Patterns in the News Values Appreciated by Spanish News Audiences

The next presentation at IAMCR 2019 is by Pere Masip and Pablo Capilla, but presented by Jaume Suau. It begins with the fundamental question of what is news, and how this is perceived by audiences – do they employ the same newsworthiness criteria as journalists and editors? The project explored the news published by El País, ABC, El Confidencial, and Público in Spain, representing legacy and born-digital outlets from a range of ideological perspectives.

The study examined the five leading, most read, most commented, and most shared news items on each site over a period of time, and coded these for their news values (as per standard news value concepts). Conflict, follow-up, and elite stories are universally strong, but there are some differences between the different story rankings, and between legacy and digital media outlets. Readers of legacy outlets look for a greater variety of news values than those of digital media; the importance of audiovisual content also varies across the site categories and ranked lists.There is little variation across sites with different ideologies, however, except that right-wing media focus more on surprise, drama, and entertainment.

Conflict, elite, and follow-up stories remain generally important, however; follow-up stories are not necessarily appearing on the most-read news lists, even though they are often featured on the front pages. There are also interesting findings about isolated news stories (which appear in only one outlet). Users prefer to read and share such stories, perhaps because of their lack of coverage.

The front pages remain dominated by political news; the most read stories are most diverse in their news values; most commented stories largely follow the editorial agenda-setting of the news outlets; and most shared stories are similar to most read, but with more focus on conflict and politics. Audiences seem to share more political news than they actually read.