Abstract

© 2019, University of La Laguna. All rights reserved.Introduction. Food-related news disseminated by the mass media have increased over the last two decades. These contents are powerful structuring elements of Western contemporary society. This article presents a method for the selection of a corpus of thousands of news published in the digital press -without having to resort to paid news databases-that can be subsequently processed with quantitative analysis software. Methods. Food-related content is operationalised through a series of keywords that allow for the retrieval of news on the subject in question using the Google search engine and the Import.io service. Results. More than 2500 news items published in 2016 by three Chilean newspapers were retrieved and stored for their subsequent analysis with big data techniques. Discussion and conclusions. The differences and similarities of the results obtained for each newspaper are discussed from different theoretical and methodological points of view. The different research possibilities offered by the data obtained are also mentioned.