A hierarchy of models for simulating experimental results from a 3D heterogeneous porous medium

In this work we examine the dispersion of conservative tracers (bromide and fluorescein) in an experimentally-constructed three-dimensional dual-porosity porous medium. The medium is highly heterogeneous ($\sigma_Y^2=5.7$), and consists of spherical, low-hydraulic-conductivity inclusions embedded in a high-hydraulic-conductivity matrix. The bi-modal medium was saturated with tracers, and then flushed with tracer-free fluid while the effluent breakthrough curves were measured. The focus for this work is to examine a hierarchy of four models (in the absence of adjustable parameters) with decreasing complexity to assess their ability to accurately represent the measured breakthrough curves. The most information-rich model was (1) a direct numerical simulation of the system in which the geometry, boundary and initial conditions, and medium properties were fully independently characterized experimentally with high fidelity. The reduced models included; (2) a simplified numerical model identical to the fully-resolved direct numerical simulation (DNS) model, but using a domain that was one-tenth the size; (3) an upscaled mobile-immobile model that allowed for a time-dependent mass-transfer coefficient; and, (4) an upscaled mobile-immobile model that assumed a space-time constant mass-transfer coefficient. The results illustrated that all four models provided accurate representations of the experimental breakthrough curves as measured by global RMS error. The primary component of error induced in the upscaled models appeared to arise from the neglect of convection within the inclusions. Interestingly, these results suggested that the conventional convection-dispersion equation, when applied in a way that resolves the heterogeneities, yields models with high fidelity without requiring the imposition of a more complex non-Fickian model.Comment: 27 pages, 9 Figure

How COVID-19 displaced climate change: mediated climate change activism and issue attention in the Swiss media and online sphere

Issues continuously compete for attention in the news media and on social media. Climate change is one of the most urgent problems for society and (re)gained wide public attention in 2019 through the global climate strike protest movement. However, we hypothesize that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 challenged the role of climate change as a routine issue. We use extensive news media and Twitter data to explore if and how the pandemic as a so-called killer issue has shifted public attention away from the issue of climate change in Switzerland. Results show that the climate debate fell victim to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the news media and the Twitter-sphere. Given the vast dominance of the pandemic, there is a strong indication this finding applies similarly to various other issues. Additional hashtag co-occurrence analysis shows that some climate activists react to this development and try to connect the issue of climate change to the pandemic. We argue that suppression of climate change by the pandemic is a problem for its long-term resolution, as it seems to have turned climate change back into a struggling issue

Investigating News Deserts on the Content Level: Geographical Diversity in Swiss News Media

With its diverse landscape of regional and local news media, Switzerland seems far from being a news desert. However, the centralization of editorial offices following the economic crisis of journalism has led to news outlets that share most of their content but appear under different names in different regions. This development has fostered fears about declining geographical diversity at the regional level in the news coverage of Swiss news media. We argue that this centralization by regional news outlets affects news content; it constitutes a specific process of news desertification, which is not aptly captured by news desert research’s focus at the outlet level. With our explorative study, we aim to analyze news deserts at the content level. We apply an automated geoparser to a manually annotated dataset of local news media articles (n = 5,173) published by six regional news outlets of two news organizations between 2016 and 2021 to determine the extent and development of geographical diversity in Swiss regional news media. The geoparser uses a weighted gazetteer-based approach to determine the most relevant locations of news articles within Switzerland. We find early signs of news desertification. At the output level, we observe a declining number of articles published by the analyzed outlets. At the performance level, we see a declining number of unique place names in the articles and more mentions per article. However, the diversity of place names in the coverage remains stable

Change in News Access, Change in Expectations? How Young Social Media Users in Switzerland Evaluate the Functions and Quality of News

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

Investigating News Deserts on the Content Level: Geographical Diversity in Swiss News Media

With its diverse landscape of regional and local news media, Switzerland seems far from being a news desert. However, the centralization of editorial offices following the economic crisis of journalism has led to news outlets that share most of their content but appear under different names in different regions. This development has fostered fears about declining geographical diversity at the regional level in the news coverage of Swiss news media. We argue that this centralization by regional news outlets affects news content; it constitutes a specific process of news desertification, which is not aptly captured by news desert research’s focus at the outlet level. With our explorative study, we aim to analyze news deserts at the content level. We apply an automated geoparser to a manually annotated dataset of local news media articles (n = 5,173) published by six regional news outlets of two news organizations between 2016 and 2021 to determine the extent and development of geographical diversity in Swiss regional news media. The geoparser uses a weighted gazetteer-based approach to determine the most relevant locations of news articles within Switzerland. We find early signs of news desertification. At the output level, we observe a declining number of articles published by the analyzed outlets. At the performance level, we see a declining number of unique place names in the articles and more mentions per article. However, the diversity of place names in the coverage remains stable

Sportberichterstattung in Schweizer Nachrichtenmedien : eine vergleichende Analyse aus einer normativen Qualitätsperspektive von 2011 bis 2019

