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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
explore the issue from the viewpoint of comments on news stories from the viewpoint
of readers’ participation (Lampe, 2010; Tsagkias, 2010; Cho, 2010) 84 .
Method
The methodology of this research has consisted in an analysis of the legal norms and
the moral norms of participation that are to be found in the web pages of five
international digital newspapers: nytimes.com, guardian.con.uk, repubblica.it,
lemonde.fr and elpais.com, which are the object of study. The analysis was carried out
in November 2010, taking account of those norms concerning user participation that
appear in the legal notices, although they can also be found in other areas of the
websites. We have also considered the norms on the contractual regime that is
established between the publishing company and the user, those relative to the use of
the service, as well as those that refer to the rights that the users generate as authors.
Furthermore, we have analysed the norms of behaviour that the user explicitly accepts
when s/he accepts to send in comments. These norms delimit the framework of action
of that new subject of communication.
The analysis was made from the perspective of the discursive ethics of Jürgen
Habermas (1992, 1997, 2003), because he deals with the moral requisites that can be
demanded of the participation of speakers for their conversation to be compatible with
democracy. Habermas considers that dialogue is an ethical and rational procedure for
social construction. Thus, speakers must recognise each other as valid interlocutors
through respectful treatment and consideration of the arguments of the others. The
rational and moral requisites that Habermas believes are demandable can be
summarised in three broad sections:
Logic and coherence
The speakers should centre their intervention on the subject under debate, and show
the intention of discussing it.
84 Other articles refer to the same question of comments on news stories, but from a technical point of
view (Faradini, 2010).
301