Trends in Video Content on Spanish News Websites

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Pere Masip, whose focus is on the multimedia content of Spanish online newspapers. There is a growing presence of video on such sites, indication new content as well as business models. Why and how is video used on news Websites, then? This study examined the Websites of three of the biggest Spanish newspapers, as well as of the most visited online-only news site in Spain.

Between 14 and 17% of stories on the three newspaper sites had videos; just over 10% of the online-only site. Such videos are mainly integrated with text news on these sites; only one site placed many of its videos in a separate section. Usually, these videos were professionally produced news videos; citizen-generated video content is rare. Such videos include a news organisation ident, but tend not to include bylines or other identifications of the journalists responsible.

There is considerable variety in the origin of these videos; between 28% and 47% of videos on the newspaper sites were produced by in-house journalists, but the same is not true for the online-only site. For the most part (86%), these videos complement text coverage, with only 11% constituting independent coverage that does not have a text counterpart. In 1.9% of cases, video and text are identical in content. Videos are most used for sport (30%), culture (19%), and politics (17%) sections; sports is especially prominent in El Mundo and El País. There are also video blogs summarising political events and covering local news, and videos covering new movie releases and other cultural events.

Compared to 2008, in 2010 videos are increasingly sourced from news agencies, increasingly complementary to stories. The percentage of politics and society videos has increased substantially, while that of sports and culture videos has declined. Video news is now totally integrated into these sites, and news agencies are more important now, which means that differences between news sites have been diminished; only La Vanguardia has a very substantial in-house production – but overall, production is kept inexpensive. The overall idea behind adding video news appears to be that it may attract a younger audience to these sites.