Abstract
ABSTRACT In reporting about the regions of a country, news media help define relevant topics and contribute to the integration of society. In multilingual countries, covering news across language boundaries is especially important, yet challenging and costly to perform. To what extent the news media use transregional coverage, that is, look beyond their own language regions, is therefore a particularly relevant question for multilingual societies. This study shows how news media in the three language regions of Switzerland observe each other. A representative sample of news items (N = 25,035) from 47 print and online news outlets was automatically structured based on textual mentions of Swiss place names (n = 189) and linked to manually coded variables. The results show that the degree of transregional coverage differs considerably depending on the size of the language regions, the topic, the source, and the media type. When covering other language regions, news media focus on sports, and news media from the two smaller media markets rely heavily on news agency reports. Both public service media and tabloid media use much transregional coverage, with the former focusing on politics and the latter on sports. Thus, media types contribute to integration differently.
Highlights
Many news media organizations are reducing foreign correspondent networks for financial reasons (Sambrook 2010)
The results further show that German-speaking media use news agency content less frequently when reporting about municipalities in other language regions (27%), while transregional coverage in the French-speaking (43%) and Italian-speaking (50%) media market relies more often on news agencies as sources
This study analyzed how the media report on regions within a multilingual country, focusing on the case of Switzerland
Summary
Many news media organizations are reducing foreign correspondent networks for financial reasons (Sambrook 2010). Correspondence networks are costly to maintain, as they require specialized journalists with knowledge of the language and political and cultural characteristics of the country or region on which they are reporting (Archetti 2012). While the resulting decline of foreign news coverage or the generally “unequal representation of the world” through unequal country mentions (Segev 2019) has been widely discussed, one should be aware that similar mechanisms could be at work within countries. In the United States, for instance, the alleged failure of larger news media from the coasts to adequately cover rural regions in the Midwest has been linked to insufficient mutual recognition and, insufficient integration (Cramer 2016)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
