Media accountability in the age of social media: Participatory transparency of the audience in Spain

Abstract

The mass media is increasingly promoting public participation. Taking as a starting point the participatory transparency concept enunciated by Karlsson (2010), our research studies the audience’s active role in holding Spanish media to account through a range of online tools. We study the role of the audience by analyzing the perceptions of two main actors: journalists and citizens. A two-fold methodology was adopted: a questionnaire survey of 228 active journalists in Spain and six focus group panels with media users. The main results show that the journalists are not optimistic about the effectiveness of accountability instruments used by the audience. The users value positively being able to participate in the journalistic process, although they believe that journalists should ultimately perform the role of fact-checkers of user-generated content.

Keywords

Facebook journalism practice media accountability participation social media social network sites transparency Twitter

Introduction

Because journalism allows for informed participation by citizens, it is considered central to the sustenance of democracy (Gil de Zúñiga, 2015; Habermas, 1996). Interactive technologies have transformed the role of the public, which has gone from being that of an audience passively receiving information, to become an active one in which users participate in the information process (Culver, 2017). The Internet and social media offer citizens new opportunities to take an active part in the information production process (Chadha et al., 2012).

Journalists have become increasingly more involved in the public’s active role, such that they promote public content creation through online social networks (Hermida et al., 2014). Thus, journalism is now participatory, global, and multiplatformed, producing a relentless flow of data and comments (Beckett, 2010). In this way, the public currently fulfils the following functions: “reading, watching, viewing, listening, checking, snacking, monitoring, scanning, searching, clicking, linking, sharing, liking, recommending, commenting, and voting” (Meijer and Kormelink, 2015: 667).

However, users do not always participate in the best possible way. Some research has shown that public involvement in the information production process is very limited because the media are not able to dominate and control the production of citizens’ editorial content (Harrison and Barthel, 2009; Hermida, 2012). For all these reasons, Karlsson (2011) considers that although user input is growing rapidly, it focuses on peripheral processes, which are not fundamental to the creation of news content.

Do media promote user participation? What do citizens say about the participatory tools they currently have at their disposal? Do these tools help to strengthen media accountability? This research explores the citizen’s active role in media accountability in the Spanish context, through online participation via different social media channels. To this end, we gauge the opinion of two central actors in the informative process: the journalist and the citizen. Thus, we analyze the results of a questionnaire survey completed by Spanish journalists and the findings of six focus groups with citizens from across Spain.

Conceptual framework and literature review

Media accountability and transparency

Media Accountability implies that the media must be held publicly accountable for the quality of their journalistic projects and shoulder responsibility for the negative consequences that such projects may cause in society (Nolan and Marjoribanks, 2011; Von Krogh and Nord, 2010). It presupposes a willingness by the media to embrace criticism and engage in dialogue with the public about the information production process (Porlezza and Splendore, 2016). Media Accountability, therefore, is a concept directly related to participation, transparency, and a willingness by the media to develop professional self-regulation (Puppis, 2009).

In the online scenario, there are various recently-developed Media Accountability Instruments (MAI) (Fengler et al., 2015) related to information quality and transparency that are widely used to enable the public to comment easily and quickly. Such instruments include report-an-error buttons, reader comments, and public participation via Facebook and Twitter (Craft et al., 2015; Loosen and Schmidt, 2012; Suárez-Villegas et al., 2017).

Transparency in the journalistic context, defined as “making public the traditionally private factors that influence the creation of news” (Allen, 2008: 323), is closely bound up with credibility, truth-telling and accountability (Avery, 2010; Phillips, 2010; Singer, 2007). According to Karlsson (2010), there are two levels of transparency:

- Disclosure transparency: the medium explains the procedure behind the selection, writing, and publication of news. This is related to mechanisms such as detailed timestamps, highlight and explain changes, external links, and original documents in the news.

- Participatory transparency: this level of transparency entails reader participation at different stages of the news production process. In this case, it refers to journalists’ email addresses, comments, discuss, blog links, chat, poll, reader news, reader collaboration (is wanted), reader contribution (is published), and report errors in news item. Our study addresses this level of transparency and its main mechanisms of participation.

