COVID-19 in Singapore and New Zealand: Newspaper portrayal, crisis management

Abstract

News frames influence destination reputation. Research primarily focuses on social media impact relative to destination reputation. Newspaper reporting is a major source of information which remains a study area underexplored when assessing news media framing. This study fills the gap by analyzing how newspapers from tourist generating countries such as China, USA, and Australia portrayed reputable destinations like New Zealand's and Singapore's efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. The ProQuest library database was used to collect 192 newspaper articles. The software Qualtrics Text iQ and Leximancer were used to track sentiments, identify themes and concepts correlating with literature on tourism crisis management. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic yields a negatively lower sentiment value for New Zealand, than Singapore's higher sentiment value. The contribution lies in the relationship concept emphasizing shifts in destination reputation corollary to crisis management, and to account for reputation fluctuations in media framework theory.