50 Years - The Authors' Report (original) (raw)

June 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the Autorenreport-the first major project of cultural researchers Karla Fohrbeck and Andreas Joh. Wiesand, who at the time worked at a think tank of the SPIEGEL publishing house in Hamburg (SPIEGEL Institut für Projektstudien). The Authors' Report, published by Rowohlt, was a comprehensive empirical study of the professional and social situation of writers and other freelance authors in the cultural and media sector. Around 13,000 authors' addresses were identified for a representative sample and oral interviews lasting over an hour were conducted with 1,693 authors. In addition, their legal and socioeconomic status was examined by analysing, among other things, around 1,400 authors' contracts-the spectrum of works ranged from poetry to popular magazine novels. Today, this methodology could not be implemented similarly any more, if only because of data protection rules.