Klaus Schoenbach

Klaus Schoenbach
Zeppelin University

Dr. phil.

About

241
Publications
46,156
Reads
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2,339
Citations
Additional affiliations
Zeppelin Universität gemeinnützige GmbH
Position
  • Honorary Professor
May 2010 - December 2025
University of Amsterdam
Position
  • Honorary Fellow

Publications

Publications (241)
Article
The authors discuss the current environment for newspaper readership research and address the essential issue: does newspaper research ask the right questions?
Chapter
Full-text available
Since the late 1950s, there have been a number of attempts to create more realistic models of the media effects process. For this purpose, transactional concepts have combined the stimulus–response paradigm and the uses and gratifications approach. This entry traces how those models have developed. Reasons for a major standstill since the 1980s in...
Chapter
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Faced with the ongoing evolution of the media landscape, media and communication science is constant-ly asking itself new questions concerning the tension between stability and change in social communication. In this context, many relevant topics exist for which there are still no publications that would systematically evaluate what we know (empiri...
Book
Wie und warum gelingt es uns, andere davon zu überzeugen, etwas zu kaufen, uns zu helfen, sich (ver)führen zu lassen? Und was können wir dafür von der Werbung lernen? Ein umfassender Überblick über die Erkenntnisse zur persuasiven Kommunikation - von einem der auch international bekanntesten deutschen Kommunikationswissenschaftler, auf der Erfahrun...
Chapter
Wir haben in diesem Buch eine Fülle kleinerer und größerer „Theorien“ kennengelernt, mit denen die Erfolge von Überzeugungstaktiken und -strategien erklärt wurden. „Theorien“ in Anführungszeichen deshalb, weil der Anspruch an eine Theorie ja gemeinhin höher ist als an schlichte Regeln menschlichen Verhaltens, die sich Persuasion offenbar zunutze ma...
Chapter
Darauf will dieses Buch systematisch antworten: Was sind denn die Taktiken und Strategien, die uns dazu bringen, etwas zu tun, das wir eigentlich nicht vorhatten oder auf das wir zumindest selbst nicht gekommen wären? Und warum funktionieren welche Überzeugungsversuche? Deshalb gleich eine erste Antwort auf die peinliche Frage, wieso wir uns wieder...
Chapter
Sollte man persuasive Botschaften aller Art, wann immer möglich, bebildern? Sagt nicht ein Bild mehr als 1000 Wörter? Denn gilt nicht: Ich hab’s doch mit eigenen Augen gesehen? Oder etwas allgemeiner gefragt: Gibt es Vermittlungskanäle persuasiver Botschaften, die Beeinflussungsversuche stärker als andere gelingen lassen? Persönliche, individuelle...
Chapter
Argumentieren war die erste der drei persuasiven Techniken, die Funkhouser 1986 für seine Entscheidungs-Sequenz vorschlug. Es ist das Herausstreichen von Vor- oder Nachteilen der Handlungsmöglichkeiten, die uns zur Verfügung stehen, ihr Schönreden oder Schlechtmachen, der Nachdruck auf damit verbundene subjektive Normen (s. o., S. 6 f.). Argumentie...
Chapter
Verkaufen, Flirten, Führen – überall wird dazu persuasive Kommunikation eingesetzt. Wie sie funktioniert und warum, haben wir kennengelernt. Dabei sollte auch sichtbar werden: So einfach kann Überzeugung gelingen, fast auf Knopfdruck, dass es uns manchmal fast die Schamröte ins Gesicht treibt.
Chapter
Werbung ist ein lehrreicher Sonderfall persuasiver Kommunikation. Für ihre Überzeugungsleistungen wurden allein in Deutschland schon in den ersten fünf Monaten von 2021 sage und schreibe mehr als 13,6 Mrd. € ausgegeben – vor allem deshalb, weil sie es oft besonders schwer hat, Menschen zu beeinflussen. Werbung hat dabei gar nicht so sehr mit dem Vo...
Chapter
Bisher haben wir Taktiken persuasiver Kommunikation beschrieben und auf ihre Wirksamkeit hin abgeklopft. Das waren Argumente, einzelne überzeugende Botschaften, bestehend aus einer Handlungsaufforderung, dem dafür angebotenen Nutzen und der Glaubwürdigkeit der Verbindung zwischen beiden Elementen. Fragen dabei waren: Wie lassen sich solche persuasi...
Chapter
Schon die Yale-Studien der Hovland-Gruppe in den 1940er und 1950er Jahren (s. o., S. 16 f.) fragten, ob es nicht Leute geben könnte – oder genauer: Persönlichkeitstypen –, die leichter zu überzeugen sind als andere, und zwar immer und überall. In dem Band „Personality and persuasibility“ von Janis, Hovland und acht weiteren Autorinnen und Autoren (...
Chapter
Wie eine überzeugende Balance aus persuasiver Botschaft und Zielgruppeneigenschaften jeweils aussieht, ist nicht immer leicht zu bestimmen. Weil die Persuasionsforschung dafür keine gebrauchsfertigen Rezepte liefere, ist sie sogar oft dem Spott von Praktikern ausgesetzt – und in der Tat: Eher selten gibt es wissenschaftliche Beiträge, die ganz konk...
Article
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Based on two large and representative surveys of adult Americans in December 2019 and May 2020, this study investigates the state and development of the U.S. news media’s images during severe crisis times, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and racial unrest after the violent death of George Floyd. Our analyses show that both positive and nega...
Article
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Advertising and marketing practitioners are calling for more basic research on advertising effects. But it has been around for more than 2,000 years in persuasion research and more than 100 years in academic advertising research, with literally thousands of studies. Why are they ignored? The article discusses the reasons.
Article
