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Abstract
The rapid growth of Hispanics in the United States, the parallel growth of Spanish-language media, and the difficulties that this population continues to experience in terms of important socio-demographic indicators such as education, immigration, healthcare, and criminal justice, requires research that investigates the ways in which Spanish-language news outlets are delivering the information needed by this group in terms of providing a public service and contributing to democratic notions of the press. Democratic theories of the press posit that in order for a democracy to function properly, all groups should be provided with news coverage that reflects the voices, concerns, and interests of their communities. However, it has often proved difficult for news industries undergoing rapid growth and increasing corporate concentration to serve audiences with diverse news and information needs. In order to examine the extent to which Spanish-language news outlets are providing a diverse range of news and topics relevant to their audiences, researchers used software that gathers Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to archive, organize, and analyze over 10,000 news stories posted to 28 Spanish-language news websites during October 2012. The results show some diversity in the range of topics covered, but the widespread duplication of content across platforms owned by a small handful of media conglomerates found in the results raises important questions about the impact of increasing news homogenization in the digital age and the potential implications for minority audiences.
Notes
1. The terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” are used interchangeably throughout this paper, a usage that has been duplicated elsewhere (Arreola Citation2004; Garcia Citation2012).
2. Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an internet function that uses metadata language (usually in the form of an .XML document that can be read across multiple platforms) to “broadcast” a given number of stories or updates posted to a website during a pre-determined period of time (usually one day). Followers of the site (whether it is a news site, as was the case of the RSS feeds used in this study, blog, or otherwise) can then subscribe to any number of RSS feeds in order to receive daily updates from their chosen sources.
3. Regarding the reliability of the HDD software's ability to categorize the stories into the assigned topics, the calculation of the materias (which is based on a widely used process of indexation and automatic classification) is based on the number of words that appear assigned to the particular materia (e.g., healthcare, education, immigration) and are repeated during the text. These results are then compared with a corpus of words (verbum) previously associated with the field (or materia). The software's developer, F. D. Márquez, has published the methods used by the HDD software in a leading technological journal in Spain (Márquez Citation2013). Researchers relied primarily on these previously published, peer-reviewed tests of the software's reliability. As an added test of reliability, 100 articles were randomly drawn from the sample and coded by hand; the percentage of agreement was 95 percent.
4. For an excellent discussion of the myriad and complex connections between Latino voters, the media that cater to them and the wider implications for the political system, readers are recommended Subervi-Vélez (Citation2008).