Participation

The Internet has revolutionized the concept of participation (Noguera-Vivo, 2018). There is a wide range of actions that allow the public to interact with media content: “messaging, tweeting, commenting, posting, uploading, editing, etc.” (Merrin, 2009: 24). Villi (2012) affirms there are three stages of user participation:

- User-Generated Content (UGC): when users create different types of content to be published in the media.

- User-Edited Content (UEC): when users modify the content (all or part of it) that is published in the media.

- User-Distributed Content (UDC): when users share published content on such channels as Facebook and Twitter.

Thus, in recent years users have gone from being considered prosumers (Gillmor, 2006), since they consumed and produced content using web 2.0 technologies, to being “produsers” (Bruns, 2013), to become news producers, and, ultimately “prodesigners” (Hernández-Serrano et al., 2017). This means they contribute to designing news by getting involving in both its creation and modification as well its distribution.

One of the most established formulas of media-user participation are readers’ comments, as these influence the dissemination of news and its evaluation by the audience (García-Perdomo et al., 2018; Prochazka et al., 2016). However, in spite of the consolidation of user participation, many journalists remain critical of this formula, due to the frequent disrespectful content it spawns, which justifies their apathy toward this feedback (Bergstrom and Wadbring, 2015; Lowrey, 2009). Hence, journalists almost never respond to readers’ comments (Kim et al., 2018).

Social media in journalism

The reputation of social media as the people’s voice has to be understood in connection with the criticisms of mainstream media (Gerbaudo, 2018). Social media have an increasingly important place in the lives of citizens (Ross et al., 2015) and motivate user participation and engagement in the news context (Nuernbergk and Conrad, 2016), allowing actors other than journalists to play a part in news creation (Konow-Lund and Olsson, 2016). This rapidly growing practice in society means that these networked publics, through their creation of content, have become valuable information sources for journalists (Yamamoto et al., 2017).

Social media in journalism today has become so important that almost half of U.S. journalists (48%) say they would be unable to carry out their day-to day work without them. Almost two thirds (71%) insist that online social media have radically changed their role as journalists, and 80% believe they are more engaged with their audience because of them (Global Social Journalism Study, 2017).

The growing importance of social networks as channels for news consumption is turning them into a window connecting society with current affairs (Glynn et al., 2012; Guallar et al., 2016). Users’ perceived credibility and quality of a news medium will directly influence the way in which they will relate to its content on social networks (Ardèvol-Abreu and Gil de Zúñiga, 2017).

This research focuses on two of the most consolidated social media networks: Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is increasingly being adopted into the news media’s day-to-day practices and routines (Nuernbergk and Conrad, 2016). In spite of being a relatively new scenario, Twitter provides a space where journalists can share the traditional routines and practices of their profession (Lasorsa et al., 2012). As for users, the profile of the news tweeter is a young urban adult who is politically engaged (Bastos, 2015). On Facebook, in contrast, users posting news or comments on news stories are younger, usually women, who use this social network to interact with their friends (Costera-Meijer and Komerlink, 2015; Glynn et al., 2012). Content shared on Facebook is largely related to entertainment, while Twitter comments are centered on news verification (Almgren and Olson, 2016).

The Spanish context: State of the art

A number of studies have been published in Spain in recent years on user participation. Guallar et al. (2016) conducted a qualitative focus group study on the role of social media networks in news consumption. Some of these authors also published a quantitative study in 2015 on accessing news via social media networks, conducted with a focus group panel of citizens (Masip et al., 2015).

Segado-Boj et al. (2018) undertook a quantitative content analysis of the science sections of the newspapers El País (Spain), La Nación (Argentina), and El Universal (Mexico), in which, among other factors, they analyzed reader participation through users’ comments on news and their virality in Twitter. This social media network was also the focus of a study by Arrabal-Sánchez and De Aguilera-Moyano (2016), which with a view to observing journalist-user interaction, analyzes the quantitative content of the tweets by 1504 Spanish journalists.

As for television, audience participation on Spanish regional public channels was addressed using as its background reforms made by the BBC (Azurmendi and Muñoz-Saldaña, 2016). The impact of Twitter on three talent shows broadcast by three mainstream Spanish channels was analyzed through the quantitative content of the shows’ social audience (Quintas-Froufe and González-Neira, 2014). The possibilities of public participation in interviews with politicians, writers, among others, in El País and El Mundo have also been studied through a descriptive analysis and two semi-structured interviews with those in charge of this journalistic genre in both newspapers (López-Hidalgo and Fernández-Barrero, 2015).

