Comparative analysis of Spanish universities presence in national and local digital press

Abstract

Introduction. Dissemination is a cross-cutting activity within universities so the analysis of how media cover university news becomes a relevant issue in order to understand how public image of higher education institutions is being configured. Method. This work applies a mixed methodology, quantitative -content analysis -and qualitativeethnographic study -, on a sample of 3137 news published between January and September 2016 in two digital newspapers of national scope and 13 regional / local scope newspapers, regarding 23 Spanish universities. Results and conclusions. The results suggest that media scope strongly influence the coverage. While national media carry out deeper analysis of news items, giving more visibility to university experts and including cyber-journalism resources; Regional and local newspapers are more dependent on calls and press releases from university press offices, they mainly report on university events and barely use cyber-journalism resources.

Spanish Newspapers’ Treatment of Conflicts Between Science and Religion

“…In recent years, several studies have examined the public discussions surrounding science and scientific journalism in Spain (Moreno-Castro 2011;Elías 2015;López-Cantos 2017a;Cassany, Cortiñas, and Elduque 2018). For other countries, there is a steady and widespread growth of publications of information related to science and technology by the Spanish news media, and of developments in the scientific community and institutions (González-Pedraz et al 2017; Alonso-Flores and Moreno-Castro 2018). However, the number of science sections in newspapers has clearly declined over recent years (Cortiñas-Rovira and Alonso-Marcos 2014).…”