Recherche et publications

• Publications
  30 publications

  Chapitre de livre Article Thèse

  Digital media and digital media systems
  Laia Castro, Sina Blassnig (2024) | Chapitre de livre

  Populism and Social Media
  Sina Blassnig (2022) | Chapitre de livre

  POPULISM AND SOCIAL MEDIA , dans The Populism Interviews: A Dialogue with Leading Experts
  Blassnig, S. (2022), ISBN: 9781000641967 9781032168104 | Chapitre de livre

  Populism and Social Media Popularity , dans Power Shift? Political Leadership and Social Media
  Sina Blassnig, Nicole Ernst, Sven Engesser, Frank Esser (2019), ISBN: 9780429466007 | Chapitre de livre

  Dimensions, Speakers, and Targets , dans Communicating Populism
  Sina Blassnig, Patricia Rodi, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Kinga Adamczewska, Lilia Raycheva, Sven Engesser, Frank Esser (2019) | Chapitre de livre

  Event-, politics-, and audience-driven news: A comparison of populism in European media coverage in 2016 and 2017 , dans Communicating Populism: Comparing Actor Perceptions, Media Coverage, and Effects on Citizens in Europe
  Esser, F. and St?pi?ska, A. and Peká?ek, O. and Seddone, A. and Papathanassopoulos, S. and Peicheva, D. and Milojevic, A. and Blassnig, S. and Engesser, S. (2019), ISBN: 9780429687853 9781138392724 | Chapitre de livre

  Information Overload and Information Appreciation Across News, Entertainment, and Personal Communication
  Anne Schulz, Sophia Charlotte Volk, Sina Blassnig, Sabrina Heike Kessler, Sarah Marschlich, Minh Hao Nguyen, Lea Stahel, Nadine Strauß, Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media (2025) | Article

  A Balancing Act: How Media Professionals Perceive the Implementation of News Recommender Systems
  Sina Blassnig, Edina Strikovic, Eliza Mitova, Aleksandra Urman, Anikó Hannák, Claes de Vreese, Frank Esser, Digital Journalism (2025) | Article

  A matter of perception? investigating subjective and objective exposure to hate speech with a survey and mobile longitudinal linkage study
  Dominique S. Wirz, Sina Blassnig, Information, Communication & Society (2025) | Article

  Selecting, avoiding, disconnecting: a focus group study of people’s strategies for dealing with information abundance in the contexts of news, entertainment, and personal communication
  Sophia C. Volk, Anne Schulz, Sina Blassnig, Sarah Marschlich, Minh Hao Nguyen, Nadine Strauß, Information, Communication & Society (2025) | Article

  Auswirkungen einer potenziellen Abschaltung des Online-Nachrichtenangebots SRF News
  Manuel Puppis, Sina Blassnig, Lukas Erbrich, Christian Zabel, Frank Lobigs, Media Perspektiven (2025) | Article

  User Perceptions of News Recommender Systems and Trust in Media Outlets: A Five-Country Study
  Sina Blassnig, Eliza Mitova, Edina Strikovic, Aleksandra Urman, Claes de Vreese, Anikó Hannák, Frank Esser, Journalism Studies (2024) | Article

  Opportunity structures for user acceptance of news recommender systems (NRS): A multi-country survey study of relationships between individual-level factors and evaluations of NRS
  Edina Strikovic, Sina Blassnig, Eliza Mitova, Aleksandra Urman, Frank Esser, Claes de Vreese, New Media & Society (2024) | Article

  Exploring users’ desire for transparency and control in news recommender systems: A five-nation study
  Eliza Mitova, Sina Blassnig, Edina Strikovic, Aleksandra Urman, Claes de Vreese, Frank Esser, Journalism (2023) | Article

  When Worlds Collide: Journalistic, Market, and Tech Logics in the Adoption of News Recommender Systems
  Eliza Mitova, Sina Blassnig, Edina Strikovic, Aleksandra Urman, Claes de Vreese, Frank Esser, Journalism Studies (2023) | Article

  Googling Referendum Campaigns: Analyzing Online Search Patterns Regarding Swiss Direct-Democratic Votes
  Sina Blassnig, Eliza Mitova, Nico Pfiffner, Michael V. Reiss, Media and Communication (2023) | Article

