Although it may seem incredible, “timeless” news, also known as news that didn’t come out recently, are having a wide readership and attraction not only in digital media but also in their printed forms, committed to giving its audiences a deeper, more serene and proven vision of facts of the past covered by some mists.
Parallel events are also recorded on the sidewalk in front of the news, which often remain outside the immediate transmission of information, but which may have some kind of link, as in a cause or consequence of the main news episode. By linking them, exposing them to light, they can occasionally help to frame the exact context of the episode.
I was convinced, some years ago, that timeless news could predictably have near the same effect of a current news event. It was only necessary that a relevant event, hidden by time or by investigative negligence, or by wicked censorship, emerges and comes to light by being published to become, automatically, an informative novelty.
In news. When my, today, wife Wendy Santana published her series of interviews and chronicles about the tortures of some heroic women in the struggle against the dictatorship of Trujillo, in which she brought to light some episodes that remained unknown for most Dominicans of back then and today, readership records of the Listín Diario got bumped up, which was a sign of an enormous impact regarding a timeless news.
Not only is an event interesting, newsworthy, due to its actuality and its immediate repercussions, but also because of the novelty it contains or because of the truths it reveals. This is confirmed by the behaviour adopted by the digital portal Ojo Público, from Peru, whose experience I have spoken about in these reflections before, which consists in looking for all angles of some historical events, research as far as the bottom of them, reactualize them and present them under an excellent contextualization, as a “plus” content for its audiences.
With this type of initiatives, which in certain cases have been taken to printed supplements, this way of communication has shown that timeless news are not disposable just because it seems so, instead more interesting than many could imagine, because it permits the reader a privileged access to the historical memory to fully understand some current realities.
The magazines and some newspapers that are printed exclusively on weekends tend to look back to the past to look for sediments of truths, asleep by the flood of the news of the moment, and highlight their findings, which usually attracts attention, interest and curiosity from the readers, encouraging them to seek more and more of what they didn’t know or of what they had a vague and incomplete vision.
Without losing the cadence of the events of the moment, it’s worth experimenting with the exercise of the retroactive. Surely we will find many things as interesting and novel as those that happen daily before our eyes. And if you have any questions, you can ask about this to the Ojo Público.
Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 