Clearly, most of the previous studies are focused on a specific type of medium or social network, yet none of them addresses public participation from the two-fold perspective of this research: journalists and citizens. Taking into account the Spanish context, the conceptual framework, and the review of previous literature, the following Research Questions were asked:

RQ1: To what degree do Spanish journalists feel that instruments of participatory transparency (i.e. commentaries on SNS) are important today?

RQ2: To what degree do Spanish citizens feel that instruments of participatory transparency (i.e. commentaries on SNS) are important today?

Methodology

This research applied two methodologies: (1) a quantitative approach to consult journalists’ opinions through an online questionnaire survey sent to journalists across Spain; (2) a qualitative focus group methodology to ascertain citizens’ opinions on the ethical aspects of the journalistic profession.

A total of 228 journalists completed the questionnaire survey sent to them. The survey consisted of 29 questions, based on a ten-point Likert scale, related to various ethical aspects of their profession. To guarantee operability, dichotomous, multiple-choice, and rating scale questions were combined (Wimmer and Dominick, 2011). The respondents were also allowed to include other relevant comments and observations on the topics covered. The questionnaire survey was administered through the online SurveyMonkey platform, which was kept open for 3 months (October 17, 2017 to January 17, 2018). The responses collected were treated with a descriptive, monovariate and bivariate statistical analysis using the specialized software IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The resulting data were then triangulated with the qualitative information garnered from the focus group panels with the citizens.

The development of the questions on user participatory accountability instruments for both the survey as well as the scripts for the focus group and the interviews with the experts began with participatory transparency, defined by Karlsson (2010). Thus, we selected the following mechanisms included within this level of transparency:

- Users’ comments on the news outlet’s website.

- Users’ comments on social media networks.

- Corrections to news items by users.

- Publication of the journalists’ professional email addresses.

- Availability of a space for user-created content.

- Possibility for users to suggest news.

This study presents the results from the analysis of journalists’ responses to these questions. The questionnaire survey asked journalists to evaluate (on a scale from 0 to 10) to what extent they considered these aspects to be important, where 0 means “not important” and 10 “very important.”

The results of the focus group panels with the citizens are also presented. The objective of these focus groups was to gauge the social perception of the effectiveness of the different accountability instruments promoted internally and externally to the media in the different Spanish autonomous communities under study. The inclusion of the citizens’ viewpoint was considered essential to determine the knowledge of these instruments and their impact on society as a whole. A focus group was carried out between April and May 2018 in each of the following cities: Barcelona, Castellón, Madrid, Sevilla, Mondragón, and Santiago de Compostela.

Sample description. Survey to journalists

According to the criteria outlined by Weischenberg (2006), the respondents had to meet the following inclusion criteria: (1) work for a media outlet (excluding professionals performing public relations tasks), (2) work as a journalist, and (3) be employed as a full-time journalist or earn at least 50% of their income from their work as a journalist.

Unlike in countries such as France, Germany or Finland, in Spain there are no official data on the demographics of journalism professionals, nor is there a directory or census of this group (Fengler et al., 2015; Rodríguez-Martínez et al., 2017). In spite of this structural limitation, by taking into account three criteria—the number of journalists who are members of professional associations, the different types of media, and the approximate number of journalists per region—we were able to establish that the population of journalists in Spain stands at roughly 25,000 professionals. Thus, a reliable and valid representation of Spanish journalists would consist of a subsample of 123 journalists (Eberwein et al., 2014; Fengler et al., 2015). The total number of responses obtained for this work was 228 (N = 228), which allowed us to obtain data of relevance to understand the perception of accountability among Spanish journalists.

Sample description. Focus groups with citizens

A total of 38 people (22 women and 16 men) took part in the six focus groups. The age of the participants was balanced with 42% being middle-aged and the rest distributed almost equally between under 30s and over 60s. The highest level of educational background of the focus group members were PhDs or graduates, some of them in the field of audiovisual communication or journalism. For the most part, the members with a medium or low level of education performed administrative or commercial tasks.

