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Different strategies apply in the Netherlands and in Germany when TV channels have to decide how often politicians are mentioned or shown in the news during national election campaigns. Extensive content analyses in the 1990s suggest that Dutch political and media traditions promote a more equally distributed attention to different political positions. In Germany, TV news focuses almost exclusively on the incumbent candidate for the top function of the national government (the office of Chancellor) and his challengers. The likely causes are not only the political system and the particular circumstances of the 1990s (with the pre-eminence of Helmut Kohl), but also recent developments in the way in which German journalists define their task.

Cross-national assessment of coding reliability and its methodological problems have largely been neglected. In an exploratory first study and a more elaborate second study, we investigated how coder characteristics such as language skills, political knowledge, coding experience, and coding certainty affected inter-coder and coder-trainer reliability. The second study showed that language skills influenced both reliability types, albeit mediated by coding certainty. Politically knowledgeable coders coded more reliably, while coding experience did not affect reliability. Overall, the results suggest that cross-national researchers pay more attention to cross-national assessment of reliability.

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The journal ranking of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is increasingly turning into an international currency for the quality of research output. More than 40 communication journals are ISI-ranked and thus labeled "major international" journals. This analysis of ISI data reveals that the attribute "international" is not always appropriate. National diversity of communication journals is very low due to a dominance of authors from English-speaking countries and U.S. authors in particular. Younger journals and journals with an explicitly stated international mission tend to be international, whereas the internationality of the affiliated organization or impact of a journal had no influence on national diversity. The results suggest that it may be desirable to clearly distinguish between national and international communication journals, to increase the number of international communication journals, and to support authors whose mother tongue is not English.