Spanish Newspapers on Facebook and Engagement: Issues, News Values, Sensationalism and Emotional Reactions

Abstract

This research analyzes the relationship between news topics, news values and sensationalism in Facebook and user's engagement with. Content analysis is carried on a sample (n= 2,821) of Facebook posts published by six Spanish news media (El País, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, El Confidencial, El Diario and El Espanol). Our analysis found different tendencies for different engagement attitudes (sharing, liking, commenting and emotional reactions). User comments are mainly driven by news about government and politics and by those stories focused on news values such as proximity, timeliness, social significance, usefulness and elite people. Facebook "Likes" were more frequent on sports articles and the most shared stories were charactersed by a sensationalist framing. As a prospective research line, we propose further studies to consider different topical categories to provide a wider and fuller picture of the news users engagement phenomenon in the social media environment.