More than a threat, this digital era opens up an enormous field of opportunities for the traditional press to strengthen its position, to develop its creativity potential and for it to continue to be a bulwark of truth.
The assembly of the printed and digital media has permitted the reformating of the news redacting process and added ethic values to the exercise of professional journalism, while also amplifying the amount of readers.
A few of the advantage that we certainly did not have before include the daily monitoring of the preferences of those readers, we found the best and most attractive ways of engaging with those users, a more fluid intercommunication in real time and a higher propensity towards content of quality and depth.
Working in a multimedia redaction, journalists venture into this space of diversity while learning and mastering techniques to manage better stuff like language barriers inside photography and video, they also come up with new presets to tell stories and figure out the preferential use of data to enrich the contents.
The new models that come to form part of the integrated redactions, with great specific weight, are the audiovisual filmmakers, data analysts, interactive graphics designers, audience editors and programmers, a multi-colored composition mutually beneficial for a printed journal and its digital platform.
Operating in two different scenarios at once helps journalists to know what the reader expects from the media and from the newspaper, this way they can prepare their content in such desired formats, without ever losing the horizon of truth.
The presence of data analysts opens the way for the development of research teams, a genre that is strengthened every day as a source to go beyond the daily news and provide more complete perspectives of those events.
While digital turbines are endlessly working to broadcast information, the research teams accumulate, organize, process and tie many ends in a story that they then offer the reader within the deepness beneath the surface.
The quantitative data becomes qualitative data to the extent that research teams, data analysts and interactive graphics designers deliver their dues for complementary work.
The newspapers bet on the investigations of past events that still preserve some aspects undiscovered or oversighted, when they could shed light to understand what happens in the present.
And now starts the joint investigation of several newspapers, with the advice of experts, to unravel the mysteries that are buried within documents that, at first sight, did not seem to contain so many burdens of explosive novelties, just like it happened with the “Papers of Panama”.
An international consortium of investigative journalists, both of newspaper companies and independent, analyzed and classified 2.6 terabytes of data from legit and ghost companies, archived in the Mosad-Fonseca office of lawyers in Panama, they found evidence of a wide web of corruption and money laundering that shook the global conscience.
The same happened with the research teams that formed newspapers in Brazil and other latin american countries to expose the tentacles of Odebrecht’s corruption, showing the rottenness in which governments and political parties develop, succumbing to the charm of bribes in exchange of publicly overvaluing the works of others in order to retain power.
Both research efforts gave the traditional press a greater degree of reliability and responsibility, which are factors that add weight to its credibility and vindicates the premise that only the serious, rigorous, dedicated and insistent journalism is capable to turning the coin to show its both sides, regardless of how they turn out.
Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 