The information published by local governments. The websites of Catalonia’s municipal governments

Abstract

Introduction. The information issued by government institutions must be complete and intelligible so that citizens are able to exercise their right to participation based on informed decisions and the media professionals can use consider these institutions as reliable sources of information. This article presents the results of the development and application of a method to evaluate the information offered by the websites of the municipal governments of Catalonia in order to encourage policymakers to introduce improvements to these platforms. Methods. The sample of study includes the institutional websites run by the government of 947 municipalities of Catalonia. The evaluation is based on 41 purpose-created indicators. Results. The results have been represented on an online geographical mapping tool, titled Map of Good Practices in Local Public Communication, which offers individual and general results and statistics. Conclusions. The publication of results has quickly led to improvements in the sample of websites under analysis, which has led the research team to apply the same evaluation method to the websites of the municipal governments of other five Spanish autonomous communities

Pluralism of News and Social Plurality in the Colombian Local Media

“…The control of local information begins with a lack of transparency. This is followed by the hiding of information about government practices [21], the poor quality of information provided by local public administrations [22], and the control of public media [23], where journalists work in the service of the current government above the interests of the citizens [24,25], and continues with the ownership of private media.…”