Spanish News Users’ Attitudes towards Participatory Functionality in the News Media

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jaume Suau, who begins by acknowledging that we are living in a hybrid media system composed of mainstream and online media which are used differently and which are reconfiguring old models of audience participation. How do audiences feel about such participation, though?

The project is based on a survey of some 6,600 Spanish online news media users who had registered with one of 18 online news sites, and also conducted 12 focus groups. Some 83% of all participants found frequent engagement with online participatory news media formats important, with younger users placing especial emphasis on such participation. This was seen as empowering audiences and improving the quality of journalism, but also faced some criticism for the way news outlets were implementing such participatory models.

At the same time, most users said they rarely commented, sent information to news media, alerted news outlets to errors in their stories, or participated in online surveys. Most people also felt that such participation was implemented by the news sites mainly for commercial reasons rather than to improve democratic engagement or genuinely engage with audiences.

Spanish citizens thus show high levels of participatory energy, but this is not aimed at content production functions on the news sites themselves, but realised in commenting and dissemination activity via social media platforms. Still, they scored the participatory functions provided by news outlets relatively highly – and users who believed in the democratic motivations of such functionality scored the media performance especially highly.

In part, interestingly, such high scores also turn out to be an expression of users’ ideological alignment with the news outlet; more generally, however, citizens providing lower scores complain about the lack of agency they feel even where some participatory functionality is provided. For example, moderation systems can be perceived as a form of ideological censorship or, conversely, as being too poorly and inconsistently operated.