Online media in a context of proximity in Galicia and Portugal and its presence on the social networks

The online media in a context of proximity has experimented in recent years a series of transformations towards new communicative and business models, due to the economic recession and the crisis of the newspapers' traditional model suffered by the media industry. In a global context of crisis in the traditional local media sector, readers express a growing necessity of information about the geographical areas nearest to them. This has favored the proliferation of a great diversity of new communicative spaces on the internet. The online media in a context of proximity tends to be web-native, cover hyperlocal areas and built community projects where citizen participation becomes especially relevant. This research focus on the study of the local and hyperlocal online media of Galicia and Portugal, on the basis of a media of proximity map in the Iberian space that is being developed. In this way, we compare two areas that, although pertaining to different countries, are very close about cultural issues. The main objective of the present study is to measure and check the presence of this type of media on the social networks, observing which are the most used platforms and the importance of the communities that are maintained by the media in those spaces. It is therefore an exploratory and very descriptive work that allows a first approximation to the social networks' functions in the creation of spaces for socialization, participation and debate between the citizens of the local communities.