Results

Participatory transparency perceived by Spanish journalists (RQ1)

The surveyed journalists were asked to assess (on a scale from 0 to 10) various items related to user-participation through different mechanisms. Overall, the professionals were not very optimistic about the effectiveness of the audience-oriented accountability instruments. The instruments analyzed show a certain progression in the respondents’ assessment of user-engagement and -participation in their work. Journalists reluctantly accepted User-Edited Content (UEC), which they considered important to bear in mind for correcting errors in news items published on the Internet (6.2), as well as to provide access to the editors (5.8). In terms of User-Distributed Content (UDC), the professional journalists tentatively accept they should take into account users’ comments on both the news outlet’s website (5.4) and its social network page (5.1) and that comments on a news item warrant a response from the author of the story (5.4). The media experts, on the other hand, expressed almost total disagreement with the idea of including User-Generated Content (UGC) in the media: the existence a space for the inclusion of such public-created content is rejected (3.6).

These perceptions vary significantly according to the age variable of journalists (see Table 1). The youngest journalists showed the least regard for users’ opinions, while the older ones expressed the greatest concern for participatory transparency. In the seven items addressed, the younger professionals score was always below the average, whereas that of older professionals was above the average.

Table 1.

Results (average score from 0 to 10) of the questionnaire survey to the question “Assess the importance of the following items on user participation”, according to the age of the journalists (N = 228).

		Take into account users’ comments on news published on a news outlet’s website	Take into account comments they make on social media networks	Take into account corrections to news published on a news outlet’s website	Respond to comments on the news of which you are the author	Facilitate contact between readers and the editors of their news outlet	Existence of a section with user-created content	Enable users to suggest news to editors
		Average	Average	Average	Average	Average	Average	Average
Age (by groups)	19–24	4.44	4.44	6.11	4.67	4.33	3.44	4.67
	25–34	5.21	5.22	6.36	4.72	5.41	2.81	5.05
	35–44	5.14	4.85	6.11	5.26	5.64	3.60	5.49
	45–54	5.91	5.60	6.21	6.21	6.36	4.11	6.28
	55–64	5.53	4.94	6.03	5.97	6.06	3.94	5.29

The survey also explored the Spanish journalists’ perception of the comments posted by users on social media networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter (see Table 2). When asked about these two social media networks, Spanish professionals attach limited weight to this form of audience participation.

Table 2.

Results of the survey to the question “Assess the following items on user interaction on social media networks” (N = 228).

Items administered	Average score (0–10)
Comments on news shared on the news outlet’s Facebook page should be taken into account.	5.3
Comments on news shared on the news outlet’s Twitter account should be taken into account.	5.3
You should respond to the comments on news shared on Facebook if you are the author.	4.8
You should respond to the comments on news shared on Twitter if you are the author.	4.7

Grouping the results by age range highlights differences between younger and older professionals. While the professionals aged between 19 and 24 awarded no more than a 5 to the importance of reading and answering the audience’s comments, those aged between 45 and 54 rated this item almost one point higher (see Table 3).

Table 3.

Results (average score from 0 to 10) of the questionnaire survey to the question “assess the following items on user interaction on social media networks” according to the age of the journalists (N = 228).

Age (in years)	You should take into account comments on news shared on the news outlet’s official Facebook page	You should take into account comments on news shared on the news outlet’s official Twitter page	You should respond to comments on news on Facebook if you are the author	You should respond to comments on news on Twitter Facebook if you are the author
19–24	5	5	4.6	4.6
25–34	5	5.1	4.4	4.5
35–44	5.2	5.2	44	4.5
45–54	6	5.8	5.9	5.4
55–64	5.2	5.2	4.6	4.7

Given that the 65+ age group recorded only two or fewer responses, this age group is not included in the table.

Participatory transparency perceived by Spanish citizens (RQ2)

Users’ comments on the news outlet’s website

When the citizens were asked about the main changes brought about by the online press compared to the print press, they mention the greater bidirectionality. One of the mechanisms that have most helped this two-way process is the possibility for users to post comments on news media’s websites.

I think it’s both useful and dangerous. People get fired up very easily. I try to engage in debates that I consider harmless and mostly ignore those that aren’t. I’m telling you it’s risky because people get incensed, but I also find it worthwhile engaging with people who are more even-tempered. (GD04-M)

Although the comments help to broaden the debate, many of the citizens consulted doubt that journalists read users’ comments. They also suspect that these sections are aimed more at spreading news rather than showing any interest in the audience’s opinion.

