The printed platform continues to maintain its lordship in Latin America, India and the Asian continent, despite the superlative audiences that browse for news events through social media, which actually feed plenty of the worldwide population in a large scale.
This is the result of successful practices that have been applied in order for the newspapers to reinvent themselves in this era of multiplatform-media, to which they’ve adapted without missing out on the engagement with the readers.
They printed journals have learned, from this process, to identify the topics of interest sought by those who nourish themselves with news and information through social media, and to cover their content with the level of depth and seriousness that characterizes and requires the authentic exercise of journalism.
Understanding the public’s preferences and, in top of all, the specific topics that the users look for on each of the most popular sites, such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Linkedin or Twitter, is what has allowed the printed platforms to point their lights towards these heterogeneous audiences.
Digital media created by printed platforms, are striving to reach a larger audience by learning to deal with the languages that predominate in each of these networks, which are not the same for all users.
At the same time, the newspapers have been discovering that it’s no longer enough to simply transfer all of their contents to the web without any filters, instead they have to achieve a substantial differentiation when comparing both platforms, which can be achieved by letting the papers be more outstanding with research depth and context precision when it comes to topics about social issues and the practical every-day-life of humanity.
One of the gurus of the transformations of the media, my mate Mario Garcia, with whom I’ve had work experience about revamping, graphically, our printed newspapers, recognizes that Latin American newspapers are going through a stage of progress.
“In most of Latin America, one can still see the “fat” daily editions, that is, complete, with healthy sections, tons of advertisements and the appearance of the north american newspapers from decades of the 90’s and the 80’s”, said Mario in one of his recent columns of his blog.
The secret of the printed media remains as the selection of the best contents and reproducing them in very interesting or intriguing ways, without forcing story-tellings to fit-in on the model of the digital platforms.
This is the intelligent and opportune advice that Matthew Sanders gives us, the president of the Inter-American Press Association (SIP) and general manager of Deseret Digital Media, from Salt Lake City, Utah, a company dedicated to imagining narrations for digital and mobile audiences.
– Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 