At a certain point, due to the Covid pandemic, the contents of the press became necessarily monothematic. The only news we all were seeing was the virus saga, with all its downsides. And of course, we couldn’t have expected less.
Being a new virus, difficult to decode, with unpredictable expansion and magnitude of aftermath, the mystery hooked all kinds of readers and users until their lack of information, doubts, fear and bewilderment got addressed.
Due to the fact that entire populations were confined to their homes and only from there did they manage to contemplate a paralyzed world through audiovisual and digital media, news consumption actually reached new peaks.
Both traditional and digital newspapers made every effort to break the vicious circle of monothematic information and set out to explore all the possible edges of this health catastrophe.
From this effort, a very deep journalism was born, whose main axis rests on investigations and exposures of the alternatives that humans had to recur to in order to survive, plus the deep and radical changes that transformed their daily routines and ways of working.
Here, the press found fertile ground to deploy resources for the hunting of new stories that would offer, beyond the daily dead-count of the virus, suicides or family conflicts, the new life lessons that the pandemic is continuously teaching us.
Taking the pulse of this fatigue, the media quickly created options for relaxation or entertainment, education and specialized content that would help break the monotony and, at the same time, retain the audiences that try to escape from the monothematic news climate.
Regarding the LISTIN DIARIO, we had to appeal to all possible resources, within an unexpected and unique work model, in which most of the staff operated from home, while only a handful were in the newsroom, and like that we were battling monotony.
The accumulated experiences are now challenges and subjects to study before the approach of 2021, with an eye fixated on the horizon of deep and rapid changes, while carrying on our hands the balance of the pros and cons of a post-pandemic journalism.
- Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 