  News recommender systems: a programmatic research review
  Eliza Mitova, Sina Blassnig, Edina Strikovic, Aleksandra Urman, Aniko Hannak, Claes H. de Vreese, Frank Esser, Annals of the International Communication Association (2023) | Article

  Media Systems in the Digital Age: An Empirical Comparison of 30 Countries
  Edda Humprecht, Laia Castro Herrero, Sina Blassnig, Michael Brüggemann, Sven Engesser, Journal of Communication (2022) | Article

  The “Audience Logic” in Digital Journalism: An Exploration of Shifting News Logics Across Media Types and Time
  Sina Blassnig, Frank Esser, Journalism Studies (2022) | Article

  Correction: Media systems in the digital age: An empirical comparison of 30 countries (Journal of Communication DOI: 10.1093/joc/jqab054)
  Humprecht, E. and Herrero, L.C. and Blassnig, S. and Brüggemann, M. and Engesser, S., Journal of Communication (2022) | Article

  Populist online communication: Interactions among politicians, journalists, and citizens (Dissertation summary)
  Sina Blassnig, Studies in Communication Sciences (2021) | Article

  Hitting a Nerve: Populist News Articles Lead to More Frequent and More Populist Reader Comments
  Sina Blassnig, Sven Engesser, Nicole Ernst, Frank Esser, Political Communication (2019) | Article

  Populist and Popular: An Experiment on the Drivers of User Reactions to Populist Posts on Facebook
  Sina Blassnig and Dominique S. Wirz, Social Media + Society (2019) | Article

  Populism in Online Election Coverage
  Sina Blassnig, Nicole Ernst, Florin Büchel, Sven Engesser, Frank Esser, Journalism Studies (2019) | Article

  Favorable Opportunity Structures for Populist Communication: Comparing Different Types of Politicians and Issues in Social Media, Television and the Press
  Nicole Ernst, Frank Esser, Sina Blassnig, Sven Engesser, The International Journal of Press/Politics (2019) | Article

  Populism and Informal Fallacies: An Analysis of Right-Wing Populist Rhetoric in Election Campaigns
  Sina Blassnig, Florin Büchel, Nicole Ernst, Sven Engesser, Argumentation (2019) | Article

  Populists Prefer Social Media Over Talk Shows: An Analysis of Populist Messages and Stylistic Elements Across Six Countries
  Nicole Ernst, Sina Blassnig, Sven Engesser, Florin Büchel, Frank Esser, Social Media + Society (2019) | Article

  Populist communication in talk shows and social media. A comparative content analysis in four countries
  Sina Blassnig, Nicole Ernst, Florin Büchel, Sven Engesser, Studies in Communication | Media (2018) | Article

  Extreme parties and populism: an analysis of Facebook and Twitter across six countries
  Nicole Ernst, Sven Engesser, Florin Büchel, Sina Blassnig, Frank Esser, Information, Communication & Society (2017) | Article

  Populist Online Communication – Interactions among Politicians, Journalists, and Citizens
  Blassnig, Sina (University of Zurich2020) | Thèse

• Projets de recherche

  10003942 - Generative Visual AI in Swiss Journalism: Exploring Production and Audience Perspectives Through a Mixed-Methods Design
  Statut: En cours

