Automated journalism in news about traffic accidents: emergency services information dump

Abstract

In this work, the process of producing news about events in the Spanish digital press has been studied. Acontent analysis was carried out on news related to the main external causes of mortality (traffic accidents,accidental falls, drowning and suicides) published in the six main Spanish digital media (elpais.com,elmundo.es,abc.es,lavanguardia.com,elconfidencial.comand20minutos.es) during the period 2010-2020. The selectednews items (n=5,727) were obtained through the digital newspaper libraryMynewsonline. A qualitativestudy has also been carried out (in-depth interviews with professionals and a focus group). The results showa high number of news items published on traffic compared to other external causes of death with highermortality. It is also appreciated that the media automatically transfer the information they receive from theemergency services. It has even been detected that most of the news events coded in this study are exactcopies that are published on the same day in different media (headlines and the body of the news).