Introduction
There is not only one reason that explains the preference of the public for certain types of press, just
as there is not only press model that caters the needs of all the audience. In the majority of cases, the
success or failure of a news outlet, especially printed newspapers, depends on a convergence of
factors that include not only its information quality, but also its historic opportunity, political stance,
economic situation, and formal appearance, etc.
The reasons why a new publication becomes or not a medium of reference are neither very clear. For
the most pragmatist scholars, it would be a simple matter of how many copies are put for circulation
on the streets: the one that sells the largest number of copies becomes an opinion leader. However,
we know that this is not case. Without leaving the European space, the closest reference to the
Spanish press model, we know that the newspapers that set the news agenda (The Guardian, The
Times and The Independent, in England; Le Monde and Liberation, in France; Il Corriere de la Sera,
in Italy; Die Welt in Germany; and El País and La Vanguardia, in Spain) are not the bestselling
newspapers. All of them are far from selling the large numbers of copies sold by the German Bild
Zeitung (four million copies a day for the period covered by this study) and the English tabloids.
The difference between the two newspaper models has been widely studied by different authors
(Núñez Ladevèze, 1991; Edo, 1994; López López, 1995; Sparks and Tulloch, 2000; Steinberg, 2000;
Rodríguez Infiesta, 2009; Redondo García, 2011), who generally differentiate between quality (or
broadsheet) press and popular (or tabloid) press, although some of them identify subcategories.
When describing the quality press model, most authors emphasise the purely interpretative sense of
this model and its assessment of the news based on their actual informative value, without more