This paper presents preliminary findings of a Content Analysis (Neuendorf, 2002) conducted in 194 digital culture articles focused on Brazil published by Público in 2012 and 2018. This is part of a multimethod analysis within a larger project that analyzed 1118 articles to draw a panoramic view of this digital cultural coverage, specifically revealing the main differences in cross-country coverage about Brazil by Público and about Portugal by Folha de São Paulo. It is hypothesized that colonial heritage is a driver of social memory and stereotypes that may be identified in digital Journalism.
We define Journalism as a social construction (Alsina, 2009), based on the concept of social construction of reality (Berger & Luckmann, 2010). As Hall, Chritcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts (1999) indicate, news analysis allows the identification of maps of meaning or supposed consensuses about society in specific periods and territories. We also considered concepts such as social representations (Moscovici, 1988), stereotypes (Tajfel, 1982) and social memory (Assmann, 2008; Erll, 2011). We recognize that cultural coverage differs from general news coverage (Golin & Cardoso, 2009; Faro, 2014; Kersten & Janssen, 2016; Hovden & Kristensen, 2018) and that the digital environment adds some specificities and possibilities (Santos Silva, 2016).
This research covers only journalistic publications in the digital environment, due to its specific goal of identifying how newspapers are working with digital capabilities in their cultural coverage. We selected our sample using keywords (Brazil, Brazilian, for instance) from Factiva’s database. All the articles were coded in 16 specific variables that take into account descriptives aspects, formats and digital features. Intercoder reliability tests were performed as proposed by Lacy and Riffe (1996).
Although this sample is composed only by articles with a clear focus on Brazil, Brazilians were not interviewed in a significant amount of pieces: 20% only had a Portuguese source and 20% did not have any identified source. Less than half, 48% of the total, had Brazilian sources and 12% had mixed sources, which means from Brazil and/or Portugal and/or other countries. Taking into account types of sources, artists were most prominent group (76 occurrences), followed by news agencies (32 occurrences), civil society (30 occurrences) and other media (28 occurrences). Social media is not a frequent source (six occurrences). The audience that consumes cultural products is not usually interviewed, only appearing three times in the sample.
We could understand that digital capabilities are not central to Público digital cultural coverage, as only 34% of the articles have digital formats. However, a growth has been identified between the two researched years (7 pieces of the total were published in 2012 and 59 in 2018). On the other hand, the most prominent formats are not very new, such as photo galleries (45 occurrences) and videos (28 occurrences). Infographics, playlist and podcast were identified just once each. Some formats were not present in any of the analyzed years: panoramic photography, 360-degree video, GIF, personalized visualization and quiz.