Triangulating Temporal Dynamics in Multilingual Swiss Online News

Abstract

Analyzing news coverage in multilingual societies can offer valuable insights into the dynamics of public discourse and the development of collective narratives, yet comprehensive studies that account for linguistic and cultural diversity within national media ecosystems remain limited, particularly in complex contexts such as Switzerland. This paper studies temporal trends in Swiss digital media across the country's three main linguistic regions, French, German, and Italian, using a triangulated methodology that combines quantitative analyses with qualitative insights. We collected and processed over 1.7 million news articles (January 2019–January 2023), applying lexical metrics (diversity, density, sentence length), named entity recognition and Wikidata-based linking, targeted sentiment analysis, and consensus-based change-point detection. To enable principled cross-language comparisons and to connect to theories of domestication and cultural proximity, we derive domestication profiles together with a proximity salience ratio. Our analysis spans thematic, recurrent, and singular events (e.g. the British Royal Family, Christmas, Brexit, and the Swiss Wolf). By integrating quantitative data with qualitative interpretation, we provide new insights into the dynamics of Swiss digital media and demonstrate the usefulness of triangulation in media studies. The findings reveal distinct temporal patterns and highlight how linguistic and cultural contexts influence reporting. For example, French outlets emphasize France’s role in Brexit negotiations, while German and Italian media focused on broader European implications, patterns reflected in our domestication and proximity indices. In contrast, coverage of the Swiss Wolf is strongly localized, with each linguistic region highlighting its own cantons and concerns, and with consistently high Swiss anchoring across languages. Our approach offers a framework applicable to other multilingual or culturally diverse media environments, contributing to a deeper understanding of how news is shaped by linguistic and cultural factors.