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Background: In Qatar, health media campaigns and applications (apps) have not been particularly successful among adolescents. Arab culture suggests personal communication as a promising alternative. Aims: This study aimed to assess the importance of personal communication for health information among Qatari adolescents compared with other source...
Article
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This study examined concerns about Internet surveillance among Internet users in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Lebanon, Qatar, and the UAE (N = 4160). Despite common stereotypes about how variables like gender, youth, income, nationality, and liberal or conservative ideology affect political and cultural attitudes in Arab countries, these indicators were...
Article
How do audiences in the Middle East and North Africa respond to the dramatic expansion of content offered with the advent of online video? Rapid internet adoption in the region signifies the latest expansion of content menus available to audiences since television. In this article, we determine who—as a consequence of this expansion—diversifies the...
Article
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This study investigates the influence of season of birth on media use and media genre preferences later in life. An impressive body of research in Europe and Japan shows that the month of birth has a significant impact on one’s temperament: People born in the winter of the northern hemisphere, for instance, tend to be less cheerful, lively and self...
Conference Paper
I. The first comprehensive and large-scale investigation of Qatari teenagers' health-information and health-monitoring behavior is the basis of our paper. It presents an overview of the results. A survey of more than 1,100 Qataris, 13 to 20 years old, conducted in spring 2017, addressed which the health issues are they are most concerned about, how...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
How do audiences in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) respond to the dramatic expansion of content offered by online video? Are genre preferences online still consistent with preferences for traditional television content, or do audiences use the new offerings to diversify their tastes? A secondary analysis of surveys on media use in the regi...
Article
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This study examines predictors of blogging in six Arab countries in a secondary analysis of population surveys of, in total, 7,525 respondents in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Lebanon, Bahrain, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates in 2013. The surveys assessed a wide variety of Internet uses, news and information consumption, and also levels of political ef...
Conference Paper
This study explores possible determinants of blogging in the Arab world. In particular, it tests the stereotype that political motives are strongly behind blogging among survey respondents in six Arab countries. Human rights activists, scholars, and others have often speculated about the role the Internet plays in the political mobilization of Arab...
Article
Today’s online news environment has made it easy to select outlets covering the topics one is interested in and the political viewpoints one shares. Previous research often examined either the diversity of news content or the audience’s choices. This study of online news use in Austria does both to assess audience selectivity systematically. It fir...
Article
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This article analyzes intermedia agenda-setting processes during a national election campaign of 38 newspapers, online news sites, TV news programs, as well as a wire service, through semi-automatic content analysis and time series analysis. The theoretical assumption was that intermedia agenda-setting is determined by the production structures of...
Article
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The question how offline media use is related to online media use has been heavily debated in the last decades. If they are functionally equivalent, then advantages like low costs, rapid publication cycles, and easy access to online news could lead to them displacing offline news. Data from a large-scale survey with detailed questions about media...
Article
What do citizens in the Netherlands expect from journalism? A large-scale survey shows that many audience expectations align fairly well with what experts and journalists consider important democratic functions of the press. We refer to these expectations as Civic Demands. In addition, more at odds with the profession's view, the audience wants jou...
Conference Paper
This paper analyzes the intermedia agenda-setting process of 34 newspapers, online news sites and TV-news in a nationwide setting through semi-automatic content analysis and time series analysis. The findings suggest that the opinion leader role of a medium depends on issue specific characteristics such as obtrusiveness, mediating the intermedia ag...
Article
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Das Internet – so wurde gehofft – macht politische Information mehr Bürgerinnen und Bürgern zugänglich, erleichtert die Beteiligung an Politik und fördert damit die Demokratie. Aber wen erreicht politische Kommunikation wirklich via Internet, und wer beteiligt sich aktiv daran? Nehmen bisher Passive teil, oder sind es doch wieder die „üblichen Verd...
Article
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Citizens in the Netherlands demand that news media are transparent and responsive to audiences. But above all, the population expects journalism to adopt a more professional manner of self-regulation in order to strengthen news quality. These are the main findings from a large-scale representative survey—the first of its kind—on audience perception...
