Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This study analyzes the ways in which the Basque diaspora community in the United States consumes news media from their home origin. Using survey data collected from over 400 Basque-Americans with varying generations (first, second, third, etc.), we explore the ways in which surveyed individuals consume media from their ancestral territory of origin, in this case, the Basque Country of Spain and France. This research is exploratory and descriptive of the media habits and behavior of individuals with Basque origins. We find that significant shifts in media consumption occur between first generation immigrants and those beyond the second generation. As we move across generations, we observe that individuals shift from engagement with home-origin media to engagement with Basque cultural activities, such as dancing clubs. Our study suggests that the importance of digital media from the homeland is growing, but that most consumption of information by the Basque diaspora is through social networks. Our findings also suggest that, among those who continue to consume home-origin media, it is mainly through readership of national newspapers (in this case, from Spain) rather than local newspapers (from the Basque Country). This article enriches our understanding of the media habits of the Basque diaspora and raises questions for future research about the effect of transnational media consumption on the political, social and economic behavior of immigrants in the United States.

The media participates in the creation and reinforcement of mental models, through which people interpret social realities, especially those that are distant and unknown. News making involves the use of certain frames that highlight some aspects of the information and downplay or silence other elements. In this context, the objective of this article is to analyse how China is portrayed on the Spanish news, and identify the organising ideas and value judgments that are used in the frames used in this process. Based on the application of the content analysis technique, the results show that the portrayal of China, its institutions and citizens, on television is carried out through four main frames: “Capacity, potential, development;” “Gloom, shadow and darkness;” “Dangerous environment” and “Exotic organisation.” From the Western perspective, Chinese economic growth is accepted, but at the same time China is presented as a problematic country in which natural disasters, accidents, and criminal acts abound, highlighting its systemic political deficiencies and systemic deficiencies. This mostly negative image of China does not correspond with its current and historical relationship with Spain, nor with the relevant position that this emerging power has reached on a global scale.

The use of Twitter as a tool for mobilisation has made digital social and political activism a growing area of interest in communication research. Scholars have underscored the effectiveness of Twitter in galvanising the opinion of broad sectors of the public and expressing the indignation of average citizens on issues of social concern (Bruns et al., 2015; Martínez, 2017). The rise of feminist social media activism has prompted a number of studies on the feminist movement’s use of hashtags to foster online conversations on specific issues (Jinsook, 2017; Turley & Fisher, 2018; etc.). This article examines the correlation between the degree of ideological commitment amongst social media users and the nature of their Twitter conversations on a given issue. The analysis focuses on Twitter conversations generated by feminists, influencers, journalists and politicians in reaction to the controversial sentencing of the Wolf Pack (La Manada) –a gang of men involved in a sexual assault perpetrated during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona. Big data techniques were used to explore the nature of messages containing four highly charged hashtags central to feminist discourse on this issue: #YoSiTeCreo (Yes, I believe you), #HermanaYoSíTeCreo (Yes, sister, I believe you), #Cuéntalo (Talk about it) and #NoEstásSola (You are not alone). Our findings indicate that the levels of ideological commitment of Twitter users participating in what was essentially a feminist conversation varied to an extent that impeded serious interaction amongst them, either online or offline. From the perspective of communication strategy, feminist hashtag activism would appear to be an intermediate step in a longer process of creating a higher consciousness regarding gender equality issues in Spain.

As part of their social function, Public Service Media (PSM) organizations are devoted to innovation. In this context, a number of European PSM outlets have created laboratories based on the implementation of products, services and formats for multiplatform audiences. Our research focused on two case studies: a) BBC News Labs (UK) and b) RTVE Lab (Spain). We applied both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. We used content analysis techniques to examine products generated by the two laboratories between 2013 and 2017, quantifying and classifying each one according to categories related to the type and nature of the innovation. We carried out ethnographic research using participant observation over five days in each laboratory, both in London and Madrid. We also conducted open-ended interviews with five professionals at the BBC and three at RTVE, as well as with the head of EBU’s Media Strategy & Development department. Our results show that BBC News Labs implements a global innovation strategy through the design and engineering of products that facilitate journalists’ work. Projects include speechto- text software, prototypes for voice recognition and text analysis, chatbots and object-based media. On the other hand, RTVE Lab focuses on designing and producing interactive formats, multimedia narratives and social media content, with an emphasis on experimentation. The findings reveal the main barriers and incentives to innovation within each lab and show how the transfer of innovation could increase the diversity, universality and quality of their overall output.

