Catalonia's ban on bullfighting, which was passed by the Parliament in July 2010, caused a political and media commotion. This study analyses the arguments provided by the Spanish press with the aim of verifying how the media is involved in the conflict, accentuating the distance between advocates and abolitionists of the bullfighting tradition. The research compared editorials and opinion articles in Catalan and Spanish leading newspapers, taking a discursive approach. The authors defend that the comment columns did not add new perspectives to stories compared with the opinions offered by the editorials of the newspapers and that these displayed the bullfighting debate as a pretext for reaffirming their position with regard to identity. After conducting a discursive analysis, the authors state that the media is understood to be a political player whose actions influence the evolution of the conflict. This can be done by means of the (de)legitimization of both, the discursively implied participants and their actions. The discursive approach will be followed in order to uncover how ideological beliefs are spread and how the selected newspapers help to construct identity.

This article intends to contribute to the debate on whether Twitter can be a complementary tool or an alternative to traditional media. Based on a qualitative and quantitative exploratory approach, the research focuses on the coverage of social issues to explore the informative capacities of Twitter. The sample consists of more than 1000 tweets covering the marches that occurred in Spain in July 2012 against the government’s public policies. The results show that less than 25 per cent of tweets could be considered as strictly informative. Due to its lack of informative focus, high degree of emotion, repetitive contents and personal writing marks, the power of Twitter seems to be rather an opinion and emotion net organizer than a reporting tool: we cannot consider it an informative source in the cases explored.

Resumen:La opinión de muchos lectores de prensa digital española se expresa en los comentarios. El artículo es un estudio de las reacciones emitidas por los lectores a propósito de la propuesta de la Ley Wert (durante el mes de mayo de 2013). Las principales conclusiones que se extraen del análisis es que la participación (1) es escasamente complementaria o nula a la información profesional y, en consecuencia, (2) no contribuye, en el ejemplo analizado, al llamado periodismo participativo. El estudio ha permitido radiografiar el tipo de participación y debatir sobre su pertinencia en las principales cabeceras de la prensa digital española.Palabras clave: comentarios en noticias; periodismo participativo; participación; usuarios; prensa digital Users' comments analysis in the Spanish press in the Ley Wert's debate Abstract:The opinion of many digital Spanish newspapers readers is expressed in comments. This article is a study of the users' reaction about the 'Ley Wert' proposal (during May 2013). The main conclusion showed up from the analysis is: (1) the participation is scarcely supplementary to the professional labour; and (2) it does not contribute, in our study, to the so-called participatory journalism. The study has allowed us to draw the type of participation and discuss its relevance in the referenced Spanish online newspapers.

Who’s there? A human figure projected against the light in the mist: is this figure still the main character of media information? Journalism erected itself on the contradiction between an unreachable objectivity and a silenced subject. Is it time to change the model from “daily” to “diary”? This individual in the shadow, what does he want? What shape might he have?