2011 Yearbook «Media Quality – Schweiz Suisse Svizzera»
The yearbook *Quality of the Media – Schweiz Suisse Svizzera*, published for the second time by FÖG—the Research Division for Public Life and Society at the University of Zurich—shows a decline in the use of information media across the press, radio, and television sectors. Even the use of key information providers on the Internet—the news sites of subscription-based newspapers—has shown only a slight increase.
Not only are the news media reaching the Swiss population less effectively, but they are also characterized by a decline in hard news in favor of soft news (human interest and sports). The FÖG study goes on to note that the entertainment function of the media examined is gaining ground, while the informational function is losing importance.
Contextual journalism has lost ground to episodic reporting. This means that, at the expense of contextual journalism, the course of events is being portrayed—even more so than last year—as a sequence of individual events. The extent to which episodic journalism is responsible for the audience’s growing disengagement from informational journalism remains to be investigated.
Once again this year, free media—both online and offline—score particularly poorly in terms of journalistic quality. A look at news sites reveals that the accelerated pace of news production on the Internet comes at the expense of journalistic quality. Among online news sites, events are covered the least, the proportion of soft news is above average, and there is a high degree of reliance on content produced by third parties.
Furthermore, the research shows that spending on political advertising campaigns («paid media») is asymmetrical and that the influence of political campaigns on editorial content depends on their provocative nature.
Lack of Transparency and »Copy-Paste»—The Practice of Reposting Agency News Reports
The in-depth analyses also show that some of the SDA agency reports are not transparently labeled. The quantitative and qualitative influence of PR on corporate reporting is significant, while transparency is low. This obscures particular interests, according to a FÖG statement on Presseportal.ch. The researchers conclude that 40 percent of the reprints were not labeled transparently enough. Some of these reprints were not identified as agency reports, even though they were reproduced in their entirety. In some cases, the texts were even presented as original editorial content, as the study notes. The researchers consider this practice by editorial teams to be «problematic.».
Since the spring of 2010, the Swiss News Agency (SDA) has held a de facto monopoly on agency reporting for domestic news. This not only reduces journalistic diversity but also places greater demands on individual media outlets to transparently identify SDA as the source, the FÖG adds.
There is also little transparency when it comes to identifying those passages of text that are based on corporate public relations. A mere 25 percent of articles transparently disclose the use of PR information in a prominent location. This quality standard is rarely or never found, particularly in Sunday, tabloid, and free newspapers. At the same time, the influence of PR is high in both quantitative and qualitative terms: on the one hand, no less than 40 percent of the corporate coverage examined is triggered by PR activities; on the other hand, in 56 percent of cases, the companies’ interpretive perspective is simply adopted.
Press Market
Concentration in the newspaper market took a quantum leap in 2010. Tamedia has now reached a market share of 43 percent, placing it far ahead of its nearest competitors, Ringier and the NZZ Group. In French-speaking Switzerland, Tamedia controls as much as 74 percent of the newspaper market following its acquisition of Edipresse. With the launch of *20 minuti* in Ticino, Tamedia is now reshaping the Ticino newspaper market as well and, with *20 Minuten* and *20 minutes* in Switzerland, has established a national advertising platform.
