2022/07/12 by Burkhart, Ria, Hofmann, Laura Romana
#FOS: Media and communications
paper · doi:10.25598/jkm/2022-14.22
In times of major world events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the ever-increasing climate catastrophe and five changing governments in Austria since 2019, the headlines in newspapers and magazines tend to change rapidly. This paper takes a closer look at which issues have been pointed out most often, how they are related and what developments they may have undergone over certain periods of time. As part of a cooperation with the Salzburger Nachrichten, all news articles published in the newspaper from 2010 to 2020 were analyzed. Based on topic models generated with the aid of computers, an attempt was made to examine the question of the main topics of the Salzburger Nachrichten. This analysis was performed with the open source software Rstudio and then manually validated. With the theoretical background of the “news-value-theory” it was possible to structure the found topics into clusters that share similar topics. These clusters are the most discussed topics in the Salzburger Nachrichten. The clusters were interpreted by using the factors determined in the “news-value-theory”. The results show that political topics, sports and crime are given high priority in the news coverage of the Salzburger Nachrichten. However, the topics religion, housing and tourism are only to be found with less frequency. A few topics show a sudden increase in frequency in the year 2020. A few examples are education, employment and retirement.