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Communicative complexity concerns the variety of issues and stakeholders (agenda complexity) and their associations (frame complexity) in the news. One issue may dominate news in crises (9/11, Katrina), but as soon as complexity recovers, uncertainty may decrease and the public mood may improve. The financial crisis in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany (2007-2012) offers an example. An automated content analysis was applied to over 160,000 newspaper articles. Frame complexity decreased until the spotlight fell on the demise of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers (2008). The subsequent gradual recovery was only partly interrupted by the euro crisis. A Vector AutoRegression time series analysis shows that increasing frame complexity may indeed have fostered the recovery of financial markets and consumer confidence.

Different "paradigmatic" approaches to explain news effects on voting may supplement each other, because their starting points are based on different news types in political campaign news: news on issue positions of parties, news on real-world developments, news on support or criticism for parties, and news on success and failure of parties. Daily content analysis data and a weekly multiwave panel survey from the 2003 election campaign in the Netherlands are used for a simultaneous test. A logistic regression analysis demonstrates that the paradigmatic approaches supplement each other. The data reveal a huge impact of the news from a campaigner's point of view in spite of a huge variety in responses to the news at the level of individual respondents. © 2007 International Communication Association.