La autorreferencia como estrategia de promoción: Periodismo o publicidad

Abstract

News that has the mass media themselves as its subject is becoming increasingly frequent. This presence of self-referential content is not a problem in itself; the problem arises when this self-reference serves interests that are not strictly informative. The newspapers on occasion use their layout content to promote themselves, producing news items by which they make known the products that are offered with the newspaper or the contents of their supplements. This is self-referential news that shows how the growing competition in the communication sector and the processes of media concentration are blurring the frontier separating news from advertising. This article presents the results of research whose object was to study the self-referential news appearing in the newspapers ABC, El País and El Mundo.