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Theories of the public sphere—or more recently, of plural public spheres— are core elements of communication and media research. A lively and dynamic debate exists about the respective theories, and the approaches employed to do so have diversified in recent years. This special issue of Communication Theory aims to assess the role and future of public sphere(s) theory in digital societies: if, and where, are concepts of the public sphere(s) still useful and needed, which criticisms are (still) valid, which not, which new ones might be necessary, and which concepts need to be developed or elaborated to respond meaningfully to the digital transformation? This editorial introduces the topic of and contributions to the special issue as well as nine theses on the development of public sphere(s) theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By providing diverse news content, news media are key for a well-functioning public sphere. However, agreement on how to measure news content diversity is lacking. Research often refers to democratic theory as normative reference point, but different models of democracy understand news content diversity differently. Our study makes a unique, innovative contribution to this field: (1) We develop a methodological framework for measuring news content diversity, that is a set of comprehensive measuring instruments that derive different operationalizations of topic and actor diversity each from liberal and deliberative democratic theories. (2) Considering that a good public discourse requires more than diversity, we analyze news content diversity in the context of four other journalistic standards: neutrality, rationality, discursivity, and civility. (3) We prove the applicability of our measuring instruments by means of a standardized content analysis of six German news media as a case study. The different quality profiles of these outlets our analysis reveals are explained by their different functions in the media system. Our study shows how important a multi-perspectival normative approach to news content diversity is, both empirically and theoretically. Future studies on news content diversity should make their normative foundations transparent and derive their indicators purposefully therefrom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The news media are among the most important sources of information about political events, such as referendums. For young adults, the smartphone has become the main device for accessing news. However, we know little about the factors influencing mobile news consumption and how this consumption is related to political knowledge and political participation. This study investigates the antecedents of young individuals' smartphone news consumption and how it is correlated with their knowledge about and participation in two referendums in Switzerland. We record the mobile internet usage of 309 young adults and link their digital trace data to survey data. We show that trust in news media and the use of broadcast media are positively correlated with the duration of mobile news consumption. The use of social media leads to more news source diversity. However, we find that the duration of mobile news consumption and news source diversity are not correlated with political knowledge about or participation in the referendum. As interest in politics is also positively correlated with the diversity of news sources used by individual participants, our study supports the idea that attentive audiences use a broader range of news sources to inform themselves about referendums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Referendum campaigns, which happen in many countries on the national or sub-national level, are highly important and special periods of political communication. Unlike elections, however, referendum campaigns are understudied phenomena. This thematic issue addresses patterns of referendum campaigns, which increasingly take place in digital and hybrid media environments, where political actors conduct campaigns through various channels, news media react to and shape debates on social media, and citizens receive a large share of political information from traditional and digital media. In this editorial, we provide a short overview of how research on referendum campaigns has evolved and how it has started to shift its attention away from news coverage and toward the role of campaign actors and the citizens who use (or engage with) search engines and social media platforms. The articles in this thematic issue reflect this shift but also show that news media remain important actors in referendum campaigns. Finally, we outline further research steps, which should include even more holistic analyses of the hybridity of referendum campaigns and hopefully more comparisons across cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of crisis, the spread of conspiracy myths increases since people seek answers to complex questions. Besides societal aspects, social media platforms, especially messenger services, have been identified as a positive driver for spreading conspiracy myths. Much research focused on whether right-wing populist attitudes correlate with belief in conspiracy myths resulting in inconsistent findings. We show that different anti-system attitudes and corresponding digital media usage can promote the affinity towards conspiracy myths apart from right-wing attitudes. With this paper, we first want to sharpen the terminology on 'conspiracy myths' and develop a scale to measure affinity towards conspiracy myths in different dimensions. We second use this scale to investigate different mindsets of conspiracy in the Swiss population. Third, we want to find out how the dimensions correlate with messenger usage. Based on data from a representative population survey in Switzerland from November to December 2020, we investigated different affinities towards conspiracy myths, represented by far-left, far-right, populist, anti-elitism, general anti-system attitudes and science skepticism. We then used the six dimensions in a cluster analysis and identified five typological mindsets. About 30% of the population accordingly have higher affinities towards conspiracy myths than the rest. Our study also highlights the potential role of messenger services in spreading conspiracy myths. To a certain extent, Facebook Messenger and Telegram usage show a robust correlation with the different dimensions of the affinity towards conspiracy myths. In contrast, WhatsApp usage does not show a robust correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online media environments have changed the way young people access news. Despite much research on the topic, the expectations of journalistic news by young adults who have turned their back on traditional news media remain unclear. We use a novel multimethod qualitative online study design to investigate the perceived quality, functions, and expectations toward journalistic news of young adults in Switzerland who use social media as their main source for news and rarely consume traditional media. Nineteen young adults between 20 and 25 years of age with different educational levels participated in our study in May 2020. Our results show that even though the participants only occasionally use traditional news media channels, they still consider journalistic news relevant and appreciate quality standards of professional journalism such as actuality and veracity (Swart 2021b). Among the functions of news, the participants highlighted sociability and identification. Exchange and discussion of news are, thus, of high relevance online but also offline. Also, the participants show a high affinity toward news on mobilizing topics, which are of interest to themselves and their peers, and motivate them to engage with news more intensely. According to the participants, news should be attractively prepared, such as with audiovisual formats and easy to understand and integrate into everyday life. The participants also expressed a preference to consume news articles from different media brands within a single platform. Our study outlines a fruitful path for comprehensive qualitative research with innovative online tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political implications. