The Swiss news media landscape is still rich in news formats, especially in the press, but as well in the public and commercial broadcast programmes, and new with the increased diversity of online media formats. Besides the multiple types of news media, there are different forms of news presentations as well. So, at first glance, Switzerland’s media landscape still is diverse with its public and private television channels and radio stations as well as still many newspapers (daily, tabloid, and weekly). However, a closer look reveals several dysfunctional tendencies, both in the press and in the private broadcast sector.
The format structures and content of the public and private broadcast channels has been observed and analysed in a regular way by research studies executed for the Federal Office of Communication BAKOM (Brändli et al., 2019; Göfak, 2018; Grossenbacher et al., 2018, 2019). And the fög – Forschungszentrum Öffentlichkeit und Gesellschaft (fög, 2019) analyses and provides accounts of the quality of the Swiss media regularly in its yearbook “Quality of the Media”.
In comparison with the situation about ten years ago (e.g., Kradolfer et al., 2010), we have to state that the diversity of news formats and news content has decreased significantly, not least because the traditional quality press has come under heavy pressure. But together with public radio and – with some distance – public television, the traditional newspapers provide the public with all relevant information required for a democracy. They continue to try and sustain their public service to politics, economy, and culture. But, in this endeavour, they struggle to compete against the solely commercially aligned free sheets, tabloids, and commercial radio, television channels, or online media, which all focus on individual interests, sports, human-interest, and showbiz. Furthermore, they very successfully reprocess issues from politics, economy, and culture in a personal and emotional way (Kamber & Imhof, 2010). The abolishment of the traditional news sectors leads to an “all-round journalism” that very often neglects quality criteria. The core sectors such as politics and economy have lost of importance in favour of human-interest topics.
On the one hand, the share and significance of news compared with non-news content varies between the different media, and on the other, the news is also presented in a variety of formats like neutral information, reportages, features, and interviews. In addition, new online editions of most Swiss newspapers are available, and most public and private broadcasters to disseminate their content in, online modes. Online news coverage, thus, occurs in various formats: news articles can be read on websites, live radio streams can be listened, and television programmes can be viewed online – or downloaded as podcasts.
Conversely, certain news-related online media have entered the Swiss news market like watson.ch with news and entertainment for young people, the non-profit Internet -papers infosperber.ch or JOURNAL21. The locally oriented Tsüri.ch started in January 2015, or higgs.ch, a non-profit independent website with science-topics, was founded by the science journalist Beat Glogger in January 2018, financed by crowdfunding.
Table 7 presents the structure of topics in different types of newspapers in the three language regions. The significance of the topics from politics, economy, and culture is highest in the elite and quality press with an amount of 60 per cent respectively 50 per cent and lowest in the boulevard and free press with about 25 per cent, whereas sports and human interest with amounts between 40 per cent and 50 per cent have the highest priority in the popular and free press. But there are differences between the three language regions.
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Besides these differences in topics between media and regions, pressures towards presenting news in personalised and emotionalised story formats to attract reader interest has considerably increased in the last years (Vogler et al., 2019). While factual and objective news reporting and transparency of sources remain almost stable at a high level, there is a loss concerning societal relevance and diversity of topics(Vogler et al., 2019). Traditional “media sections”, observing and discussing media quality from a critical stance, have been increasingly eliminated. In addition, content media concentration occurs as articles in regional newspapers are taken over from the central news-office: only 62 per cent of articles dealing with politics in the newspapers of the German part of Switzerland have been unique in 2018 (Häuptli & Vogler, 2019b). Further, there is a strong tendency of the press, especially in the German part of Switzerland, to focus on events in the same language region: 82 per cent of the articles therein are region-specific. This tendency is relatively weaker in the French-speaking part at 63 per cent in the French-speaking, and significantly lower in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland at 49 per cent (Häuptli & Vogler, 2019a). To summarise these tendencies, decrease in the quality of news provided by Swiss newspapers in the last decade has been, at best, moderate.
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Table 8 presents the structure of the programme content of the six television programs of the Public Service Broadcaster SRG SSR in the three language regions (German, French, Italian) and the information channel SRF Info in German language only. About a third of the programs consists of journalistic content, but the share of news varies in the three language regions between 6 per cent in the German part and about 35 per cent in the French and Italian region. SF info in German language consists mostly of information (78%) and news (39%), whereas the other main programs deliver fictional and nonfictional content as well. The share of journalistic content with about 70 per cent and 40 per cent news during evening primetimes, are provided by the 14 regional television programs. This seems to be significantly higher in comparison to the public television program, but with many repetitions (Brändli et al., 2019).
Regarding the public radio programmes, SRF1 transmits in the German language its first channel: 27 per cent information, including for example the programme ECHO DER ZEIT with background information and analysis on current topics, 39 per cent is regular news several times a day, and with 53 per cent is music, of which 32 per cent comprise Swiss titles (Grossenbacher et al., 2018). In addition, the 33 private local radio stations broadcast during the prime time mainly music with a share of 67 per cent and short local and regional news: 16 per cent by radios with service mandate, 12 per cent by commercial radios (Grossenbacher et al., 2019).
