YouTube is the second social network for news consumption (Reuters Institute, 2018)
influencing directly on the information diet of citizens all over the world. The increase of
online video viewing (Smith & Anderson, 2018) has provoked a reaction in the journalistic
industry to attend the need to connect with an audience that constantly demands
audiovisual content. It has been a challenging issue for the media industry to abandon their
direct relationship with the audience, decentralize their production and disseminate content
on channels such as YouTube (Peer & Ksiazek, 2011). On the other hand, they are aware
of image allows to corroborate facts and, therefore, influences the credibility (Wardle &
Derakhshan, 2017). This exploratory research analyzes, from a qualitatively and
quantitatively perspective, the presence of journalists on YouTube with the aim of finding
out if they benefit or underuse the platform. After a selection process with 207 profiles
focus on Spain, 78 of them have been selected to study aspects such as genres, topics,
structure, intentionality… In addition, ten in-depth interviews with the most successful
journalists in the platform were conducted to understand how they interact with their
audiences. Results conclude that the role of the journalists promoting their professional
profile on YouTube is scarce: 3,32% of registered reporters in Spain maintain an active
channel, and only 0,21% of them obtain satisfactory results developing journalistic content.
Finally, youtuber journalists consider that traditional colleagues still perceive the platform
as a lower level channel and related to the infotainment.
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