I’m sceptical that the author who publishes a news story would bother to read all the comments posted about it. I feel it’s a bit like “tossing the news into the ring and letting the users have fun fighting over it.” This generates traffic on the web [. . .] but the journalist doesn’t give a damn, doesn’t read it, doesn’t look at it, or anything. (GD01-M)

Others believe that being able to express an opinion is positive, even if the opinion is not read or answered by the journalist, because there were no channels in the past for public expression. They users also mention the possibility of processing the data statistically to draw conclusions about opinion trends.

Users’ comments on social media networks

The news media’s closer ties with social media networks has not gone unnoticed by the public, who also use these networks to voice their opinion, to counter those of other users, or to express their agreement with news published by the news outlets. However, the citizens are aware of the downsides to this practice, pointing out that the type of opinion shaped discourages further probing of the information.

In addition, the citizens also hold that the social networks, unlike news media websites, generate more interaction between users and the media that publishes the information or the journalist who writes it. They claim that online newspapers feel more challenged by users on the networks than by users’ comments posted below articles on the news media’s website. Therefore, they do believe that journalists should respond to comments they receive from the public through their official Facebook or Twitter accounts, especially if the feedback has aroused interest or been shared on the networks.

Sometimes people criticize a news story [on social media networks] because it’s been unverified, for which some news outlets immediately apologize. [. . .] It’s true, you can already see on Twitter lots of messages between news outlets and users. (GD01-H)

Similarly, the input of new information by the online community to which one belongs is positively valued, as it can help to generate opinion or invite scrutiny of the subject matter.

Normally the type of followers you have or the people you follow take a more or less similar line to yours. On one hand, you’ll see less different opinions, but, on the other hand, you don’t have to take sides to dig deeper into the subject. Like everything else, it can be good or bad. (GD04-M)

Some of the citizens find that information from news media outlets is intimately tied up with the social media networks, but large corporations find it difficult to adapt to the rapid response demanded by social media networks. This can become a double-edged sword when a news outlet keeps silent over an accusation or a condemnation.

The media and organizations in general have this problem that when there’s a problem, users suddenly respond and these corporations they become flustered, they don’t know how to react, they don’t give interviews, they publish an apology via a press release and mess it up even more. (GD06-M)

Contact address where users can send complaints, corrections, and own news creation

Another of the mechanisms that can promote two-way communication between the media outlet and their users is to provide a visible means of contact, such as the journalist’s professional email address, where users can to send complaints. The citizens express interest in this, especially if such complaints could be shared with other users. Some people, on the other hand, do not believe in the utility of this mechanism and consider that the media do not take into account individual complaints. As an alternative, the possibility is raised of culling the complaints that reach the media so that journalists from time to time may carry out a collective reflection on how to improve the news.

Regardless of whether or not they receive letters, they should conduct some self-criticism from time to time of what they have done. In other words, make it possible to review what they are doing and have the institution deliberate, something that’s not being done. (GD01-M)

The citizens express uncertainty when asked about the possibility of the audience correcting erroneous news published by the news media.

Professionals don’t spent a lot of time studying to become journalists for nothing. [. . .] I think that professionals must correct the news. (GD01-M)

However, the idea of the audience taking part in news creation is becoming more and more widespread, according to the citizens. This is due to the ease with which people can provide information recorded on their smart phones. They cite various instances of the usefulness of the audience’s contribution.

The media receives much more information from individuals. We all crave notoriety [. . .]. And in terms of correcting the news, I’m not so sure, but I have no doubt about the audience’s participation in news production, which is growing. (GD01-H)

According to some of the citizens, public participation in providing new information or correcting some aspect of published information, which is believed to be erroneous, is changing the way of practising journalism, and they emphasize the greater authenticity of these contributions than those of the journalists themselves.

