Dr. Dominique Wirz has received a prestigious Ambizione Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the project "News Consumption and Infotainment on Social Media: Effects of entertaining features in digital news stories on exposure, engagement, knowledge and attitudes". She is one of only two researchers at the University of Fribourg to have received such a grant this year.

The project is funded with a sum of CHF 613,000 over four years and started in February 2022. It aims to show how Swiss news media inform on Instagram and Tiktok and to what extent such news formats convey knowledge on political and social issues. It is assumed that the entertaining presentation of news has a positive effect on attention to the content, but also leads to an overestimation of one's level of knowledge. Experiments will be conducted to find out which forms of entertaining presentation have a positive effect on not only perceived but also actual knowledge. The project includes collaborations with the University of Amsterdam, the fög of the University of Zurich, and the publishing house Ringier.

Dominique Wirz studied Communication in Social and Economic Contexts (B.A.) at the Berlin University of the Arts and Communication Management and Communication Research (M.A.) at the University of Zurich. Afterwards, she completed her PhD in "Media Psychology & Media Effects" at the University of Zurich. She has been a postdoc at DCM since December 2018.