Comunicar, n. 59, v. XXVII, 2019 | Media Education Research Journal | ISSN: 1134-3478; e-ISSN: 1988-3293 www.comunicarjournal.com Content syndication in news aggregators. Towards devaluation of professional journalistic criteria La sindicación de contenidos en los agregadores de noticias: Hacia la devaluación de los criterios profesionales periodísticos Dr. Concha Edo is Professor in the Department of Journalism and Global Communication at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) (
[email protected]) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6960-867X) Dr. Juan Yunquera is Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Audio-visual Communication at the University Carlos III of Madrid (Spain) (
[email protected]) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4062-1659) Dr. Helder Bastos is Professor in the Department of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Porto (
[email protected]) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6351-4610) ABSTRACT The growing expansion of Internet access and mass-scale usage of social networking platforms and search engines have forced digital newspapers to deal with challenges, amongst which are the need to constantly update news, the increasing complexity of sources, the difficulty of exercising their function as gatekeepers in a fragmented environment in which the opinions, biases and preconceptions of pundits, their followers, Twitter users, etc. has taken on a new and decisive weight and the mounting pressure to publish certain news items simply because they sell. They must also share audiences with aggregators devoted to the business of disseminating content produced by digital news publishers, blogs and RSS feeds, which is chosen on the basis of search engine algorithms, the votes of users or the preferences of readers.