What is it about?
In this work, the process of producing news about events in the Spanish digital press has been studied. A content analysis was carried out on news related to the main external causes of mortality (traffic accidents, accidental falls, drowning and suicides) published in the six main Spanish digital media (elpais.com, elmundo.es, abc.es, lavanguardia.com, elconfidencial.com and 20minutos.es) during the period 2010-2020. The selected news items (n = 5,727) were obtained through the digital newspaper library Mynewsonline. A qualitative study has also been carried out (in-depth interviews with professionals and a focus group). The results show a high number of news items published on traffic compared to other external causes of death with higher mortality. It is also appreciated that the media automatically transfer the information they receive from the emergency services. It has even been detected that most of the news events coded in this study are exact copies that are published on the same day in different media (headlines and the body of the news).
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Why is it important?
The article demonstrates, through an analysis of more than 5,700 news reports and interviews with professionals, that the Spanish digital press publishes a disproportionate number of news stories about traffic accidents compared to other external causes of death, and that most of these stories are automatic copies of emergency service press releases. This reveals an automation process that calls into question journalistic rigor and the media’s ability to provide added value and contextualization in the information they offer to society
Perspectives
My research was aimed at examining how automation and reliance on emergency service press releases are transforming crime and accident reporting in the Spanish digital press. I set out to show that, instead of producing their own contextualized information, media outlets tend to automatically and repeatedly reproduce official reports, which calls into question journalistic rigor, informational diversity, and the social role of the media as agenda setters and providers of added value for society
Francisco Javier Olivar
Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Automated journalism in news about traffic accidents: emergency services information dump, Texto Livre Linguagem e Tecnologia, January 2024, FapUNIFESP (SciELO),
DOI: 10.1590/1983-3652.2024.49369.
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