Religion through the Local Media on Twitter. The Holy Week in Malaga
This research is part of the work of the Cátedra de Estudios Cofrades, Culturales, Sociales y Económicos de la Semana Santa Malagueña (Chair of Brotherhood, Cultural, Social and Economic Studies on Holy Week in Malaga) of the University of Malaga. The main purpose of the study is to deepen understanding of this local festivity. The article addresses the question of how social networks, particularly Twitter, are being used as a new resource for the transmission of religious values. People are able to find out more about this festivity by interacting with the platform. Examples of this interaction have previously been seen in the World Youth Day in Madrid, the Pope’s Twitter profile and the case of Sister Lucía in Spain. This study aims to confirm the hypothesis that the local media makes a special effort to report on the event by means of Twitter while preserving its religious essence using the appropriate choice of words. The methodology is based on a detailed analysis of content found in the tweets of nine important local media organizations: three radio stations, three television channels and three newspapers. The content has been taken from 13th to 20th April 2014 (Holy Week) and classified into three categories of terms: religious terms, tourism terms and artístic terms. The results confirm that the local media use religious vocabulary on Twitter as compared to tourism or artístic terms, commonly used in general publications.