The journalism of paper won’t die just yet. Its horizon is still very wide, despite the doubts that many harbor when they realize what are the exact or approximate measures of the audiences found throughout digital media and how the paid advertising in them only keeps growing, contrary to printed advertising.
We mustn’t confuse, however, audience volume and flow of data throughout social media with what constitutes the true professional practice of the journalist, which should be the same in any platform, but has not yet been properly set in the digital networks.
Journalism on paper still retains intact its essence of being the great interpreter of the facts and the surgeon who can apply the scalpel to the entire body of society to scrutinize what’s inside, which either makes it stronger and sustainable for a while or turns it evil, leading to inanition for a while.
Social media have been the phenomenon of revolution within the vast field of social communications, because they’ve allowed millions of people to share information, illustrations, videos and other data in a rapid manner, and with a magnificent sense of synthesis.
Paper journalism operates in reverse. Since the newspapers have a beginning and an end, they do not become vulnerable to the obligatory rush or zigzagging navigation that allow the links found throughout all of the Internet.
The reader that enters news websites immediately perceives that it concentrates purified information, which is always managed this way regardless of the biases that accompany the abbreviated, preliminary and not always verified contents found on this kind of media.
The written press still remains as the firsthand from which the entire range of digital media is nourished. It still maintains a powerful cast of influence on society, based on the credibility and verification of its contents, elements that make the written platforms the most reliable.
This guarantees it a greater opportunity to enhance its leadership condition over the weaknesses of digital media. The challenge is to know how to connect with the audience and, for that, newspapers are striving to offer plenty of differentiated content and reinforcing journalistic researches to bring to light those hard-to-see angles of news events, which can definitely arouse the interests of the readers.
At the same time, they try to improve the stories or chronicles of impactful stories, leaving aside the parametric and sober style that predominated years ago, as a way to please the tastes of the new generations that have already come into contact with the mixture of text and audiovisual information that is offered through online platforms, including the social media that nowadays captivate users.
Dominican newspapers are advancing in the integration of printed and digital operations and in the production of content for both platforms, although it’s worth mentioning that our traditional press model hasn’t yet experienced the top radical transformations that are occurring with the other big traditional media of the rest of the world.
But we’ll get there.
– Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 