At the national or linguistic-regional level, three and a half private commercial media companies dominate the print media market, namely Tamedia (TX Group) (Zurich), Ringier (Zurich), CH Media (Aarau), and the NZZ Mediengruppe (Zurich). CH Media is a merger of AZ Mediengruppe and NZZ Mediengruppe in the field of regional media. In contrast to this, the public broadcaster SRG SSR dominates the radio and television sector in all four language regions of Switzerland.
At the national level, many forms of media concentration have been observed for some time: the concentration of ownership (declining number of independent media houses), journalistic concentration (many newspaper titles are mainly supplied by a mantle or central newsroom), multimedia concentration (media houses produce newspapers, radio, television, and online offerings in the regions) and circulation concentration (the declining newspaper circulation is spread over a shrinking number of titles. This trend seems to be heading towards a two-tier newspaper landscape. Few daily and weekly newspapers with regional and local language coverage serve the economic centres and agglomerations, while free sheets and small paid local newspapers try to fill the remaining gaps. In addition, for about 30 years now, concentration has progressively become both horizontal and also across media genres. All dominant media houses usually have cross-media portfolios. Only Tamedia (TX Group) sold its radio and television stations to prevent jeopardising its dominance in the print sector through antitrust regulations. A summary of the online platform Republik shows that since the 1990s, large mergers and sales have been taking place in waves. With the launch of several commuter newspapers distributed free of charge at the turn of the century, traditional regional newspapers came under massive additional pressure due to their modest market power. The big winner in the commercial competition is Tamedia Verlag (TX Group), which dominates not only the Zurich region, but also the Bern and the attractive Lake Geneva region from an entrepreneurial point of view. It is progressively becoming the largest commercial media group. At the end of 2017, NZZ Mediengruppe and AZ Mediengruppe announced an intention to merge their regional media businesses. The new group CH Media started its publishing activities in autumn 2018 following an examination by the Competition Commission. Its centralised newsroom serves more than 20 regional media houses across 13 cantons to position itself as the second strongest force, despite massive job cuts. In terms of domestic business, a third dominant place is occupied by the Ringier Group, which discontinued its commuter free newspaper Blick am Abend in the autumn of 2018. The Covid-19 crisis has not only intensified the advertising crisis of daily newspapers and regional Sunday newspapers, but also has jeopardises commercially successful publications such as 20Minuten Friday or even 20Minuten. The following table lists the most important media companies in the three main language regions.
The city of Zurich prominently stands out as the journalistic and economic media capital of Switzerland. This orientation is reinforced by the SRG SSR, which also has a strong presence in the city in the broadcasting sector. Additionally, Tamedia (TX Group) is also the only commercial media company active in all language-regional markets, especially with its free commuter newspaper 20Minuten (20Minutes, 20Minuti).
In French-speaking Switzerland, Tamedia has an even larger market share than in German-speaking Switzerland. Its dominance is concentrated in the large cities in German- and French-speaking Switzerland, that include agglomerations such as Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Bern, Lausanne, and Winterthur, especially in the daily newspaper and online media business. Although Ringier no longer runs any regional newspapers, it does have four strong media brands throughout German-speaking Switzerland, namely the tabloid Blick, the weekly Sonntagsblick, blick-online and the magazine Schweizer Illustrierte, which also deals with some politics. Tamedia and Ringier have mutated into digital groups and earn more income from commercial services than from journalistic news media. CH Media, the joint venture of the NZZ Mediengruppe and AZ Medien, has its economic and journalistic focus primarily in regional newspapers outside the major centres and, exclusively in German-speaking Switzerland. The market share of CH Media is 19 per cent (fög, 2019). With the selling-out of its regional newspapers, the NZZ Group has further lost market share and, can only rely on its two renowned newspapers NZZ and NZZ am Sonntag. The other groups, Somedia, Editions Suisses Holding (ESH) and Gruppo Corriere del Ticino, are only prominent regionally, namely in the Canton of Ticino, the Cantons of Neuchâtel and Valais, and the Canton of Grisons. Since all the major media in Switzerland are considered corporate media, centralisation has become even more pronounced. All media genres listed reinforce tendencies of media concentration and in no way constitute a corrective, even though the latter would be absolutely necessary from a federal perspective. This renders a lack of structural diversity and alternatives in the various media arenas in the language regions and cantons, acutely problematic.