Article
Although concerns have been raised that political infotainment programmes might increasingly substitute more serious information, empirical evidence about changes of individual viewing behaviour is scarce. The authors discuss audience specialization and diversification as two opposing patterns of audience response to a growing variety of public aff...
Article
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Twitter, blogs and alternative news sites play an increasingly important role in the realm of news and journalism. Journalists often use Twitter to survey the public opinion and to gather information for their articles. At the same time, there has been an explosive growth of non-journalistic websites that have started to compete with professional n...
Article
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Journalistic codes of conduct are regularly mentioned as instrument to secure journalistic quality. But do they really work? To answer this question, we reviewed all academic studies on journalistic codes that are mentioned in the Social Science Citation Index or in EBSCO’s Communication & Mass Media Complete database. Our findings show that codes...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Citizens in the Netherlands demand that news media are transparent and responsive to audiences. But above all, these citizens expect journalism to adopt a more professional manner of self-regulation in order to strengthen news quality. These are the main findings from a large-scale representative survey-the first of its kind-on audience perceptions...
Article
The goal of this study is to explore different facets of exposure to television news—from the regularity of exposure via viewing durations to deliberate news selection and avoidance behavior. Using Dutch people-meter data on the individual viewer level, nine different exposure measures are compared. Our results suggest that exposure to news entails...
Article
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In an information-rich environment with ample choice, do citizens still get exposed to what is going on around them in society? Or do they become ‘information hermits’, only interested in their personal hobbies? In contrast to widespread fears, the results of a large-scale survey, representative for the population of the Netherlands, suggest that m...
Article
In today's media landscape with an abundance of news outlets, it is often assumed that news media use becomes increasingly fragmented and polarized. Based on a large-scale survey of the Austrian population, fine-grained patterns of news exposure are explored. Criteria for the interpretation of these patterns as fragmented and polarized are discusse...
Article
With an abundance of TV channels available, viewers with no interest in politics might escape from news watching completely. But whether this is true depends on how viewers deal with an increasing complexity. Do people follow their viewing motives and preferences even more or do unintentional choices prevail? Using people-meter data, the authors st...
Article
This study compared and integrated the influence of motivational and situational determinants on news viewing behavior. Individual people-meter data allowed the unobtrusive study of news viewing situations. The finding is that the viewing context is much more important than motivations. However, interest in the news and politics can reinforce or re...
Article
A three-wave Delphi study in the Netherlands invited 60 experts to assess the quality of online and traditional journalism and to propose measures for improvement. Although from very different backgrounds and representing a wide range of opinions, the experts agree on a focused set of core standards to be strictly observed by journalists. They sepa...
Conference Paper
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Warum gibt es überhaupt noch Zeitungen? Solche, die sich Mühe geben-wie die, die gerade ausgezeichnet wurden? Zeitungen könnten eigentlich resignieren-und manche tun das leider auch. Das Internet enthält ja alle Informationen-und das zu jeder beliebigen Tages-und Nachtzeit. Die Zeitung wird damit zweier ihrer wichtigsten USPs beraubt-zum einen natü...
Article
By means of a two-wave representative panel survey of adults in the Netherlands, this study examines changes in the profile of the online-news audience, how it uses and evaluates online news and how this eventually affects the use of traditional media. The analyses reveal interesting differences in the use of newspaper websites and other, non-paper...
Article
Television viewing often is a sequence of a multitude of activities that can vary tremendously from the moment the TV set is turned on until it is turned off again. Previous models of individual viewing behavior as well as empirical studies have focused on isolated aspects of viewing only, such as the frequency and duration of viewing or patterns o...
Chapter
Warum sind manche Zeitungen erfolgreich, andere nicht? Seit 13 Jahren befasst sich Klaus Schönbach mit dieser Frage. Mehr als 500 Tageszeitungen hat der Medienforscher untersucht und ist zu erstaunlichen Ergebnissen gekommen.
Article
Traditional newspapers have been shown to improve knowledge about politics and other societal issues and to widen the perceived public agenda, but what of their online counterparts and other news sites on the Internet? The consequences of differences in presentation style are addressed. A large survey representative of the Dutch adult population is...
Chapter
