Stay Online, Stay informed: Exploring Public Discourse on COVID-19 in Austrian Online Newspaper Coverage and Readers’ Comments

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an unparalleled global challenge to politics, health systems, economy and social life. A high number of infections originating in skiing resorts made Austria an early COVID-19 hotspot in Europe. Austria responded as an effective and strict crisis manager, implementing an early and far-reaching lockdown of the country in mid-March. Since lockdown measures generally limited essential, democratically granted individual freedoms and slowed down the economy, public demand for a justification of these measures increased and the public was highly vigilant about announcements of the government regarding the tackling of the crisis. Mass media impact people’s knowledge and understanding of health crises. They act as primary sources of information about the crisis and its dynamics, including prevention measures, and thereby serve as the main information channel between the executive managing the crisis and the population affected. Overall, the often unexpected and unclear nature of health crises triggers media hypes, leading to a great amount of spontaneous and intense media attention. Media are important actors during public health crises, aiming at providing relevant information that meets the informational needs of media users. However, reporting may also be characterized by crisis, especially in terms of excessiveness, inaccuracy, or sensationalism, potentially increasing emotional responses, especially anxiety and fear, amongst the population. Importantly, little is known about how such information dynamics evolve over the course of a crisis. Against this backdrop, we explore the coverage of COVID-19 crisis in Austrian newspapers and what reactions it prompted, analyzing comments posted on newspapers’ websites in response to the articles. While news coverage provides information about the crisis, crisis management and consequences from a rather institutionalized perspective, the commenting data allow assessing the direct link between certain topics and readers’ reactions, offering a unique opportunity to study public response through empirical observations. We particularly focus on the time dimension, as not only the nature of news and comments but also their relationship may change as the crisis evolves. Empirically, we analyze a unique dataset comprising around 50.000 articles and 5 Million responding comments posted on online pages of der Standard and the Kronen Zeitung from 1 January 2020 - 30 June 2020, allowing us to compare pre-lockdown, lockdown and the beginning of post-lockdown periods. The two sources are high-circulation newspapers with different journalistic routines, ideological profiles of readers and a very active commenting community. We rely on automated content analysis, using a dictionary approach to map coverage in terms of general issues, COVID-19-crisis related policies and the actors discussed. In addition, we explore the emotions conveyed in posted articles and comments applying a word-embeddings approach. Finally, we test different influences on emerging trends in comments’ emotions in a regression analysis, using article contents, but also aspects external to media contents and time as possible explanations. Overall, our study offers important insights into the dynamics of crisis communication and public responses in a country often portrayed as an exemplary manager of the COVID-19 crisis.