It’s undeniable that the readership of the printed newspapers is declining progressively while the digital platforms absorb the largest number of users who want to learn about the everyday news and their evolution throughout the day.
This phenomenon is the biggest challenge that newspapers companies face today, which have forced the inevitable swift of the internal dynamics of traditional writing formats, so that we can look for new ways to attract, interest and preserve readers. And many of us are already achieving this.
The key is to fill the gaps that occur when there’s a fluid coverage of stories that are soon divided or worn out on digital media, suggesting a reconstruction of the facts through added diverse sources and contrasted versions that help better contextualize the integrity of the story.
Accepting that audiences are now way greater in the digital platform than in the printed, the world’s leading newspapers have adopted the “digital first” strategy, which involves focusing on the planning, searching and dissemination of content online, which to a large extent, chains with the next-day offer of the newspaper versions.
Thanks to the studies of preference of topics, hours of consumption and strategies of spreading the news, the printed media have refocused their objectives to bet on quality content of depth and importance, such as investigative journalism, deep data analysis, the opinions, interpretations, or the singular narratives that an interesting chronicle or a report can represent.
This general knowledge of what the audiences do prefer is obtained from a continuous measurement of the digital behavior of users, and on this basis these platforms prepare a menu for their short-term contents, not necessarily those for the next day, trying to fill the gaps of the unknown angles of one or more stories that flowed quick through digital networks and thus refreshing them.
Betting on “the digital first” does not mean neglecting the powerful base of the purified and proven contents that are professionally managed with the criteria of a journalism of quality.
This refocus of contents has been the best response to the challenge, because although there’s been a loss of subscribers or readers for the newspapers, hence also advertising, it’s not untrue that they’re compensating this decline through the digital approval, through more subscriptions plans for exclusive contents, which is a trendy business model that keeps guaranteeing their survival and powerful level of influence in society.
– Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 