Analysis of the topics and trends of Spanish journalists on Twitter: Contents on politics, culture, science, communication and the Internet

Abstract

Twitter has become a source of data and news. But what do Spanish journalists talk about on Twitter? The research is characterized by its descriptive and analytical aim, and its quantitative and qualitative approach. The work presents a retrospective longitudinal investigation that studied a diachronic succession of messages via Twitter produced over a certain period. The study, with a sampling work of one and a half years, designed a categorization system of registration units that were subsequently quantified. The study corpus consisted of 3,500 tweets issued by 20 journalists who were Twitter account holders in seven days over seven weeks, between January 2017 and March 2018, and by 35 newspaper covers that were published in that same period. The sources of the data obtained from the monitoring of the two groups of journalists were structured into two invited and non-probability samples. Based on this, the research analyzes the tweets of Spanish journalists classified into five thematic categories: politics, culture, science, communication, and the Internet. The study has created a unit classification system made up of 35 thematic categories and 1,226 subcategories. The research concludes, among other aspects, that through Twitter journalists offer a thematic scope much more extensive than the mass media. Hispano-America is presented as a stage for political debate against Europe; while crises, especially international ones, condition the media thematic agendas. The non-existence of a cultural information strategy and a leading role of self-promotion are detected.