  Début	01.06.2026
  Fin	31.05.2030
  Financement	FNS  Voir la fiche du projet
  Generative Artificial intelligence (AI) – technology that produces new content like text, images, audio, or video based on training data in response to written prompts (Arguedas & Simon, 2023) – is increasingly permeating various sectors of society and providing powerful tools for news media production in journalism (e.g., Cools & Diakopoulos, 2024). Rapid advancements in AI technologies, especially in generating visual content from data visualizations to photorealistic images, have generated both excitement and concern. Media professionals, policymakers, and scholars predict that AI-generated visuals will become more prevalent, potentially transforming journalistic practices, audience engagement, and visual communication (Paik et al., 2023; Thomson et al., 2024; Thomson & Thomas, 2023). Yet, empirical research on the use and impact of generative visual AI in journalism remains limited. Industry reports and academic studies emphasize the need for comprehensive research on how these technologies are used, perceived, and their broader implications for visual news production and consumption (Thomson et al., 2024; Thurman et al., 2024). Against this backdrop, this project aims to assess how generative visual AI-technologies are integrated into journalistic news production, characterize AI-generated visual content in journalism, and examine how media professionals and news audiences perceive and evaluate these technologies and visuals. By integrating theoretical perspectives from journalism studies and visual communication, drawing on news media logics and a texto-material understanding of visuals, and combining production and audience perspectives, the project offers a comprehensive exploration of this emerging field. Our multilingual project uses a sequential mixed-methods research design, combining qualitative and quantitative methods with participatory visual techniques. The project has two main work packages. WPI starts with qualitative visual diaries of media professionals from selected Swiss news outlets, identifying types, topics, and contexts of AI-generated visuals in use. Expert interviews follow, exploring opportunities, challenges, and shifts in journalistic practices. WPII involves focus groups with news users from Switzerland’s three major language regions to assess audience perceptions of AI-generated visuals in journalism. Both work packages conclude with a quantitative survey of media professionals and news users respectively across the language regions, providing broader, more representative insights and testing hypotheses deducted in the qualitative parts. This design allows findings from each stage to inform subsequent ones, offering a comprehensive view of generative AI in Swiss visual journalism from production and audience perspectives. The project’s expected results will significantly contribute to the timely yet under-researched field of generative visual AI in journalism and visual communication research, at theoretical, methodological, and empirical levels. Through a multi- and mixed-method approach, we will provide in-depth empirical evidence on the use of generative visual AI in Swiss newsrooms across different organizational types, characteristics of AI-generated content, and both media professionals’ and audiences’ perceptions of such technologies and visuals. This offers a holistic view of how generative visual AI is integrated into contemporary Swiss journalism. Additionally, our findings will guide media professionals, policymakers, and educators on the ethical and effective implementation of generative visual AI, addressing risks and maximizing benefits for both news production and consumption. In addition to scientific contributions, we will prioritize disseminating our findings to the public, including a panel discussion and workshop bringing together media professionals from Switzerland’s three major language regions and leading scholars.

  Evaluation der Medienförderungsmassnahme ‘Gratis-Abos für Jugendliche’ in den Kantonen Freiburg und Genf
  Statut: En cours

  Début	01.12.2024
  Fin	30.06.2026
  Financement	Autre
  Auch nach dem Scheitern des Massnahmenpakets zugunsten der Medien laufen die Diskussionen über Medienförderung weiter. Auf Bundesebene gibt es erste Vorschläge, wie einzelne Elemente des Massnahmenpakets doch noch umgesetzt werden könnten. Und einzelne Kantone haben bereits selbst einige Fördermassnahmen implementiert. Unter anderem haben die Kantone Genf und Freiburg 2023 resp. 2024 ein Gratisabonnement für junge Erwachsene eingeführt. Mit dieser Massnahme sollen zwar auch die regionalen Medien unterstützt werden, indem eine bisher schlecht erreichte Gruppe von Leser·innen erreicht wird. Im Vordergrund steht jedoch in beiden Kantonen, jungen Erwachsenen den Zugang zu politischen Informationen zu erleichtern und sie für das regionale Geschehen zu sensibilisieren. Es soll nicht nur das politische Interesse junger Menschen gefördert, sondern auch ihre Teilhabe am politischen Prozess intensiviert und ihre Medienkompetenz gestärkt werden. Über die Wirkung ist aber bisher kaum etwas bekannt.

  Crowding Out? Auswirkungen des SRG-Onlineangebots auf die Medienlandschaft
  Statut: Terminé

  Début	01.06.2024
  Fin	31.03.2025
  Financement	Autre
  Am Beispiel der Deutschschweiz wurde untersucht, welche Auswirkungen eine Abschaltung des Online-Nachrichtenangebots SRF News auf Absatz und Erlöse von Digitalabonnements privater Medien hätte. Von einem Wegfall des öffentlichen Angebots würden vor allem Gratismedien profitieren. Zusätzliche Abonnements für private Online-Nachrichtenangebote ließen sich nur in sehr beschränktem Umfang verkaufen. Die Nutzung von SRF News, Nachrichteninteresse und Medienvertrauen hängen positiv mit der Zahlungsbereitschaft zusammen. Indirekt könnte über die politische Bildung und Medienkompetenz auf eine höhere Zahlungsbereitschaft hingewirkt werden. Statt den öffentlichen Rundfunk im Internet einzuschränken, sollte die Medienpolitik über Medienförderung und neue Aufgaben für gemeinwohlorientierte Medien in einer digitalen Gesellschaft nachdenken.

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