The printed newspapers that have cultivated, for decades, a high degree of credibility based on their seriousness, truthfulness, quality and usefulness of contents, are the ones that now have the greatest benefits within the newer digital ecosystem, not only in terms of audience but also in income.
I could quote many examples now, though I already have done so in many previous reflections, where the credibility factor, closely associated with that of antiquity, is the key to explaining this phenomenon.
Since the digital news websites got widespread, the free access and consumption of content caused many to think that the useful life of printed newspapers was about to end, but it hasn’t been so.
After traumatic experiences in which many traditional newspapers didn’t know whether to fully bet on the innovation and transformation to the new multimedia model, so as not to abandon their role as the grail of the diffusion of news (which prevailed for a long time until the irruption of the internet changed this), the picture is now different.
The biggest trustworthy brands that saw and took the opportunity from the digital sphere to maximize their audiences, have now achieved, based on their offers of quality content, their severing from fake news and other malicious manipulations, thus attracted digital subscribers who pay to receive deep-digging articles that follow up relevant topics published on the newspapers. So this phenomenon has changed the principle of gratuity that once prevailed at full scale everywhere.
That’s to say, they now monetize or receive increasing income from ads, paid subscriptions and new modalities of offerings and audiovisual content, as well as from the added values incorporated into their contents, causing these contents to be published in different ways according to the platform and types of audiences that come after them.
The news doesn’t remain in a single textual format, but is seasoned with applications of artificial intelligence, audiovisual innovations and varied narratives to be reproduced in distinctive ways on the digital platforms, with the advantage that when applying these methods they achieve a much greater precision on identifying the tastes of their users and on how to interact with them.
No wonder that the great analyst of this transformation process, my friend professor Rosenthal Alves, in a dialogue that we held in the framework of the fifth SIP-Connect Conference in Miami, affirmed that the trust of the audiences and the news reports of high-quality are very closely linked to the revival of the excellent exercise of journalism, which has characterized the traditional press for decades, which has been the only one to pay the appropiate respect to the golden rules of the informing, educating and entertaining profession.
– Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 