Competing Media Frames During a National Currency Transition: The Euro Adoption in Croatia

Davor Trbušič · Stela Lechpammer · Luka Šikić

Communication Today, Vol. 17 No. 1, 2026

The study investigates how the adoption of the euro was framed in Croatian online media during both the pre-adoption (December 2022) and the transition periods (January 2023). The analysis of 236 articles shows the dominance of a technological and administrative frame with statistically significant variations between the two periods. Sentiment was predominantly neutral, though positive sentiment appeared more frequently in economic coverage while negative sentiment dominated social and political coverage. The frames are interconnected, with technical content sometimes enhanced through sensationalist headlines, and lexical patterns create thematic clusters that function as linguistic markers of distinct frames.

Open-access article in Communication Today. The full PDF is hosted at communicationtoday.sk.