Social Media and Digital Information Sources in News Coverage of Crisis, Disaster, and Emergency Situations: A case study from Spain

Introduction

Journalists and news media play a crucial role in the coverage of the crisis, disaster, and emergency situations. Amid the chaos generated by crises, like the current COVID-19 pandemic, an earthquake, or a chemical escape, information is a vital tool to save lives and mitigate harm. Until the massive penetration of the internet and social media in contemporary societies, the public needed news outlets intermediation to be adequately informed. Nevertheless, in the current digital media ecosystem, mass media could have lost their monopoly between information sources and the public. This chapter explores journalistic coverage of crises, disasters, and emergencies in the digital world through a case study in Spain. The authors use this methodological approach because case studies are a common and effective method of descriptive research in the scientific field of crisis communication (Coombs & Holladay, 2010).

The empirical evidence in designing this chapter has been collected through a mixed methodology that integrates several research techniques with a quantitative (survey conducted through a panel of experts) and a qualitative approach (analysis of the journalistic coverage of the recent crises in Spain). The authors have built the theoretical frame of this research by a selection of emergencies analyzed based on their journalistic, social, and political relevance. They are representative of situations like an epidemic, a public health alarm, a food crisis, or natural and human disasters. This chapter considers that the breadth of the sample analyzed includes all the typology present in the scientific literature on risk communication and, specifically, the field of communication in crisis contexts. The quantitative data come from a nationwide survey applied to the 30 most relevant Spanish news outlets in four media mediums: television, radio, press, and online media. Therefore, the sampling was designed according to the relevance of their audience by taking four information sources: OJD (press), EGM (radio), Kantar Media (television), and ComScore (online media). The authors selected the seven newspapers with the highest circulation (OJD), the nine television outlets with the highest audience (Kantar Media), the four radio outlets with the highest audience (EGM), and the ten digital native media with the highest online consumption (ComScore). The team conducted the research through an online questionnaire answered by the editors-in-chief of the newsrooms. The news outlets selected for the sample meet two criteria: national scope and generalist sense. The global response rate achieved was 76 percent, and the partial response rates in each of the mediums were over 50%. The literature review lets to qualify it as highly satisfactory (Keyton, 2019: 154) (Denscombe, 2017: 186). Specifically, this research focuses on the use of official information sources (those coming from public institutions involved in the communication management of the crisis: politicians, civil servants, officials, police, firemen, health workers, etc.) and non-official sources (victims and those affected and general public) in crisis, disaster and emergencies. The following six research questions guide this chapter:

• RQ 1: How is the journalist's reliance on digital information sources when covering crises?

• RQ 2: How do journalists contact to digital information sources in crises?

• RQ 3: How much trust do journalists have in official and unofficial digital information sources on covering crises?

• RQ 4: For what purpose do journalists use information from social media in crises?

• RQ 5: How do journalists exercise social responsibility in the digital coverage of crises?

• RQ 6: What are the main communication errors made by the authorities in crises?