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The 2019 Yearbook Quality of the Media speaks of an increase in structural and content-related media concentration, caused by editorial cooperation within and between the remaining media houses. With declining revenues, media groups are looking to achieve economies of scale and scope, as well as efficiency gains. Increased cooperation is also intended to reduce the economies of scale of the globally active tech platforms in the advertising market (fög, 2019). Consequently, media concentration is increasing in all language regions. Specifically, the market shares of the leading media houses are growing, the number and significance of independent providers is declining, and the number of titles is decreasing (fög, 2019).
In the press market of German-speaking Switzerland, media concentration (CR3) grew by 27 per cent points from 2001 to 2018 to a market share of 83 per cent. In that of French-speaking Switzerland, it grew by 10 per cent points to 90 per cent (CR3) from 2001. The dominant players are Tamedia Publications (TX Group)with 69 per cent, the ESH with 12 per cent and Imprimerie Saint-Paul with 8 per cent market share. In Ticino, the CR3 concentration rate in 2017 was around 61 per cent (fög, 2019).
Due to the widespread establishment of centralised newsrooms, concentration of media content, measured in terms of the share of independent media contributions (one-offs), is also declining. In the German-speaking media arena, the share of one-offs has fallen by 7 per cent points within one year and still amounted to 74 per cent in 2018 (fög, 2019). Particularly problematic from a Swiss perspective is the result that, of all the subject areas examined, political reporting is the least diverse.
According to the 2019 Yearbook, the quality of media content will remain stable over the years as media content changes, namely with regard to a factually balanced reporting style, editorial input, and the transparency of sources. In contrast, however, daily titles lose quality in terms of relevance and also, especially, diversity. Softnews are gaining in importance, the variety of reporting is significantly decreasing and the “provision of context” is decreasing. Above all, explanatory, background information on politics has decreased significantly over the years, while opinion journalism has increased (fög, 2019). The authors of the Yearbook argue that the ongoing cost-cutting measures increases the danger of opinion journalism, which is cheaper and quicker to produce, being expanded within the media arena and that tedious, time-consuming journalistic research will diminish. This assessment also coincides with the Tamedia Quality Report, where Strehle writes that resources are at a critical point in the entire media industry (Strehle, 2018).
Although different in methodology, the Media Monitor Switzerland (Thommen et al., 2019) attempts to capture key consequences of media concentration: is the free formation of opinion in Switzerland under (increasing) pressure? Which media offerings and which media groups have a particularly strong influence on the formation of opinion among Swiss citizens (Publicom, 2019)? The press release of Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM) results show that television continues to dominate opinion formation in Switzerland, followed by radio, print, online, and social media. The dominance of television is particularly pronounced in Latin Switzerland: in French- and Italian-speaking Switzerland, television has a much greater power of opinion than radio and the press. In German-speaking Switzerland too, television is the most important medium. In comparison with Latin Switzerland, however, radio and the press play a greater role in German-speaking Switzerland. However, the study itself contradicts this interpretation of the results. In the Media Monitor Switzerland, opinion power is understood merely as an auxiliary construction that does not claim to measure the intended or unintended influence of all media brands on individual opinion formation comprehensively and precisely. It is merely an approximation of opinion power as an estimate of the opinion-forming potential of media offerings and providers (Publicom, 2019). In this sense, the study lacks quantifiable and verifiable credibility. It does not allow more than a rough estimate of a controversial and highly diffuse impact potential of media brands on opinion formation.
