Interaction in online media: Readers’ reaction to news and opinion

Abstract

The comments in digital journalism websites are a new practice developed thanks to the increase in internet interactivity. Most of the electronic journalism media have implemented blogs on their websites in order to receive feedback from their readers. The emergence of this practice brings the concrete possibility of analyzing key aspects of the relation between the communication media and their audience and of recognizing some characteristics of the extension of public space to a virtual milieu. A corpus of 480 commentaries linked to 24 articles of two different genres was constituted, namely opinion columns and news, in three Chilean electronic media. The readers’ response to the main article and the other comments were analyzed, trying to identify the specifi c type of response to comments and whether the positioning is in favor of or against the object of response. The findings show that the commentators respond more to other comments and the general topic than to the contents presented by the media. It can also be claimed that the form of response is affected by the journalistic genre of the main article, as well as by some particularities of the newspapers studied.Keywords: blogs, cyber journalism, public sphere, interactive communication, online comment.