@Francesco Cioglia,
1- Was Covid19 one the key words in your search of the corpus to measure the size of the coverage?

2- It was interesting but not surprising that the web as more active in the reporting than print papers. It just shows the proliferation of online accountability platforms.

3- Isn't it possible that the Austria's coverage is affected by the fact that it has less cases in comparison to Italy which confirms the hypothesis of event-oriented of coverage. In other words, we report problems and since problems are not as intense why would outlets be triggered to the same level of intensity as the Italian newspapers?

• Rahma Al Foori

@Rahma Al Foori,

thank you very much for your comments and questions!
I reply following your order:
1. 'Covid-19' was not a keyword in my research, I excluded it because when I have searched for articles containing it, it seemed to be a choice used rather for titles, and within the body, however, you usually find 'coronavirus' (in addition to 'covid-19' or other synonyms). The only exception are leads in the front page, where 'covid-19' may appear alone, but since the article continues on another page, where the 'coronavirus' presumably appears, I decided to leave 'covid-19' out.
2. Yes, this result was what I would have expected, especially by the Italian daily La Repubblica, since they update their website quite often during the day, and create very much content (also video). What surprised me more was the effective number of articles and videos published - all different from the others! This behavior may have, i.m.h.o., rather negative consequences since they “bomb” their public with information on a very sensitive topic related both to health and diplomacy dimensions/issues, creating an alarming perception within the public, especially when the problem did not arrive yet in the Country. And now I come to the third point,
3. It is true that Italy had to deal with the problem in a much bigger extent than Austria, and it may explain also the number of articles published during the last 20 days of the period taken into account (let’s say from Feb. 23/24 to Mar. 11, although the number of positive people was at that point in time relatively small), the problem was the coverage made the time before: on Feb. 1 La Repubblica published 56 different articles talking about coronavirus, however there was no single case in Italy. And as a concrete consequence, since such coverage pushes well-known (racist) problems within society, were an increase in racist attacks against Asian looking people, a decrease in guests in Chinese restaurants, as well as an increase in the demand of masks and hand sanitizers. In Austria, a noticeable increase was, on the other hand, when first cases appeared in Italy, here as event-oriented coverage.

• Francesco Cioglia

@Jennifer Dumoulin,
That's an interesting piece of paper. Your talk also highlighted the didactic role of celebrities during the pandemic.

• Rahma Al Foori