Cualidades profesionales de un buen comunicador social de acuerdo con estudiantes de periodismo y periodistas en ejercicio: un estudio desde la disponibilidad léxica.

Journalists have a fundamental role in society as they oversee delivering pertinent, situated, timely, accurate and objective information in a readable way for a universal audience. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to know the vision that journalism students and journalists have regarding the qualities that a good social communicator must have in the exercise of their profession. The focus of this work is mixed, that is, qualitative and quantitative, and the analysis methodology is carried out through a lexical availability (LA) model in a sample of 104 participants, of which 52 are journalism students and 52 are journalists. The results obtained show that both students and journalists assign to a social communicator qualities associated with the value and affective domain, such as: honesty, responsibility, ethics, empathy and curiosity. The findings of this study reveal a professional conception close to the personal and value dimension over the thematic, theoretical, and technical one. Finally, considering this data, it is possible to direct the training itineraries of journalism students in order to strengthen the specialized aspects of the professional field to emphasize a disciplinary training that works jointly with theory and practice from an attitudinal approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]