Articulo_1_EN_Doxa_29

Healthy nutrition, sugar, properties of food and diets are the 4 contents that received the most attention from the two newspapers being analysed during 2017. Whilst elpais.com particularly focussed on the first two; lavanguardia.com centred mainly on analysing different diets and the properties of certain foods. Obesity, particularly in the case of elpais.com, remains in the news; confirmed by studies such as by Atasonava et al.(2012), De Brún et al.(2013) or Jeon et al.(2014), among other authors.

If we look at text authorship, it stands out that in lavanguardia.com, up to one third of its contents come from an agency or appear anonymously, which does not stop it exceeding elpais.com by 287 items. In turn, elpais.com, either due to its particular business idiosyncrasy or due to explicit recognition of the interest aroused by nutrition, puts an author’s name to 87.1% of its contents. However, its specialisation in the matter is clearly restricted, as most of the authors have only written just one or two articles.

The majority of the texts are framed in sections that would correspond to the “Lifestyle” field, as happens with “Buenavida” in elpais.com, where half the articles from this newspaper are published, or “Vivo” and “Vida” that cover 60% for lavanguardia.com. In any case, it should be highlighted that, although it still has a limited percentage of articles, elpais.com promotes a section called “Nutrir con ciencia”, working with well-known nutritionists Julio Basulto, Lucía Martínez or Aitor Sánchez, among others; while lavanguardia.com has the “Comer” channel, in which nutritional contents appear side by side with items on gastronomy or wine reviews. Therefore, it might be concluded that these digital newspapers have started to develop specific sections for food topics.

Far and away (over 60% of cases in both newspapers) the most-used genre in the texts on nutrition is reporting. This is a considerably higher percentage than registered in other studies quoted in this paper.

The predominant framing in the texts is Recommendations/Solutions, defined by Entman (1993). It appears in more than half the texts in both publications. Secondly, there is Diagnostic, followed by Responsibility. This focus indicates an intention to assess the reader and would link in with the concept of “service journalism” defined by Diezhandino (1994: 89) as something which “is not limited to informing on but for, that imposes the requirement of being useful in the recipient’s personal life”.

In concordance with this idea and, after analysing its type, there are the appellative headlines that accompany texts on nutrition, where it is common to see use of a question (26% in elpais.com and 20% in lavanguardia.com), plus the first or second person and lists.

The most used sources by both media come from what is known as the researcher-academic field and from nutritionists. Among them, certain names are repeated such as Juan Revenga, Aitor Sánchez, Julio Basulto or Miguel Ángel Uruñuela, known for their dissemination work in their respective blogs. In any case, we should highlight the fact that the average number of sources per text used by elpais.com (3.3) practically doubles the lavanguardia.com (1.7).

Although, according to data from ComScore, elpais.com had 14.9% more readers than lavanguardia.com in 2017, the number of comments provided by users of the Prisa publication were five times higher than comments for the newspaper from the Godó group (3,730 compared to 637). In both cases, texts related to vegetarianism and veganism elicit special participation from the readers.