Covid-19, digital media, and facebook: Interactions, treatment, and content analysis based on keywords of news on okdiario.com and eldiario.es

Abstract

An analysis of the news on Covid-19 published by okdiario.com and eldiario.es until the end of April 2020 is carried out considering interactions on Facebook (shares, comments, and reactions) as the consumption measure. The analysis in-cludes the evolution of the news published; an analysis of the interactions on Facebook, including the top 10 news items with the most interactions for each media; and a content analysis based on the keywords extracted from the metatags of the digital news websites. The evolution of the publication volume is similar for both media, but okdiario.com achieves a greater number of interactions. Based on the content analysis, okdiario.com can be related to the Polarized Pluralist Model defined by Hallin and Mancini (2004), and eldiario.es with the Democratic Corporatist Model, at least concerning news on Covid-19. The results obtained will be useful for people to decide which media outlet is more appropriate to address their information needs, at least in relation to the topic analyzed. Finally, the value and originality of this work lie in the extraction of keywords from the metatags of the news published by the media, considered as the basis of the content analysis. This technique can be used in future research to produce thematic media maps, as it is done in other fields such as bibliometrics and science mapping analysis.