The RegioMedia subproject investigates how local media environments, both offline and online, contribute to shaping political attitudes and behaviors across Germany’s regions. Political opinions, such as anti-immigrant sentiment or party preferences, vary significantly between regions, yet the influence of regional media on these attitudes remains understudied. RegioMedia seeks to bridge this gap by creating detailed regional indicators—down to the level of municipalities and counties—that capture local media sentiment on topics like immigration, gender, or climate change.

To achieve this, we will analyze content from over 200 local newspapers across Germany, supported by our collaboration with the FoDiRa Research Network on Discrimination and Racism. Through access to a vast archive of digitized local newspaper content, we aim to produce indicators that reflect the offline media climate over time and across regions.

In addition to traditional media, RegioMedia will also examine the role of online media by analyzing geotagged social media data, specifically German-language Tweets. With access to the X-GTA database, which includes over 2 billion Tweets (of which many have been geotagged, Nguyen et al. 2022), we will use advanced computational techniques to derive insights into regional variations in online discourse.

Our work is supported by collaborations with Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte, an expert in political text analysis from the University of Duisburg-Essen, and Prof. Dr. Philipp Cimiano, an expert in semantic computing from Bielefeld University. Together, we aim to deepen the understanding of how regional media climates impact political attitudes and contribute valuable tools and data for the wider research community.