Wer sich über öffentliche Angelegenheiten auf dem Laufenden halten will, braucht keine Zeitungen, kein Fernsehen, Radio oder Zeitschriften mehr. Inzwischen enthält das Internet alle Informationen, an denen jeder Einzelne zu einer beliebigen Tages- oder Nachtzeit spontan interessiert sein könnte. Sind auch Nachrichtenjournalisten nicht mehr nötig? D...
Chapter
Warum gibt er überhaupt noch Zeitungen, wenn das Internet zu einer beliebigen Tages- und Nachtzeit jede Information bereithält, an der jeder einzelne spontan interessiert sein könnte? Warum braucht es noch Zeitungsjournalisten, wenn jeder sein eigener Journalist sein kann? Diesen Fragen ist der Kommunikationswissenschaftler Klaus Schönbach bei eine...
Article
Full-text available
The number of journals in the field of communication is increasing. Above all, new, and more specialized journals geared to an international market, and therefore published in English, have appeared. In contrast to those journals, most national journals are still published in languages not accessible to the majority of communication scholars. How c...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In recent years, newspaper companies all over the world have introduced a series of innovations to stop a further decline in their readership, to open up new readership markets and new sources of income. Those measures can be categorized into five different groups: changes in the content and the appearance of the dailies themselves, measures of mar...
Conference Paper
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Running head: Communication channels and the public agenda Communication channels and agenda diversity: The impact of "display" and "research" sources on the public agenda Abstract / As "display" channels, television, print newspapers, radio and magazines offer pre-selected and pre-ordered information about topics of the public sphere. "Research" c...
Article
Printed newspapers are known to widen the range of public topics, events and issues their audience is aware of. There are reasons to assume that their online counterparts help increase their audience’s perceived agenda to a lesser extent. The way print newspapers are structured and used is supposed to lure readers into reading stories they may not...
Article
Full-text available
Printed newspapers are known to widen the range of public topics, events and issues their audience is aware of. There are reasons to assume that their online counterparts help increase their audience’s perceived agenda to a lesser extent. The way print newspapers are structured and used is supposed to lure readers into reading stories they may not...
Article
Full-text available
Mehr als 20 Jahre nach Erscheinen der beiden Grundlagenartikel zum DTA ergibt eine systematische Recherche der Fachliteratur, dass die Resonanz erstaunlich stark gewesen ist. Der DTA wurde in Lehrbüchern, Theorie- und Forschungsüberblicken beschrieben und diskutiert. Meist geschah dies als eher selbstverständliche Erwähnung, oft aber auch mit posit...
Article
Research suggests that online newspapers are not as good as their printed counterparts in widening the range of topics their audience is aware of. But should we be concerned about that? So far, visiting online newspapers does not seem to be a substitute for reading traditional newspapers. But the evidence is scarce; only a few studies specifically...
Conference Paper
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Spätestens jetzt müsste sie eigentlich die gedruckte Zeitung verdrängt haben-die "Daily Me", die Zeitung, die der Medienprophet Nicholas Negroponte vom MIT uns allen schon 1995 angekündigt hat. Er nannte sie "Täglich nur ich", weil sie Schluss machen würde mit all dem Kram, der mich persönlich in der herkömmlichen Tageszeitung nicht interessiert. E...
Article
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What is it that helps printed newspapers successfully compete with other media for the audience: marketing efforts, content, or their design? This article discusses the results of the most recent studies of an extensive research program on this topic. It began with the evaluation of 350 local dailies in Germany in the mid-1990s. Papers were reexami...
Article
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The ‘trap’ effect of television is the presumed impact of that medium on those who are not really interested in politics. Television, it says, is capable of influencing political opinions and behaviors in that group better than other media are. Previous research, however, has already shown that this effect is not very impressive. Historically and i...
Conference Paper
There are reasons to believe that online newspapers are not as good as printed newspapers at widening the range of public topics, events and issues their audience is aware of. As a display ("push") medium, print newspapers carry many topics at first glance, and the presentation of articles is supposed to lure readers into reading stories they may n...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
There are reasons to believe that online newspapers are not as good as their printed counterparts in widening the range of topics their audience is aware of. But, should we fear this? Does reading online newspapers actually substitute reading traditional newspapers? And to what extent do online newspaper readers compose another media mix compared t...
Chapter
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In meinem Aufsatz „Das hyperaktive Publikum: Essay über eine Illusion“ aus dem Jahre 19971 plädierte ich für mehr Realismus. Zumindest für Gelassenheit wollte ich werben, wenn es um die Bedeutung von Interaktivität im Umgang mit Medien geht. In den 90er Jahren sahen uns die Prognosen unseres Medienverhaltens ja vor allem aktiv, sogar — hyperaktiv:...

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