Transregional News Media Coverage in Multilingual Countries: The Impact of Market Size, Source, and Media Type in Switzerland

In reporting about the regions of a country, news media help define relevant topics and contribute to the integration of society. In multilingual countries, covering news across language boundaries is especially important, yet challenging and costly to perform. To what extent the news media use transregional coverage, that is, look beyond their own language regions, is therefore a particularly relevant question for multilingual societies. This study shows how news media in the three language regions of Switzerland observe each other. A representative sample of news items (N = 25,035) from 47 print and online news outlets was automatically structured based on textual mentions of Swiss place names (n = 189) and linked to manually coded variables. The results show that the degree of transregional coverage differs considerably depending on the size of the language regions, the topic, the source, and the media type. When covering other language regions, news media focus on sports, and news media from the two smaller media markets rely heavily on news agency reports. Both public service media and tabloid media use much transregional coverage, with the former focusing on politics and the latter on sports. Thus, media types contribute to integration differently.