Podcasts and storytellings have become two essential pillars for digital journalism, opening the way for the presentation of the news at a time when audiences choose to “see” and “hear” stories, rather than undergo an extensive reading session.
Podcasts are stories told orally, preferably supported by sounds that allow the listener to form a better idea of the environment being described.
The radio stations, which have been losing audience as well as the television and printed newspapers, have discovered through the podcasts a salvation ground to renew and retain the masses of audiences.
The storytellings are, equally, narratives that rely more on visual resources, such as video and dynamic or still images, accompanied by short texts, to offer in a tight synthesis as thorough of an history as possible, while also communicating ways to solve a common issue, the reconstruction or contextualization of other events of the past, biographies of important characters of a country, and such.
It is no coincidence that both tools have been excellently exploited by the large printed newspapers, which have assumed a radical transformation on their journalistic model and have applied it to digital platforms too, achieving excellent new experiences and income.
This is where the new media ecosystem is truly reflected, on which the news are offered based on the characteristics and preferences of the digital users, by applying redacting techniques accordingly to these different types of audiences whom access the web.
At the same time, three different platforms converge: the television, radio and written press, a miracle that can only occur over the digital sphere thanks to the technologies that have emerged in this Internet era, accelerating the speed of information and widening its global reach.
To achieve the best use of these sources, multimedia platforms have to focus on updating and upgrading their technologies, enhancing the structures of their editorial and marketing rooms, reviewing their advertising strategies and, above all, a preparation of the human staff, which at the very moment is the biggest challenge because this implies replacing or adjusting their mental “chips”, to give course for new ways to tell the stories, taking into account that nowadays the news are continuous and neverending.
– Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 