This paper analyses the information sources used in a large corpus of news items published in Spanish printed newspapers between 1618 and 1635. The initial aim is to determine how information credibility was constructed in both historical and rhetorical terms. To this end, the rhetorical construction of credibility in the news stories are analysed by focusing on the information sources that these reveal or conceal. And in order to determine whether or not these sources were deliberately concealed, the frequency with which ‘on deep background’ attribution appears is examined. The methodological approach on which this study is based is Historical News Discourse, which applies the conclusions and methods of critical discourse analysis to newspapers of the past, in addition to contextualising and explaining the results in terms of journalism history and communication approaches (Conboy, Brownlees and Broersma, among others). In this work, we contend that the discourse analysis of the first printed newspapers is essential for gaining further insights into how the journalistic profession consolidated its position in Spain thanks to a new form of auctoritas based on discourse competence. The gazetteer or journalist emerged as a new kind of writer, whose credibility and reputation depended on his ability to access, organise and reveal –according to rhetorical patterns recognisable to readers– the information sources available to him.

The new digital communication ecosystem has brought about a reconfiguration of its uses as a result of adapting the new media and electronic devices to the existing ones. Hypermediality, facilitated by the Internet and the media’s conversion to multiplatform media, has redefined content. This has led to the emergence of new formats exclusive to electronic media, due to the synergistic merging of written press narrative strategies integrated into audiovisual reports. This study aims to analyze the electronic media’s audiovisual content and to determine different formats. For that purpose, a methodology is developed based on the description of the formal elements of these types of items from a reading of the narrative and audiovisual language, identifying the elements founded on conventional television journalism formats. The methodology is based on the analysis of a representative sample of the audiovisual contents from El País’, El Español’s and Playground’s digital portals from June and July 2018. The analysis concludes by categorizing the audiovisual contents into four formats, which are grouped according to their structure, coverage, and production complexity. Audiovisual content in cybermedia is not only articulated as an extension of the news text by illustrating facts and the main figure’s statements, but it can also be integrated into the text autonomously, and even makes up independent sections in the medium.

Disenchantment with politicians and politics –also called political cynicism– is understood as a phenomenon that deteriorates the functioning of democracy. One of the factors that can impact this disenchantment is the appearance of corruption within the political sphere. Prior research has studied the relationship between corruption and trust in politics; this study aims to investigate the link between corruption-related news and political cynicism in Spain. The study uses an experimental approach to investigate the impact of news reporting corruption on the political cynicism of Spanish citizens and to argue that the consumption of corruption-related news increases cynical attitudes and political cynicism. The present study also investigates whether the involvement of renowned politicians, along with the perceived level of corruption that is reported, has an impact on political cynicism. The results show that political cynicism does not depend solely on consumption of corruptionrelated news; the involvement of renowned politicians in corruption cases and differences in education levels also play a key role in increasing cynicism. Based on the results of the participants assigned to the control group, the study also reveals that Spanish citizens express a baseline level of cynicism that is already very high.

This paper proposes the delimitation of a literary territory, or of certain speech acts as a form of expression specifically dissociated from religious and philosophical discourses, and the corresponding adaptation of such acts to the small and big screens. Expropriations, or confidences by characters on the verge of death, are used as a trope to convey this specific idea. They refer to a kind of speech that no longer bears the weight of worldly events, but that does not attempt to ignore the consequences of having been in the world. With this reconceptualization of the term, this article seeks to identify an ethics of the human intensity in three specific sequences: two stories for cinema and television –Visconti’s The Leopard, and the final episode of Brideshead Revisited– and André Gide’s “literary testament,” Et nunc manet in te.

The economic crisis suffered in Spain in the last ten years has forced management of the country’s public museums to look for new sources of funding with which to compensate the reduction of public funding. Business sponsoring has been one of the most intensely studied channels. One of the consequences of the new scenario is the weak bargaining position of museums before sponsors. There are clues that suggest that a new model has arrived in Spain: museums are used as public relations agencies by businesses and the subtlety that once characterised the relationship between a sponsored museum and its sponsor disappears. The article lays out the development of business sponsorship in public museums in Spain, illustrating the changes that have taken place in this relationship. Through a content analysis of cases that answer to the new model and structured interviews with cultural journalists from written media, it is shown that sponsors do not achieve their objective, which is to factor the communication media into the equation to increase their brand notoriety and/or strengthen their corporate image

The study here proposed draws on the concept of the so-called “film-induced tourism”, understood as a strategy for promoting tourist destinations in fiction films. This objective is pursued through the development of an analysis model that enables the identification of the unique features of the destination as a space where the events depicted in the films occur, their function and their relationship with other narrative variables. The model has been applied to a corpus of films that other researchers have identified as essential for the growth of tourism to the locations they present. The results suggest that the space needs to be referential, irrespective of whether the diegetic space is the same as the filming location, that its status should be closer to the character than to the setting, that its mise-en-scène should emphasize the interaction with other characters, or that it should be essential in events that shape the structure of the story.