Alba Diez-Gracia

Propósito. Esta investigación analiza la relación entre el clickbait y la polarización política en la cobertura de las Elecciones Generales españolas de 2023 en tres de los medios digitales más leídos con líneas editoriales dispares: El País, elDiario.es y Okdiario. Metodología. A través de un análisis de contenido de 878 titulares, se identifica la presencia de clickbait y su asociación con estrategias discursivas de polarización, evaluando elementos como el uso de lenguaje bélico, sesgos y personalismo. Resultados y conclusiones. Los hallazgos muestran un uso minoritario del clickbait en los tres medios analizados, aunque con una tendencia común hacia la omisión del dato reclamo y el uso de hipérboles. Se detecta la presencia de un lenguaje belicista y un sesgo mayoritariamente negativo, lo que sugiere una relación entre las estrategias de atracción de audiencia y la intensificación del discurso polarizado. Aportación original. Este estudio contribuye al análisis de las dinámicas mediáticas en contextos de alta polarización política, proporcionando una metodología replicable para evaluar el impacto del clickbait en la construcción de narrativas informativas y su potencial influencia en la percepción pública del proceso electoral.

The digital media environment, transformed by the increase in multiplatform content, reflects a growing divergence of news interests between the journalistic agenda set by the media and the real preference of audiences. This difference in criteria forces the media to compete for the attention of a fragmented and detached public by combining current news topics with other soft, spectacular or curious topics on their agenda. The international scientific literature has referred to this phenomenon as a “news gap,” although in a dispersed manner and with a lack of systematisation in its study. This paper addresses this phenomenon through meta-research, a systematic review and content analysis based on the Prisma model (N=901), with the aim of offering its conceptualisation and evolution in the academic literature from its beginnings in 2010 to 2023. The results compile the research and contributions on the news gap from the perspective of the media that produce content on demand, not always following journalistic relevance or criteria, and the audiences that consume and disseminate it. It is an object of study barely a decade old which, although not integrated in its approaches and methods and with the absence of a standardised model to address it systematically, confirms a structural, multi-platform and multi-support gap that manifests itself as an open and expanding area of study, pointing to the loss of attention of a fragmented audience on the most relevant journalistic selection in a process of disintermediation.

The expansion of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) across different stages of production and distribution in journalism is opening a debate on its applications within newsrooms and in business models. This research studies how different media outlets, media groups and institutions are beginning to create internal regulations for the use of AI, both from a technical and an ethical perspective. To do so, an international sample (N = 45) of editorial stylebooks and internal self-regulatory guidelines published between 2023 and early 2025 have been compiled—all links are openly available here—and put through a process of content analysis. The results indicate that the self-regulatory guidelines emerge from an individual initiative of the media themselves, with a focus on limiting the use of generative AI, particularly in text creation. The guidelines emphasize ethical commitments such as transparency, content verification, and respect for data and copyright while underlining the importance of human oversight. Key objectives include avoiding bias, ensuring information quality, and strengthening audience trust. Despite progress, regulation remains in its early stages and requires continuous adaptation to keep pace with technological advancements.

La capacidad selectiva de las audiencias digitales, fragmentadas y multiplataforma, produce una discrepancia entre lo que los medios ofrecen como más relevante en su agenda y lo que el público prefiere consumir o compartir. Una ‘brecha de la cobertura informativa’ que se analiza en este trabajo aplicado al caso de la guerra de Ucrania en la prensa internacional. Para ello, se recogen las noticias destacadas en la portada, las más leídas por el público web y las más compartidas por los usuarios de Twitter/X de las ediciones digitales de El País (España), Público (Portugal), The Guardian (Reino Unido) y The New York Times (Estados Unidos) durante cuatro semanas de 2022. La muestra inicial (N=1680) conforma una muestra útil final (N=259) sobre el conflicto ruso-ucraniano a la que se aplica un análisis de contenido en torno a cuatro categorías: narrativa periodística, multimedia, interactividad y tratamiento tabloide. Los resultados principales indican que tres de los cuatro medios dedican menos del 25% de su portada a la guerra de Ucrania. Una cobertura de actualidad informativa, aumentada por titulares ‘gancho’, que merma conforme se aleja en el tiempo y que apenas encuentra interés en la audiencia, con datos de consumo y difusión entre el 10% y el 3%. Esta disparidad entre la selección periodística más relevante y las preferencias del público confirma la existencia de una ‘brecha’ en la cobertura informativa que refleja una audiencia que desoye el criterio de relevancia periodístico y unos medios que no logran captar su interés o atención respecto a la cobertura del conflicto.

The competition to attract audiences has led to an increase in sensational or misleading headlines and content, with the aim of garnering user clicks in the news media. This dynamic alters the journalistic manner in which news is presented, and it does so by reducing informative quality and eroding the trust of the audience. This study examines the proliferation of clickbait strategies on the front pages of reputable international ‘serious’ press and how it manifests in readers’ consumption and sharing habits. We carried out a comparative content analysis of digital news articles from four international media sources (N = 1680): The Guardian (UK), The New York Times (USA), El País (Spain) and Público (Portugal). Our results confirm the existence of clickbait (N = 516) on the front pages, the most read content and the articles most shared on social media. Most clickbait titles resort to headline strategies of containing incomplete information that affect both hard and soft news topics. This particular finding highlights the inclusion of clickbait in the agenda of ‘serious’ journalism, despite the negative implications on information quality and trust. Associated with irrelevant content, this ‘hook’ captures the attention of the online audience more than the social media audience.

