Journalistic resources in the construction of the story about the effects of the economic crisis in the population

Abstract

The current research studies the use of some tools, in the discourse elaborated by the press, to report the effect of the first crisis of the 21st century in the Spanish population. This aim has been developed from the corpus created with the informative pieces published in the most influential newspapers in a Spanish city (Vigo), of strategic importance for the economy of its surroundings, whose model could be extrapolated to other cities with similar characteristics. The period under study (from September 2009 to July 2011) was determined by considering two events that had a significant effect on the economic crisis affecting the considered region. Within this period, the sample was created from the informative pieces published on the 23 weeks selected for the current research, which fulfilled the criteria established for the search.  With the resulting data, an exploratory analysis has been carried out to determine the use of the following resources: presence on the front page, journalistic genre and accompaniment of photographs or other graphic elements. The results of this study have also been used to inquire about the effects of the crisis itself on the media and their influence on the message transmitted.