Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

Online News Exposure in Spain

Snurb — Friday 15 September 2017 23:44
Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Future of Journalism 2017 |

The third presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Jaume Suau, focussing on agenda-setting in the digital public sphere and exploring especially the role of Spanish citizens as online participants. Spanish users are highly active in engaging with political and social contexts, and this is focussed largely on commenting and sharing news (especially on Facebook and WhatsApp) rather than producing content. News media have failed to harness these energies fully so far.

Such audience participation is changing traditional hegemonies in journalism. Old and new media coexist in the news environment, and complement and influence wach other. Audience roles are changing, and new participatory formats are emerging; media consumption therefore also changes: while audiences may still selectively seek out particular media sources based on their pre-existing political positioning, they may now be exposed to a wider range of news than they had been offline – or they may exist in 'echo chambers' and 'filter bubbles'.

The present study surveyed some 6,600 registered users of Spanish online news media; 66% of respondents were male, and the vast majority of them were aged 35 or above (and this is also a reflection of who still registers a mainstream media account). 42% of them never or rarely used social media.

Notably, 43% registered with both ideologically aligned and non-aligned sites; on social media, access to news was largely via like-minded media, but oppositional media still featured to a notable degree, too. Those who are more active on social media were more likely to access, comment, and share news from media with whose political stance they disagreed.

Friends figured especially strongly as sources of news dissemination on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram; Twitter was more important for both friends and news outlets as sources. News accessed on Twitter was also more politically diverse. This lays the groundwork for a substantial volume of accidental exposure to news from sources that do not align with the user's own political position, but the degree of pluralism in the news received thus depends strongly also on the ideological pluralism of one's friends.

  • 1283 views
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.