Crowdsourced Contributions to the Spanish P3 News Site

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Helena Lima, whose work studies the Spanish online platform P3, founded in 2011 and directed largely at younger, urban, high-brow readers. Incorporating a crowdsourcing approach, audiences have been invited to participate in the platform in a number of ways, too.

Previous research indicates that such projects might lead audiences to focus on ‘soft’ news, while the professional journalists continue to cover ‘hard’ news stories, and this may also enable the platform to do more with a limited set of resources; further, such collaboration may strengthen relationships between the journalists and their audiences.

The present project had access to a database on the content production efforts on the platform between 2011 and 2016, and focussed especially on crowdsourced content on the platform (as opposed to content produced by agencies or in-house journalists). This included some 5,500 stories (or 32%), with some 1,200 stories contributed per year. Such content is somewhat more important to the site during the summer months, and most such stories are published in the afternoon (perhaps indicating some degree of journalistic processing of submitted stories earlier in the day).

Crowdsourced stories focussed especially on providing photo galleries, illustration galleries and videos, and they were published especially in the latest news, culture, and leisure categories (the latter is called ‘addictions’ on the site); more specifically, they cover current exhibitions, society news, and some politics. Many of these contributions can also be described as opinion content.

Crowdsourcing therefore especially generates meaningful cultural content – and this focus may also reveal some of P3’s editorial selection choices.