970 in Deggendorf, a small town in Lower Bavaria. She is editor and programmer of the blog "Riesenmaschine" which received the Grimme Online Award 2006, a ...

and

Tim Wu Timothy "Tim" Shiou-Ming Wu (born 1972) is a Taiwanese American legal scholar and official in the Biden Administration tasked with Technology and Competition policy. He was also a professor of law at Columbia University and a contributing opini ...

and other experts in the field gave talks on these topics. Since 2015 the conference is hosted in cooperation with the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Main sponsor is the

Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom AG (; short form often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a German telecommunications company that is headquartered in Bonn and is the largest telecommunications provider in Europe by revenue. Deutsche Telekom was ...

. The talks are published and documented by the journa
Medienkorrespondenz.

References

External links

Institut für Medien- und Kommunikationspolitik
information by

„Thinktank Medien. Ex-Grimme-Chef Hachmeister hat in Berlin ein Forschungsinstitut eröffnet“

Tagesspiegel ''Der Tagesspiegel'' (meaning ''The Daily Mirror'') is a German daily newspaper. It has regional correspondent offices in Washington D.C. and Potsdam. It is the only major newspaper in the capital to have increased its circulation, now 148,000, ...

, January 26, 2006
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: Grundlagen der Medienpolitik
(Published by IfM) {{DEFAULTSORT:Institute For Media And Communication Policy Research institutes in Germany Political and economic think tanks based in Germany Media studies Education in Berlin Culture in Berlin

Benefactors

Functions

Cologne Futures

See also

References

External links