The communicative effects of disintermediation caused by social media promote the expansion of personalist and emotional political discourses that reach the audience directly and evade the traditional journalistic filter. This phenomenon leads to new political communication tactics, but also exposes citizens to potentially fraudulent, contaminated or polarised content. In this context, framed in post-truth, the term ‘fake news’ gains relevance as a way of referring to disinformation and as a political and performative argument that can be weaponised. This research aims to analyse such use in the discourse of the former president Donald Trump during his presidential term (2017-2021), focussing on Twitter as the main platform in his political communication strategy online. To analyse this, we resort to a methodological triangulation of content, discourse, and sentiment analysis, with the latter combining both lexicon and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques through machine learning on the basis of deep learning and natural language processing, which is applied to his messages published with the term ‘fake news’ (N = 768). The analysis of the sample, provided here in an open dataset, employs self-developed software that allows each unit of analysis to be filtered and coded around its predominant themes, sentiments, and words. The main results confirm that Trump’s attribution of ‘fake news’ focusses on three main topics: the media (53%), politics (40%) and his cabinet (33%). It also shows how the former president resorts to a personalist agenda, focussed on the defence of his proposals and his team (80%) by delegitimizing his opponents and the press, with a negative tone (72%) loaded with derogatory terms, confirming a weaponised strategy of the term ‘fake news’ as a political argument of disinformation and disintermediation.

This research covers an interesting case of study from the perspective of films and social media as fundamental platforms for its marketing. It is a research with potential that has some areas of improvement. First, a reorganization of the section o...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been progressively expanding over the last decade, with its transversal application to the journalistic process and the engaging of media and technology companies in developing specific tools and services. This research offers a first catalogue of Spanish technological companies and institutions that develop AI systems applicable to journalism, with services and features grouped into three phases of the journalistic process: 1. Automated gathering and documentation of information; 2. Automated production of content; and 3. Information distribution and audience relations. The research uses a methodology of in-depth interviews with 45 innovation heads of Spanish-based companies and technological centres specialised in the development of AI (N = 25), and is supported by questionnaires to systematise four study categories: company profiles, tools, journalism-specific services and future trends. The results confirm a clear evolution of Spanish technological companies within the AI sector, with services and tools available for the whole journalistic process, mainly in the information gathering and content distribution phases related to monetisation; the automated news production phase is thereby overshadowed. The offering is diversified in terms of formats -textual, audiovisual, sound- and platforms, especially web and social media. The companies consulted testify to the profitability of its implementation and note a growing interest from the media, but warn of an uneven progress that reflects “slowness”, “distrust” and “lack of knowledge” regarding the application of AI.

La relevancia de las redes sociales como agentes fijadores de la agenda y de los prosumidores como creadores y consumidores de contenido al margen de los medios incentivan una comunicación política centrada en el uso de plataformas digitales como parte de su estrategia persuasiva directa hacia el usuario-votante. Esta investigación analiza la agenda temática y el discurso político en Twitter como espacio de microsegmentación para ahondar en la estrategia de personalización, polarización y discurso emocional de los candidatos políticos en periodo electoral. Para comprobar este proceso de desintermediación comunicativa, se realiza un estudio de caso centrado en los seis candidatos principales a las elecciones de la Comunidad de Madrid durante la campaña electoral (abril-mayo, 2021). La metodología combina un análisis de contenido y del discurso en torno a los tweets emitidos por los representantes políticos en su perfil de Twitter durante este periodo (N=817), así como los vídeos (N=637) e imágenes (N=202) que los acompañan. La codificación se realiza mediante un software propio que permite descargar los tweets, obtener las interacciones y clasificar los mensajes en torno a cuatro categorías: fuente del tweet; temática, diferenciando entre asuntos políticos y preocupaciones ciudadanas según el CIS (2021); encuadre o framing; y elementos de narrativa multimedia. Los resultados principales confirman que en la comunicación política desintermediada en redes sociales, los líderes políticos emplean un discurso personalista, polarizado y emocional, con alto engagement en torno a la narrativa multimedia. La investigación constata un discurso electoral que versa sobre política, pero no de políticas.

La evolución de los smartphones impulsa el consumo informativo en plataformas digitales, donde redes sociales y aplicaciones toman relevancia como canales comunicativos. Esto justifica la necesidad de investigar permanentemente la variación de los usos y gratificaciones en la audiencia digital. Este estudio profundiza en la brecha informativa que se genera al analizar la selección, preferencia e interés de la audiencia en los contenidos ofrecidos en multiplataforma -web, redes y apps- para constatar si siguen o no la agenda marcada por los medios. Así, propone un estudio de caso con una doble metodología de análisis de contenido (N=210) aplicada a elDiario.es; y una encuesta (N=245) sobre el consumo de redes y apps en la audiencia. Los resultados confirman esta brecha y la divergencia en los usos y gratificaciones junto a una estrategia del medio poco especializada en móvil y redes, mientras la audiencia las destaca como relevantes para su consumo informativo.