Coincidences between press releases and economic briefs: Quantitative and qualitative analysis of two Spanish newspapers La coincidencia entre las notas de prensa y los breves de economía: Análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de dos periódicos españoles La coincidència entre les notes de premsa i els breus d'economia: Anàlisi quantitativa i qualitativa de dos diaris espanyols

Abstract

The objective of this research is to compare the press releases of companies and public organizations and the briefs published by the media. With this goal in mind, it is intended to detect if the press release is processed or contrasted before being published, or if, on the contrary, it is disseminated as it arrives at the newsroom. What is sought, then, is to numerically establish what percentage of the briefs are coincident or similar to the press release. The sample has covered half a year, the first semester of 2014, and El Mundo and La Vanguardia have been chosen, the general information paid newspapers in Spain that have the largest number of briefs as a part of a regular section (Economy). Subsequently, a series of in-depth interviews (between 2015 and 2018) has made it possible to guide the interpretation of the data obtained. Methodologically, a specific tool, DetectPlagiarism, has served to collate texts through the SimilarityScore command. So similar texts have been obtained that are likely to have been copied or to contain some portion of the text that has been copied. In the use of the DetectPlagiarism command, the default copy threshold is 0.35. In this respect, the indexes of similarity between the briefs and the press releases of La Vanguardia and El Mundo have an average value of 0.41, above this threshold.