The history of the journalism industry consists of the continuous introduction of new technologies with innovative ways to ensure their financial sustainability, so that the stable media doesn’t fall behind in a competitive race.
Every time a technology that promises to attract and maintain wide audiences peeps out, the media are looking for ways to strengthen their positions and, as much as they can find, ways to ensamble those technologies and business models.
This process is what has become the core of multimedia, the merge of different platforms into a single one, as it specially happens with the newspapers companies that at the same time, manage radio, television and digital platforms.
I call this the Pentagon of media, the new sign of the era of social communications.
Each one of these platforms feed each other mutually off the inputs that each in particular manage, creating a distribution mechanism that offers users or customers a greater field of audience than these would individually achieve.
Readers of the newspapers, satisfied with the level of quality, objectivity and credibility of its contents, will always trust the digital platform of that newspaper, which will see it as an exentension of the main source, in which they have deposited loyalty for many years.
Without each platform losing its own qualities or audiences, the multimedia model encourages some sort of positive balance between textual, visual or oral information, and with this confluence of tools they offer their users a kind of “all-inclusive” in the menu of their preferences.
It’s not a matter of overloading a specific platform, weakening it, canceling it or replacing it, it’s about doing the opposite.
That some of some platforms gets a wider audiences than others does not mean that the nature of their contents must necessarily change by force, only to swim with more pressure in the race of the competitiveness or positioning.
This diversity fascinates me, and the challenge of working around the Pentagon of multimedia that’s crafted by the printed, digital, radio, television and web platforms, that last one with its different branches, and the changeable ways of making pure and authentic journalism in each one of them.
Translated from spanish by Randy Rodríguez.
Director's Thoughts 