Swiss music on SRF radio stations on a high
Over the past ten years, Radio SRF’s programs have never broadcast as much Swiss music as they did last year. However, coverage of other parts of the country in SRF’s news programming remains limited. Even the election of a Federal Councilor from Ticino only briefly boosted coverage of Latin Switzerland. This is evident from the latest program analysis conducted by Publicom on behalf of BAKOM.
The average proportion of Swiss music in SRF radio programs rose to over a quarter in 2017. SRF 3 in particular broadcast far more Swiss tracks in 2017 than in previous years: One in three songs originated from local production. Only the folk music station SRF Musikwelle focused even more strongly on local music. Swiss culture also played a more important role in the SRF stations' spoken word programming than in previous years. SRF 2 Kultur and SRF 3 took a pioneering role here. The overall programming performance of SRF radio stations to promote cultural identity reached a high, albeit uneven, level in 2017.
A weighty argument in favor of the SRG's fee privilege is - in addition to the promotion of cultural identity - its integration mandate. One of the essential integration services provided by SRF radio programs would be to report on the other language regions. Although in 2017 Italian-speaking Switzerland - thanks to the election of Ignazio Cassis to the Federal Council - came increasingly into the journalistic spotlight in the short term, attention for Latin-speaking Switzerland has stagnated at a low level of two percent of total information since 2014.
Information: High reprocessing quality, but much of the same
Information is one of Radio SRF's core competencies. This is expressed not only in the fact that one of the programs (SRF 4 News) broadcasts information exclusively and that others (SRF 1, SRF 2 Culture) give information a very high weighting. It is also reflected in the high quality of editing, from which especially the verbose programs SRF 1, SRF 2 Culture and especially SRF 4 News benefit. Meanwhile, the central production of daily news leads to numerous redundancies between the programs: 55 percent of the information content broadcast by the family of stations is based on repetitions and takeovers of information content from other SRF programs.
SRF 3 and SRF Virus have become more similar
The SRF radio stations differ not least in their music formats. In this respect, SRF 1 and SRF 3 in particular have changed. SRF 1 has increased the proportion of older music in the last ten years, while SRF 3 has become much younger, especially in the last three years. As a result, SRF 3 has moved further away from the first channel, but is now very close to the youth channel SRF Virus. Although SRF Virus offers less word content and information, the latter is also very close to SRF 3 in terms of content, due to the takeover of news subjects.
The Publicom study, commissioned by the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM), examined the six full-service channels in German-speaking Switzerland during an artificial week between January and December 2017 from 05:00 to 24:00 each day. The sample comprises a total of 798 program hours.
