Participative journalism in spanish mainstream media: usage and mechanisms to promote content specialization

Abstract

During the last years we have been witnesses of a change in journalistic products, in the journalistic profession and in the mass media-audience relationship. People haven’t participated in the construction of the mediatic speech traditionally. Internet has changed that tendency allowing users to be emitters also. The reason of this metamorphosis is related with the birth of a new communication platform, and setting up a new communicative rhetoric that arrives through cybermedia, where users’ participation has been accepted as a usual practice. Due to the adoption of web 2.0 tools (like weblogs) applied to journalistic routines, the way journalists work have changed, and there has been a revolution in the media content supply. The main goal of this article is to describe the use of weblogs in Spanish mainstream media, comparing its level of content specialization.