Collective Interviewing in Spain: From Television to Twitch. A Disintermediation-Based Proposal for Periodization

Abstract

During the Spanish Transition to democracy, television programs integrated audience inquiries, laying the groundwork for a new format: collective interviewing. This format dominated radio and television schedules for years and later spearheaded new journalistic strategies during the early interactive era of the Internet. This paper traces its evolution, from its emergence in television and radio to its expansion into the digital press and its eventual migration to social media, with the aim of outlining, through a qualitative analysis of critical cases, a three-stage periodization: Foundational Participation, Institutionalized Cyber-participation, and “Ideante” Participation. This diachronic study reveals a gradual shift in agency, as audiences and interviewees gain increasing autonomy from the media, reshaping the format to align it with the decentralized, participatory logic of digital communities. Consequently, the established “media-public pact” that once sustained the format has fractured. This is evidenced by its recent decline in the mainstream press and the concomitant rise of new intermediaries who, leveraging social platforms, have popularized and scaled the format into successful contemporary iterations, such as the conversational podcast. At the same time, the evolution under study raises questions about the correspondence between perceived participation and effective participation, insofar as the increase in interactive channels does not necessarily imply a greater actual capacity for participants to influence the conditions of interpellation. By providing a robust diachronic overview, this paper provides a foundational framework for future research on collective interviewing.