Regional media as bearers of mediatized constructions of regional identitiesMavsar, Maruša (Avtor) Mustić, Daria (Mentor) regional identitylocal mediadiscourse analysisnewspapersonline mediaConfronting the pandemic has strengthened the shift of attention of research bodies and institutions to the subnational levels of governance, to micro-regions, and the sustainable core of local communities, where the sociocultural glue of regions, the invoked collective identity, enhanced resilience and enabled solidarity in the most difficult times. Local news was crucial for informed decision-making in many communities, and lived experience emphasized the need for a strong communication ecology, in which citizens must have access to essential information about issues impacting their daily lives. However, both domains, local news and regional identity, and especially their intersection, are under-researched in the two neighboring countries, Slovenia and Croatia, which bridge the Central European and Mediterranean worlds. In a period when news deserts are expanding, despite this recognized value of locally invoked societal resilience, and the media landscape of the countries in question is facing severe challenges stemming from a lack of pluralism, our dissertation focuses on identifying concrete multimodal tools and strategies through which regional media, on a daily basis, foster identification with subnational spaces, co-create regional consciousness, and connect the audiences living there. After the strong theoretical foundations, which aimed for an interdisciplinary view, we discerned various multimodal ways in which regional outlets mediate and mediatize regional identities in four regional newspapers and ten digital media from the two countries. We conclude that a reframed view of smaller media outlets as important catalysts of regional identity formation could help strengthen the overall development of regions.M. Mavsar20252026-02-27 10:57:36Doktorsko delo/naloga13237slSlovenija; Hrvaška;