The Use of Twitter to Analyze Citizen Proposals: the Economic News of the National Reference Newspapers

Abstract

Twitter has become the primary means of public expression and platform on which to build a new way of doing journalism. In the Spanish case, the covers of national reference newspapers and its contents on the microblogging conversations generate traffic that is a true reflection of a social and political context marked by the economic crisis. Therefore, this study aims to reflect the degree of citizen participation in the information content on Twitter, based on the quantification of their interactions or their messages tone. The content analysis presented in this work maps the use by major Spanish newspapers of this new social media, notes the importance it attaches to citizenship expressed by sections of economy news and reveals which are the most active posts on the microblogging and therefore, the most popular.