Retos metodológicos en el estudio del sistema de medios informativos en el Perú

A strong media system is crucial when facing various types of crises. In Latin America, it becomes challenging to characterize media systems due to the weakness of their structural institutionalization as well as the modernization processes. In this contribution, we address methodological challenges when elaborating a database of news media outlets that could allow us to conduct consistent and comparative analyses of journalism practices with an international scope. When analyzing the Peruvian case, we face two main challenges. On the one hand, there is no national census of journalists or news media outlets; on the other hand, the institutionalization of Peruvian media remains precarious. Facing these challenges, we used a triangulation of sources as methodological strategy to elaborate a reliable survey despite the evident informal nature of certain outlets, the precarious digital identification, and the traditional categorizations that were mostly based on legacy media that become insufficient when examining these practices in a transmedia scenario.