It’s thanks to the fact checking done by readers, users, people on line [. . .] by means of which news is properly produced or, at least it provides clues to follow up something they are reporting: “hey, this is happening and you’re not reporting it”, or “this is what you’re reporting and it’s wrong, it’s fake news.” (GD03-M)

Discussion and conclusions

Among transformations that the online environment has brought to journalism, reader participation has forced to reconsider the practical aspects of the profession and of concepts such as accountability. This study provides a greater insight into the journalists’ views on the active role of the public, and contrasts them with the views of citizens in order to understand their positions about media responsibility.

The analysis of the results stresses that public participation is viewed with some caution. In line with other findings (Bergstrom and Wadbring, 2015; Lowrey, 2009), most of the journalists are not particularly enthusiastic about comments on news websites or on social media networks. In contrast, the consulted citizens positively assess the fact that there is an outlet for them to post their views and comments, giving them an active role in the information process (Culver, 2017). However, they recognize that many of these comments contribute little or nothing to the debate and that they are sometimes offensive or inappropriate. Therefore, we observe that the journalists and citizens are aware of the potential of these media tools, but they view them to be inadequately harnessed by the audience.

This belief is analogous to that of the citizens when asked about journalists’ reactions to them when they are asked for explanations via social media networks. Some of the citizens consider that news media find it difficult to adapt to the swift response demanded by social media networks and they do not know how to respond adequately to users. Similarly, most of the citizens consulted believe that journalists do not take into account their comments, confirming what Kim et al. (2018) have reported, namely that comments serve only to highlight articles. The journalists also confirm this impression since they attach little importance to users’ opinions, although the journalists’ attitudes toward readers are determined by their professional experience. Unlike younger journalists, older journalists are more inclined to heed their readers.

The two points on which the journalists differ to those of the citizens concern corrections to news published on the Internet and to the possibility for users to generate content. While readers’ corrections are important to the journalists, the citizens express reservations on this point, and believe that professional journalists should do this work. The responses from the journalists are reversed over the possibility of creating spaces in which citizens could publish content, which is reject outright, whereas for the citizens, public participation is what is actually changing the way journalism is practised. We see, therefore, how this study challenges the findings of other studies that conclude that journalists encourage content creation by the public (Hermida et al., 2014). Our study is more in line with Karlsson’s (2011) research, which demonstrates that public participation focuses on peripheral processes and not on relevant journalistic tasks such as content creation.

Culling the opinions of the producers and receivers of information is crucial for evaluating the future relationship among all the agents involved in the news media. The presence of social media networks and new accountability mechanisms involving citizen participation further complicates this relationship between journalism and public opinion. In this respect, this research is a first step toward a necessary ongoing analysis of the uses of these instruments by the public and their influence on the work of information professionals.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Mark Lodge for the translation and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments and suggestions.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is part of a research project ‘MediaACES. Accountability and Media Systems in Spain: Real impact and good practices in Spanish Media’, funded by Ministry of Economy, Science and Competitiveness (MINECO/FEDER, UE, ref.: CSO2015-66404-P).

ORCID iD

María-Ángeles Chaparro-Domínguez

Author biographies

María-Ángeles Chaparro-Domínguez (PhD, University Complutense of Madrid) is an assistant professor at the University Complutense of Madrid in Journalism. She has published her research findings in journals as Journalism Practice, Young, Nordicom Review or First Monday and has been a research fellow at SINTEF (Norway) research organization in 2015. Her research focuses on data-driven journalism, social network sites and the new media. She is a member of the R+D+i project “NewsSharing: Consumption of news in social media. Analysis of factors in the selection and dissemination of media content”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Marta Pérez-Pereiro (PhD, University of Santiago de Compostela) is lecturer in the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the University Santiago de Compostela. Her research interests are the analysis of national and auteur cinemas, studies on humor and journalism, particularly about history and accountability. She has participated in several funded research projects about cinema circulation, small cinemas and subtitling in minority languages. She has published her research results in journals as Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Humor. International Journal of Humor Research or Modern Language Association. She is member of the research group Estudos Audiovisuais: contents, formats and technology.

Ruth Rodríguez-Martínez (PhD, University Complutense of Madrid) is a journalism lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University and member Journalism Research Group. Her main research interests are cultural reporting, media accountability and online journalism. She has participated at several research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry and the European Commission. She has published several books and articles and has carried out several postdoctoral research visits: at School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, at the Laboratoire du Communication et Politique in CNRS (Paris) and the Journalism School at Columbia University (New York).

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