What does this recognition mean?
It is an award given every year by the International Communication Association, the American Communication Association, which is one of the most well-known at the international level. They have different sections and I am very active in the political communication section because it is my topic. Last year, we wrote an article with several European authors who are part of Network of European Political Communication Scholars. We conducted a macro survey of 28,000 individuals across Europe and analysed new user profiles.

What do you think has most effected your research?
One of the turning points in my career happened in 2016, on a trip to Jerusalem, I was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. That stay conditioned my way of understanding research, which is not only asking for funding, but also learning from other academic cultures, learning how an article is prepared and what you can learn from each researcher, try to structure teams. It was a wonderful experience in every way.

How do you think you can transfer knowledge as teachers and researchers?
I hope to encourage and enrich the discussion around the role of the media in public opinion. A lot is happening in the world and I think UIC Barcelona can’t ignore all this. UIC is making a very important commitment to use the knowledge it has here as well as the knowledge that is being generated around the world. The future is in collaborating with different technologies, collaborating with different centres, different teams asking for funding…

What does this allow?
Sometimes, we have a result in Spain, but we don’t know to what extent we can generalise it unless you compare it with other realities. We don’t know to what extent people consume little news in Spain, we don’t know to what extent we have to worry about people having little trust in the media, how much we have to worry about fake news. Comparative research and collaboration with researchers in other countries opens your mind and lets you know whether or not the results you have obtained here can be generalised.

How do you transfer this to the classroom to help your students?
When I taught my subject, I tried to familiarise my students with research centres, think tanks, journalists’ associations in other countries, so that they know who they can contact if they are in another country.

Have you found anything that has made your job easier as a researcher at UIC Barcelona?
There is a journalism team that I am very in tune with which is researching media user profiles. I have connected with them a lot.

What has your stay as a teacher and researcher been like?
These two years have been fantastic, they have gone very well for me. The university is very well organised, and I believe that it must continue to commit to internationalisation. UIC Barcelona has given me the freedom to work with a lot of different people, not just with the team here, and to open up new horizons in the department. As far as my work as a teacher is concerned, I have enjoyed it very much. I did some audience analysis assignments, and was able to work and involve my students in them.

Can you tell us a little more about the project that earned you the International Communication Association Award?
It was a fairly newsworthy study, it appeared in La Stampa, La Reppublica. We found five different profiles: a profile we call minimalist, those who do not read or see much of the news, are not very interested politically. The traditionalist does not use many media outlets, but uses those offer more news and political knowledge. They watch public television, and read professional newspapers, they are older than the rest of users.

What are the other profiles?
Online news seekers, who have a very diverse online news diet. The Reppublica calls them Indiana Jones. They are usually women, a little younger than traditionalists. They have a more diverse news diet. Then there are the hyperconsumers of news, who have very little political knowledge in comparison to the other profiles. They have an information overload, they click everywhere and are very active on social networks, but they do not assimilate everything they consume.

You have also published studies on changes in consumption patterns with coronavirus.
During the pandemic we found that users used more social networks and television than other media. Our hypothesis is that, at times like these, when individuals need guidance because there is a lot of uncertainty, media that are immediately assessable such as social media, where information travels at a much faster speed than in other media, or television, allow you to be informed in record time.

What are you working on now?
I have a project from the Swiss National Science Foundation about incivility in the networks and the consequences it can have for political behaviour, for example, in other contexts (offline). If people are exposed to very extreme and disrespectful scenes on the networks, to what extent does it affect their predisposition to be more violent in real life, or to participate in violent demonstrations, vote for parties more prone to violence... The idea started in the Trump era. We are comparing political discussions around the elections in 5 different countries: Brazil, Israel, Spain, Switzerland and the United States.