At the peak of the written press, the newspapers had enough by publishing, for their readers, the highest number of news, including the information that, in a regular and abundant manner, were offered by the press releases of governmental institutions.
They thus became a valued recipient of the novelties and, to a large extent, satisfied the appetite of those readers for getting to know every detail of what either interested them or helped them feel more aware of reality.
Since digital media and social networks monopolized that flow of news, with the formidable advantage of immediacy, the printed newspapers were forced to explore which kinds of new content would help them compete for the highest readership, thus marking great differences against the digital platforms.
So the printed media took off to a process of reinvention that has resulted in the commitment to a new journalism model that points more directly towards the analysis and interpretation of the facts, thus getting ahead, by two or three steps more, in all possible perspectives.
Hence now, the higher quality that characterize the contents and events under the new model contain the details that explain all foreseeable impacts on an individual or collective level and all possible causes from all possible edges, which are the elements that attract readers of today the most, whom are widely inclined to simply glance the news of the moment, which are brief and not always confirmed, flowing fast through social media.
Journalistic researches, in-depth analysis, reports that provide diversity of data, testimonies and chronicles that penetrate the reader into an unknown human experience, are now the main components of the transformed and reinvented printed press.
As the saturation of information on the digital networks is evident, readers feel the need to seek out for other approaches to reality, adjusted to the credibility and reliability that characterizes the exercise of the professional journalism based on the verification of data and a strong link with the truth.
Since the printed newspapers have understood that they’re unable to compete, in regards of time and speed of the transmission of contents, the alternative is to privilege the journalistic genres I have cited above, to create an interpretive context that helps readers to understand the reasons and consequences of the facts, and extract from such subsoil of information a little more light on what our tomorrow could look like, without the biases, manipulations or falsehoods that today cloud the torrent of the digital networks.
This is what we call the “journalism of the day after”, the essential basis of the on-going reinvention of the written press, which allows it to put up with the powerful impacts of the digital age.
– Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 