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Building on scholarship on the mediatization of organizations, we propose a conception of the social media orientation of organizational leaders and apply it to higher education. Based on an online survey of 276 leaders of Swiss higher education institutions, we show that social media platforms have made their way into university management and communication but are still not as important as news media. The study discusses differences between university types and uses the literature on new public management to derive influencing factors.

With its diverse landscape of regional and local news media, Switzerland seems far from being a news desert. However, the centralization of editorial offices following the economic crisis of journalism has led to news outlets that share most of their content but appear under different names in different regions. This development has fostered fears about declining geographical diversity at the regional level in the news coverage of Swiss news media. We argue that this centralization by regional news outlets affects news content; it constitutes a specific process of news desertification, which is not aptly captured by news desert research’s focus at the outlet level. With our explorative study, we aim to analyze news deserts at the content level. We apply an automated geoparser to a manually annotated dataset of local news media articles (n = 5,173) published by six regional news outlets of two news organizations between 2016 and 2021 to determine the extent and development of geographical diversity in Swiss regional news media. The geoparser uses a weighted gazetteer-based approach to determine the most relevant locations of news articles within Switzerland. We find early signs of news desertification. At the output level, we observe a declining number of articles published by the analyzed outlets. At the performance level, we see a declining number of unique place names in the articles and more mentions per article. However, the diversity of place names in the coverage remains stable.

Public communication has become more important to higher education institutions (HEIs), with many HEIs using social media to communicate with stakeholders. However, scholarship on the subject is scarce and mainly based on single-platform studies and small datasets. Therefore, we conducted a cross-platform study to examine the communication of all Swiss HEIs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The results were based on two datasets: an automated analysis on data for all Swiss HEIs (n = 42) and their social media accounts from 2004 to 2021 (337,232 posts from 207 accounts), and a manual content analysis on 1,500 posts per platform. By including all HEIs in one country, this study allowed for a comparison of the results by HEI type: universities of applied sciences, universities of teacher education, and research universities. Results show that, in recent years, HEI communication increased on Instagram, but not on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter was used the most by research universities, while most Instagram and Facebook posts were from universities of applied sciences. Universities of teacher education were least active across all platforms. The content of communication across all HEI types was primarily self-referential. Our analysis of how well HEIs used the affordances of social media communication relative to hypertextuality and multimodality revealed a generally high level of adaption. Moreover, our data showed no substantial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on posting activities and engagement with social media posts by HEIs for the two first years of the pandemic.

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.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are pivotal organizations in modern societies. Over the past decades, the higher education sector has expanded considerably in countries across the world, with many newly founded colleges and universities and rapid increases in student enrollment and research output. In addition, new public management reforms and a growing need for societal legitimation have led many HEIs to establish or enlarge their communication departments, pursue branding and reputation management, and professionalize their communication efforts across various channels. Although a growing body of literature has shed light on how HEIs engage in public relations (PR) and science communication, we know little about how their communication has developed over time and in relation to the fundamental transformations in higher education systems and the media landscape in recent years, decades, and even centuries. Most existing sketches of such historical developments have focused on one country – as is typical for histories of PR in general – and have been dedicated to the second half of the 20th century. In contrast, the early beginnings of university communication since the late 19th century and recent trends in the past decade have been little researched. This guest editorial and the contributions of this Thematic Section on Changing Communication of Higher Education Institutions address these gaps in research and together shed light on developments in different European countries, as well as in the U. S.

Over the past decades, higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world have institutionalized communication departments and played an increasingly important role in communicating science to the public. While a growing body of research has analyzed the practices and structures of central communication departments in HEIs, little is known about developments over time. This study examines perceived changes in HEI communication along different analytical dimensions and across HEI types. Conceptually, neo-institutional theory is used to derive the factors that foster this change, specifically the new public management reforms and the accompanying coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures on HEIs. The empirical study is based on a survey of 196 members of HEI leadership in Switzerland. The results show that, according to organizational leaders, HEI communication has diversified and intensified considerably over the last five to ten years. It has also become – albeit to a somewhat lesser extent – more professional and strategic. Multiple linear regression analysis reveals that the strongest predictors of perceived change in HEI communication are the goal to build public reputation, the perceived competition among HEIs for public reputation, and the observation of other Swiss HEIs. The study outlines implications for future research and for HEI communicators.

IntroductionIn times of war, sourcing becomes a major challenge for journalists. Information is often unavailable because access is restricted or because reporting on the ground is prohibited, too dangerous, or even simply too costly for media having to work with limited resources. Which sources actually shape the news is a highly relevant question because news media still constitute the main channel of information for many citizens, especially when it comes to wars abroad. For a long time, scholars have diagnosed a dominance of official sources in war coverage but have not analyzed whether this is still the case with the advent of social media platforms, which potentially offer journalists other sources. Moreover, the integration of social media sources, such as Twitter or Telegram, is just one of many interdependencies in hybrid media environments. We aim to provide a more holistic understanding of sourcing practices in times of war by analyzing to what extent information from government and military sources, social media, other news media, and news agencies is featured as a main source in reporting on the war in Ukraine.MethodsIn our paper, we examine how 13 online media in Switzerland cover the war in Ukraine during the first 3 months after Russia's invasion—an example of a period in which journalists must typically identify reliable sources for reporting on the events surrounding such a war. Using a manual content analysis of 1,198 news articles, we analyze the sourcing practices that are visible in the reporting.ResultsOur results clearly show that information from other news outlets and social media and, above all, from news agencies plays an important role. Structural features of media types lead to distinct sourcing practices. Heavily commercialized, advertising-based media rely on news agency reports, other news media, and social media much more than subscription media or public service media. However, in all media types, actors from the government and the military are the most important source type.DiscussionOur study reveals patterns old and new in terms of sourcing practices war coverage in a European country not participating in, but affected by, the major war in Ukraine.

Universities are key actors at the intersection of science and society and their strategic communication and its effective implementation is essential, as is the measurement and evaluation (M&E) of its impact. Despite the growing relevance of M&E in university communication, however, empirical studies on the subject are rare. Therefore, this study explores M&E practices of central communication departments at Swiss universities through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Findings show that M&E are still in its infancy at most universities. The study identifies resources and skills of communication professionals, digital technologies as well as a culture of learning as the primary factors enabling or constraining M&E. Findings show that the organizational context, notably the (perceived) degree of competition, the availability of personnel resources, and the professionalism of the communication department, rather than the sector of higher education itself, influences M&E practices. In addition to resources, our findings point to an engaged leadership actively supporting a culture of learning and the further development of skills in communication departments as the most important factor for M&E practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electropulse stimulation provides an energy-efficient means of excavating hard rocks through repeated application of high voltage pulses to the rock surface. As such, it has the potential to confer significant advantages to mining and drilling operations for mineral and energy resources. Nevertheless, before these benefits can be realized, a better understanding of these processes is required to improve their deployment in the field. In this paper, we employ a recently developed model of the grain-scale processes involved in electropulse stimulation to examine excavation of hard rock under realistic operating conditions. To that end, we investigate the maximum applied voltage within ranges of 120–600 kV, to observe the onset of rock fragmentation. We further study the effect of grain size on rock breakage, by comparing fine (granodiorite) and coarse grained (granite) rocks. Lastly, the pore fluid salinity is investigated, since the electric conductivity of the pore fluid is shown to be a governing factor for the electrical conductivity of the modeled system. This study demonstrates that all investigated factors are crucial to the efficiency of rock fragmentation by electropulsing.

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.