Index Comunicación (Oct 2018)
Social media as news sources in Spanish digital media (‘El País’, ‘El Mundo’, ‘La Vanguardia’ and ‘ABC’)
Abstract
The research describes and analyzes the use of social media as news sources by the four digital newspapers most read in Spain. A no probabilistic sample of news extracted from the online editions of El País, El Mundo, La Vanguardia and ABC was analyzed quantitatively. The sample was formed by the news most read by the audience that included social media contents. The content analysis was practiced on diverse classifications of contents, depending on their volumen, their nature (written, visual, audiovisual and hybrid), their use compared to traditional news sources, their informative function and their thematic. The results reveal that Spanish journalists carry out a restrictive use of social media as news sources and that the informative value of the contents is complementary and not essential in most of the cases. Only pictures are reliable sources of information and relevant, both in the news that only include sources from social media and in those elaborated also with traditional sources. The most used social media are, in this order, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Its contents were correctly cited in 95% of the news and only were detected a lack of citation or confusing or incomplete attribution of the sources in a marginal percentage of the cases.
