The Sources of Information in the Local Press During the COVID19: The Case of Jornal da Bairrada

Abstract

Information sources are a fundamental asset for the media and allow the journalist to access events. Given the situation experienced in Portugal between 5 March 2020 and 7 May 2020, a period of confinement motivated by the new coronavirus and the COVID19 disease, it was our goal to try to understand how the local press approached the subject of the disease, namely which journalistic genres were dominant and what were the most striking sources in the editions published in this period. We focused our analysis on the weekly newspaper Jornal da Bairrada and, according to the taxonomic model for the classification of information sources created by Felisbela Lopes (2016), we concluded that there is a dependence on information sources, with a primacy of the closest sources and with a clear predominance of human sources. This analysis involved ten editions, in a total of 259 articles, which directly or indirectly addressed the virus or disease, and among the human sources, there is also a preference for professional sources, which speak on behalf of a group, a collective or a professional class, as well as sources classified as official and representing public institutions. In the framework of analysis of journalistic genres, the study also demonstrated the significant use of briefs and news as a way to communicate issues related to the new coronavirus and COVID19.