MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF TOURISM ON CROATIAN NEWS WEBSITES

The phenomenon of tourism has been the subject of various studies by many scientists and experts from all fields of scientific study, especially economics. Tourism is undergoing a profound change as a result of the dynamic socio-economic development of many countries where it represents an important link in the economic chain of a particular country. In this paper tourism is researched in the context of the media using the example of the Republic of Croatia. The aim of this paper is to research articles on tourism on the pages of the most widely read Croatian news websites in order to gain insight into the media representation of tourism in Croatia, its neighboring countries, Europe and the world from the point of view of Croatian national news websites. The paper is based on articles on tourism that were published in July and August on the following news websites: Index.hr, 24sata. hr and jutarnji.hr, which are the most popular news websites in the Republic of Croatia according to Alexa.com. The research period of the paper is from 1 July to 31 August 2019 as the greatest tourist movements in Croatia are recorded during those months. The research results showed that the Index.hr news website published the most articles on tourism; that the geographic focus of articles was mainly on Croatia; that tourism offer was the most well represented topic and that, taking into account the entire body of research, negative views and opinions with respect to the researched subject predominated.