Switzerland – (F2) Patterns of news media use (consumption of news)

Swiss citizens are generally well informed on political issues due to regular public debates on referenda. The news media compete for an audience with an adult literacy of 99 % and a relatively high income. Radio and television, as well as newspapers, are the main sources of information for Swiss citizens. However, the Internet has also turned into an important source of information (Meier 2007: 185).

Broadcast media

In the German-speaking region, citizens (older than three years) spent 144, in the French-speaking 161 and in the Italian-speaking 188 minutes every day watching TV in 2009 (BfS).

Only very few Swiss people watch television programmes from other Swiss language areas. However, they intensively use the television channels originating in neighbouring countries speaking the same language. In 2009, national public TV channels had an average market share of about 30 per cent (German-speaking part: 33 %, French-speaking part; 29 %, Italian-speaking part: 30 %). national public radio predominates in all language regions of Switzerland. In the German-speaking part, the national public radio scored an average market share of 62 per cent (French-part: 60 per cent, Italian-part 71 per cent) (SRG SSR Marktanteil 2009). Commercial radios in all regions are also important, while radio stations from abroad only play a minor role.

Newspapers

Dailies have been losing readers for the past years. Free sheets, very well received by young people (but not solely), could weaken this downtrend a bit. In a representative survey, 60 per cent of the interviewed people still said that they had read a newspaper the day before (Bonfadelli 2009).⁴ However, in this survey newspapers scored lower than television. Swiss citizens spend 30 minutes on average per day reading print media.

The distribution of Swiss newspapers reflects the linguistic composition of the population. The German-language newspapers predominate. Among the Swiss newspapers, the free sheet 20 Minuten (distributed to commuters from Monday to Friday) had the largest circulation with 1.31 million readers in 2010 (Table 4).

The paper is mainly read by younger people and surpasses the former market leader tabloid Blick.

Table 4. The most read daily newspapers 2010 in Switzerland’s linguistic regions

* Reader per edition in per cent of the population of the linguistic region. Source: WEMF (MACH Basic 2010/II) ** Numbers of readers and circulation number reached with several subsidiaries.

Online media

The increasing access of Swiss homes to electronic media (in particular to the Internet) has expanded the availability of news and information sources. This has shaped the country’s media landscape of the twenty-first century. The number of people using the Internet on a daily or almost daily basis (narrow user group) has grown from 32.6 per cent in 2000 to 57.3 per cent in 2003 to the current 74.5 per cent in 2010 (MA net, net Metrix 2/2010). 77 per cent of all private households have access to the Internet, most of them (90 per cent) even a high speed connection (BFS Aktuell 2011: 5). With 37 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, Switzerland ranked three worldwide in broadband penetration in 2010 (OECD Breitband Statistik June 2010⁵).

In addition, most of the Swiss newspapers are available as online editions. Most of them provide their content for free. Thus, there is a tendency to let non-subscribers pay.

The Internet is used by different people in different ways: Highly educated people use the Internet in a rather instrumental way, while less educated people seem to use the Internet almost exclusively for entertainment purposes (Meier 2010: 5). There is still a digital divide mostly based on age, education and income. A gender gap is also detectable, but only in the age cohort over 30 years (BFS Aktuell 2011: 11).

Table 5. Reach of the top 10 news websites in 2010 (basis: 4,964,000 users = 100 %)

Source: NET-Metrix-Profile 2010/II⁶