February 11, 2025
Where did you come from, where did you go? News trajectories in Germany and Switzerland
This study uses survey and web-tracking data to map how people in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland reached mainstream news during the first COVID-19 peak. Search engines and direct visits to news sites were the dominant routes, while political and media attitudes shaped these habits differently across the two countries.
Abstract
The article examines news trajectories used by individuals to access mainstream journalistic media in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland during the first peak of COVID-19 in Europe. It discusses the role of individual characteristics related to sociodemographics, political, and media attitudes in predisposition towards specific modes of news access. For this aim, it combines survey data with data on individuals’ engagement with news automatically tracked in spring 2020. The findings of the article highlight the prevalence of accessing news via search engines (search trajectory) and by directly going to news websites (routine trajectory). The study also demonstrates the important role of political and media attitudes in the prevalence of specific modes of news access, which, however, differs between the countries, thus emphasizing the importance of conducting more comparative research using tracking data.
To continue reading please visit: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-025-00361-3
This open access article was published in the Journal of Computational Social Science on 11 February 2025.
Makhortykh, M., de León, E., Urman, A. et al. Where did you come from, where did you go? News trajectories in Germany and Switzerland. Journal of Computational Social Science 8, 33 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-025-00361-3
Keywords: News, News consumption, Web tracking, Comparative
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