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.

Gender imbalances in news coverage have been traced back to overarching societal structures and the characteristics of media companies, newsrooms and journalists. However, studies have rarely considered if and how journalistic resources can act situationally as drivers of gender imbalances. We investigated how often and in which contexts women are represented in Swiss news media articles between 2011 and 2019 ( n = 77,427) by combining manual and automated content analysis on a large scale. We looked at representation in general and the dependence of topic and media type, in addition to the influence of two resource-related features of news content: the source and the format. The study showed clear gender imbalances, which were heavily dependent on the topics in the news coverage. We found that when journalists relied on original reporting instead of news agencies and used contextualizing formats women were more frequently mentioned in the news. Our results, therefore, suggest that resources can situationally determine the representation of women in the news.

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.

No abstract

No abstract