The moving bridges between the printed to digital

To connect the different formats and paces within the transition from the printed to the digital platform, it is necessary to walk, very carefully, over the moving bridges that unite them.

The current pandemic has made some cross these bridges very quickly, through the path of no return. They migrated their paper editions onto digital, without taking the catharsis of culture and mentality change among their staff.

Those who still struggle to preserve their legacy and brand influence are going back and forth across these bridges of transformations, under the dilemma of deciding whether or not to make a final leap.

From the printed to the digital, they transfer the theorized and ideal rules of a professional journalism, even the tools and assets required to produce such high-quality and meaningful content, but no more than that.

The other way around, there wouldn’t be quite the iteration because these platforms’ parameters are different, in almost every way. The great opportunity the digital provides is the paid subscriptions model, with the loss of advertising revenue is really cushioned.

The digital is online 24 hours a day, its lifespan is basically infinite, its greatest demand is the speed and continuity with which it updates any content, and its informative priorities are highly subordinate to the interest of huge and diverse audiences.

But within the baggage of data-check and interactions with the digital audiences, newspaper companies have found new trends, such as higher preference for the short and easy-to-understand textual format, as well as the multiple angles displayed for any news episode, which serve as inputs for investigations or deep reports.

In the same manner, they’ve learned more about the general audiovisual culture and improved their designs based on the reception that these assets have on the digital platforms. This is why we’re forced to rethink our contents, so as not to simply reproduce packages of already known facts, but instead, be highly creative in the ways we recycle them, enhance their contextualization, this projecting them into the future.

• Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.