A week ago, the Listin Diario went into cadence with the changes that lead to the convergence of its printed and digital platforms, to create a model for work, that merges the practices and languages of both in the direction of reaching a higher level of readership, locally and globally.
Having reached an audience of more than 5 million clicks, to or inside the website, on a monthly basis, and consolidating the positioning of its printed product, the Listin Diario manages a greater confluence of readers on both platforms, printed and digital.
The Listin likes to walk to the rear of changes and innovations and that’s why we have spared no effort to take advantage of the formidable pros that modern technology offers us in order to expand our audiences, without detracting from content depth, credibility and overall confidence impregnated in our contents.
Our readers will be able to perceive, from now on, a greater convergence between the printed and the digital versions, they will be able to visualize the printed pages on the digital site, with greater access to advertising and messages of interest from the public and private sectors, and they’ll be able to interact more easily from the internet with the printed platform, for their information needs.
We can say that, by taking this step, the Listin Diario and Listin Digital are assembled, as molecules of the same atom, in what we familiarly know as the ecosystem of modern communications. Now we’re only one: the Listin Diario, with all its strengths concentrated.
We feel that you are living an interesting moment in the adaptation of all the existing platforms and in taking on the challenges that this convergence poses when it comes to discovering and responding to the new audiences that are slowly emerging.
That’s what forces us to reinvent the model of journalism that those audiences demand and to achieve a better use of social media, where users amount to the millions.
Now the news are disseminated first on the internet and other audiovisual media, while the daily written newspapers are still released, completing or contextualizing those news when practically everyone already knows about them.
We bet on the kind of journalism called “the day after”, with researches, analysis, background articles and taking care of the precision and rigor in the handling of the data that immediacy has allowed to flow through the most well known social networks, globally. Instead of covering, we discover the news.
Something that influences in this topic is the impactful phenomenon that I want to refer to as the smartphone overcrowding, which has contributed to speed up and consolidate the process that in the whole journalistic field is known as multimedia convergence, that is, the integration of written platforms with online ones, with tools for radio and television broadcasting, in which they combine completely different styles, languages and formats that have given a new dimension to today’s journalism, which in itself constitutes its most relevant challenge of this era.
These phones are imbricated in these platforms and through them we can receive the news through text, videos, photos, live television images, radio transmissions or even music and games, thanks to this versatility.
The mobile phone is the multimedia of this time and on its axis the others will rotate, seeking a more efficient and profitable convergence.
This technological revolution of wireless browsing, via Wi-Fi, has been favoring printed newspapers that distribute their content over the internet and phones, thus reaching a larger audience that does not have the opportunity, for demographic or cost reasons, to acquire the printed copies.
The model that we met throughout the 19th and 20th centuries has been giving way to the so-called “journalism 3.0” or “21st century journalism”, in whose context the newspapers are no longer the ones that monopolize all the information, nor are the only ones that provide it, in fact, they no longer have viable ways for competing with the profitability ranges that the electronic media can look forward to.
With the dissemination of news flowing through thousands of digital sites and media, the information no longer seems to be a commercial product or something that can be sold by itself, instead it is now seen as a source of data, pictures and videos available to the public, and hence the newspapers are seeking formulas to find a better shortcut to their profitability expectations, integrating these channels in a multimedia convergence.
This situation is reflected dramatically in the transit of long-lasting printed newspapers to the digital platform, or in the closure of newspapers that don’t support the pressures of their shareholders for greater profits, at a time when advertising is redistributed and refocuses its targets.
Beyond these recompositions, the biggest challenge of the newspapers is to exploit the preferences of the different groups of information-consumers, especially those that involve the younger audiences, to specialize the editions and contents, seeking for new niches in the market.
The most useful tip will always be to preserve the information of high quality, the depth of the chronicles, and also deliver exclusive content, which is not often achieved within digital media, because their priority is the immediacy or rush for publishing the information or missing the least amount of seconds possible in a clock.
That’s why we enlist in the so-called “the day after” journalism, that is, the one that takes advantage of the substantial amount of data that circulates through electronic channels, so that the newspapers can be kept as the head or main supporter of credible information, on which the rest of the media would depend.
In short, the greatest benefit of all these changes is received by democracy, which is nourished by the vast space of freedom that this model of planetary communications has promoted for the enriching and effective socialization of all human beings.
– Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 