The state of blogging in Spanish mainstream media

Abstract

In this paper we aim to draw a picture of what is happening in Spanish mainstream cybermedia from the point of view of new ways of participation and, more concretely, we analyze remarkable weblogs signed by journalists and/or guests, in order to determine the author’s profile. A survey answered by 50 per cent of these bloggers let us know why the use of weblogs represents the key to media success in the online sphere. During 2008, we analyzed several national (Abc.es, Elmundo.es, Elpais.es) and regional (Elcorreodigital.com, Lavanguardia.es) internet newspapers, and we underline the special case of Vocento, one of the main multimedia group in Spain. Our results show that offering outstanding weblogs is a good strategy against crisis: media obtain a significant amount of online content automatically and with no investment needed. This helps to increase the website traffic, to lenghten the time spent by visitors; and to obtain a better place in web search engines