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is difficult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important considerations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multimethod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens' notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas' ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four criteria derived from the deliberative ideal (N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broadcasting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys (N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using social media, corporations can communicate about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) to the public without having to pass through the gatekeeping function of the news media. However, to what extent can corporations influence the public's evaluation of their CSR activities with social media activities and if the legacy news media still act as the primary agenda setters when it comes to corporate reputation have not yet been thoroughly analyzed in a digitized media environment. This study addressed this research gap by looking at the effect of CSR communication through Facebook and news media coverage of CSR on corporate reputation in Switzerland. The results of this longitudinal study show that the salience and tone of news media coverage of CSR were positively related to corporate reputation, even though the news media coverage about CSR was predominantly negative. Thus, reputation was still strengthened even in the face of negative publicity. No effect of CSR communication through Facebook on corporate reputation was found. The results suggest that legacy news media still were influential in determining how the public evaluates corporations in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The structural crisis of the news media and the according lack of resources for journalism has led to several types of concentration in most Western media markets. Not only is concentration of news media ownership increasing, but there is also more editorial cooperation between and within media companies and more reliance on external sources for content, such as from news agencies. Editorial cooperation and external source reliance have led to concentration processes on the level of content — a phenomenon insufficiently considered in existing research. This paper suggests an innovative method to measure media content concentration with automated one-by-one text comparisons. The procedure allows identifying similar media articles that appear in multiple media outlets and therefore adds to the current literature, which mostly measures media concentration on the basis of readership or audiences of outlets and their ownership. The longitudinal study combined automated text comparisons using Jaccard similarities with manually coded data using a text corpus of seven newspapers between 2012 and 2018 in Switzerland — a small and disrupted media market. The results showed an increase in media content concentration, especially in the coverage of international events with editorial cooperation and reliance on news agencies as the drivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyse how various macro- and meso-level factors influence news media's provision of hard news, an important element of media quality. The research draws on a content analysis of more than 100,000 news items between 2015 and 2019 from 53 print, radio, TV, and online news outlets in Switzerland, a small state with three linguistically segmented media markets, each of which is partially influenced by a large neighbouring country (Germany, France, and Italy). The research design takes into account the multi-dimensional character of hard news and allows for analysis with explanatory factors on different levels: On the meso-level, ownership types complemented with media types, and on the macro-level language regions of different market size. Findings show large differences in the importance of hard news overall and these findings are consistent across the three dimensions of hard news (topic dimension, focus dimension, style dimension). Hard news orientation differs especially between private and public media, but also within privately held media outlets, and less so within public media, which points to a general quality culture embedded within public media organizations. Thus, rather than by language region and the according media market size or by ownership types, quality differences can be best explained by media types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Catholic Church receives much attention in the news media. In recent years news coverage about the Church most notably includes optimistic reports about Pope Francis as well as negative coverage about child abuse perpetrated by priests. Although religious organizations are highly relevant in modern mediated societies, there is little research on how media coverage influences public perceptions of the Church. This paper combines the concepts of news media repertoires and corporate reputation in analyzing how news media consumption patterns influence public perceptions of the Catholic Church. We conducted a representative population survey in Austria in the spring of 2017 (n = 1,035). We identified five distinct news media repertoires. The results show that News Avoiders evaluate the Church less positively than people with a Legacy Quality Media repertoire. The effects of media repertoires on reputation also relate to people who are highly engaged in the Church community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of UFITA - Archiv für Medienrecht & Medienwissenschaft is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The changes in how people consume news and the emergence of digital and distributed news sources call for a reexamination of the relationship between news use and trust in news. Previous research had suggested that alternative news use is correlated with lower levels of trust in news, whereas mainstream news use is correlated with higher levels of trust in news. Our research, based on a survey of news users in 35 countries, shows that using either mainstream or alternative news sources is associated with higher levels of trust in news. However, we find that using social media as a main source of news is correlated with lower levels of trust in news. When looking at country effects, we find that systemic factors such as the levels of press freedom or the audience share of the public service broadcaster in a country are not significantly correlated with trust in news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The concept of media reputation is a well-documented field in communication research. However, it often remains unclear how the process of reputation formation takes place exactly. The purpose of this paper is to analyze which stakeholder groups are the driving forces in the process of reputation constitution of the Swiss banking industry and how it was affected by the financial crisis in 2008. Design/methodology/approach – Given that mass media are the main source of information about an organization in crisis for the public, media reputation serves as a valuable concept for analyzing the effects of crises on organizations. This study is therefore based on a content analysis of Swiss newspapers published between 2004 and 2010. Findings – Data shows that the influence of political stakeholder groups on media reputation of Swiss banks is higher in times of crisis. In addition the focus in media coverage changes from economic topics in pre-crisis period to social topics in crisis period. The increased importance of political stakeholder groups and social topics in crisis lead to a more negative and less controllable media reputation. Originality/value – This study aims at a better understanding of the impact of stakeholder groups on corporate media reputation in crises. Instead of defining reputation as a single item this approach allows a more differentiated analysis of the process of reputation constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]