From News Softening to Social News Softening: Comparing Patterns of Political News Coverage on Different (Social) Media Channels in Germany and Switzerland

Many news media publish content on social media where it must meet the success factors of algorithmic selection in order to attract attention. One possible strategy for that is news softening. However, it is not clear which characteristics are decisive for news softening on social platforms. To help overcome this research gap, our paper adds a new concept called “social news softening” to the rather traditional news softening concept. We test it empirically, taking the example of the political coverage of German and Swiss (elite, popular) news media on Facebook, still the most important social media platform for news consumption overall, also in these countries. Our results point to platform dependent strategies. Linked/embedded website content (on-site perspective) shows (hardly) any differences to website articles overall, but the softening patterns within Facebook posts (off-site perspective) differ by country. While the German tabloid in particular still increasingly uses traditional news softening characteristics, Swiss popular media more strongly apply social media-specific ones. This illustrates the importance of our concept, which is flexible enough to allow continuous adjustments to the highly dynamic platformization processes.