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The demonstrations in Venezuela coincided with the celebration of the Oscars.
Is it true that people prefer to read entertainment news instead of those that talk about wars and political crises? Over the last couple of weeks I thought a lot about that question, which often creeps into discussions about the future of journalism in the face of changing audience tastes.
These days have been particularly busy in our newsroom. In the past 15 days, at BBC Mundo we have covered almost simultaneously the persistent Venezuelan political crisis, the military emergency in Ukraine and the capture of "El Chapo" Guzmán in Mexico. It was a veritable banquet of "hard news" about political-military issues that brought a very high volume of audience to our site and would seem to resolve the question with which I began this writing. In times of crisis, it is proven once again, many people want to find out news about wars, revolutions, police operations and street demonstrations.
But what happens when the waters calm down and the political-military news is not as dramatic as that of the last two weeks?
"Hard news" is often overshadowed by other types of information.
A recent book by Northwestern University academics Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein is titled "The News Gap" and refers precisely to this issue, focusing on what which they describe as the divergence in the information preferences of the media and their audiences.
In their book they cite various studies that ensure that professional journalists in large media outlets tend to show a personal preference for news on political and economic topics, and they make an effort to offer these topics to their audiences.
But supply and demand do not always coincide. The two academics undertook a study of more than 50,000 articles published on 20 news sites located in seven countries and three continents. His conclusion: regardless of the country, "users of these sites show a preference (evidenced by the most viewed stories) toward news about sports, crime, entertainment and the weather," over political and economic news, as noted the book in an introductory section.
Boczkowski and Mitchelstein point out with their statistics that, in times of political crisis like the current one, this trend decreases and "hard news" regains ground. But researchers assure that, under normal conditions, their numbers show a general trend of public preference towards topics other than political, economic and military ones.
Issues such as what is happening in the Central African Republic will not attract much attention, but it is necessary to report on what is happening.
How does this impact our work at BBC Mundo? Without a doubt, our nature as a public service introduces an important element of differentiation in our offer, regardless of what the market dictates. As my colleague Pablo Esparza said a few weeks ago in this same space, talking about why we covered news about the war in the distant Central African Republic: "At BBC Mundo we try to accommodate stories that sometimes remain on the sidelines. In recent months "We have told them, for example, the risks that Syrian immigrants face on their trip to Europe or the situation of the Nepalese villages from which many of the stadium workers for the Qatar 2018 World Cup come."
As a public service, if we consider that a piece of news is truly important to our audience, we will offer it, even if we suspect that it will not be read as much as others.
But in this era of immediate and constant interaction with our audiences, it is undeniable that a very important part of our job as journalists is to present the stories that interest people. Given this, we have the challenge of searching in every corner of the news agenda for stories that are intelligent, original and well told, whether they are about politics, entertainment, or any other topic.