Gemessen an der Bedeutung des Sports für journalistische Medien existiert vergleichsweise wenig systematische, auf einen Gesamtblick zielende Forschung zu den Inhalten der Sportberichterstattung. Diese Studie untersucht die Inhalte von Sportberichterstattung in Nachrichtenmedien mit einer gesamtheitlichen und vergleichenden Perspektive. Mit einer manuellen Inhaltsanalyse von zwanzig Schweizer Printmedien (n = 16.130 Beiträge) werden der Stellenwert und die Qualität der Sportberichterstattung im Themen-, Zeit- und Medientypenvergleich untersucht. Die Resultate bestätigen die hohe Bedeutung von Sport in den Nachrichtenmedien. Sport macht knapp einen Fünftel der Gesamtberichterstattung aus. Im Vergleich zu anderen Themen basiert die Sportberichterstattung häufiger auf Agenturmeldungen, ist weniger einordnend und stärker durch einen emotionalen Berichterstattungsstil geprägt. Im Zeitverlauf zeigt sich ein Bedeutungsgewinn von Sportnachrichten mit einem nationalen Fokus. Große Unterschiede bestehen auf Ebene der Medientypen. Besonders Boulevardmedien setzen auf das Thema Sport und weisen eine relativ hohe Qualität in ihrer Berichterstattung auf

Medienkonzentration

Im folgenden Kapitel werden Betrachtungen zur Konzentration im Schweizer Medienmarkt präsentiert, und zwar zur strukturellen Medienkonzentration (Anbieter und Angebote) und zur inhaltlichen Medienkonzentration (Medieninhalte). Für das Kalenderjahr 2021 fehlt nach wie vor eine Anschlusslösung für die Net-Metrix-Onlinenutzungsstudien, die im Jahrbuch zur Ermittlung der Konzentration im Onlinelesermarkt verwendet wurden. Deshalb wird in diesem Jahrbuch auf die Berechnung der Konzentration in den Lesermärkten im Online- und Pressebereich verzichtet. Die Betrachtungen zur strukturellen Medienkonzentration stützen sich überwiegend auf Daten der letzten beiden Jahrbücher (fög, 2020, 2021) und den aktuellen Bericht zum Medienvielfaltsmonitor des Bundesamts für Kommunikation (Thommen et al., 2021). Weiterhin werden aber Berechnungen zur inhaltlichen Medienkonzentration, also Konzentrationsprozesse auf Ebene der Medieninhalte, ausgewiesen. Diese entstehen vorwiegend über die mehrfache Verwertung von Beiträgen in Verbundsystemen wie bei der TX Group oder CH Media

Lessons learned? The quality of media coverage in the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic

Since the beginning of the pandemic, coronavirus reporting has been criticised for being too alarmist (or not cautionary enough), too uncritical of government action, too lacking in context in its use of figures and too one-sided in its selection of experts. The aim of this paper is to examine to what extent the criticism of coronavirus reporting expressed during the first wave (1 January 2020 to 30 April 2020) could have provided a reason to reflect on the quality of reporting during the phases with less reporting and, if necessary, to make adjustments. The study therefore analyses Swiss media coverage of the second wave (1 September 2020 to 28 February 2021) and compares it with findings on coronavirus coverage of the first wave of the pandemic. It ties in with the study on coronavirus reporting published in the 2020 Yearbook Quality of the Media (Eisenegger et al., 2020). The comparison reveals an ambivalent picture: on the one hand, journalists present coronavirus as a clear threat less frequently in the second wave (6%) than in the first wave (16%), despite considerably higher numbers of cases. In addition, they assess government action in the second wave less affirmatively (0.3%) than during the first wave (6%), thus reporting in a way characterised by distance from public authorities. Figures and statistics are increasingly contextualised (first wave: 12%, second wave: 21%). On the other hand, hardly any positive changes can be observed in the selection of experts: diversity continues to be limited. Most of the scientists featured in the media come from the medical field. Their share in the second wave is even slightly higher (83%) than in the first wave (78%). Social science and humanities disciplines are thus largely left out of reporting on the second wave. Female academics are also significantly under-represented compared to their male colleagues. Compared to the first wave (12%), however, they appear somewhat more frequently in the second wave (21%)

Sourcing practices of online news media in Switzerland during the war in Ukraine

IntroductionIn times of war, sourcing becomes a major challenge for journalists. Information is often unavailable because access is restricted or because reporting on the ground is prohibited, too dangerous, or even simply too costly for media having to work with limited resources. Which sources actually shape the news is a highly relevant question because news media still constitute the main channel of information for many citizens, especially when it comes to wars abroad. For a long time, scholars have diagnosed a dominance of official sources in war coverage but have not analyzed whether this is still the case with the advent of social media platforms, which potentially offer journalists other sources. Moreover, the integration of social media sources, such as Twitter or Telegram, is just one of many interdependencies in hybrid media environments. We aim to provide a more holistic understanding of sourcing practices in times of war by analyzing to what extent information from government and military sources, social media, other news media, and news agencies is featured as a main source in reporting on the war in Ukraine.MethodsIn our paper, we examine how 13 online media in Switzerland cover the war in Ukraine during the first 3 months after Russia's invasion—an example of a period in which journalists must typically identify reliable sources for reporting on the events surrounding such a war. Using a manual content analysis of 1,198 news articles, we analyze the sourcing practices that are visible in the reporting.ResultsOur results clearly show that information from other news outlets and social media and, above all, from news agencies plays an important role. Structural features of media types lead to distinct sourcing practices. Heavily commercialized, advertising-based media rely on news agency reports, other news media, and social media much more than subscription media or public service media. However, in all media types, actors from the government and the military are the most important source type.DiscussionOur study reveals patterns old and new in terms of sourcing practices war coverage in a European country not participating in, but affected by, the major war in Ukraine