To survive in the new communications ecosystem, print newspapers have to learn to swim against the tide of the technological forces that drive the success of digital journalism.
Their challenge, now, is to resist two dynamic lines of the digital world: the immediacy of information and the dissemination of false or manipulated news, and compete based on a different model from the one that was its traditional pillar.
By losing the monopoly of information, because no one waits for a printed newspaper in their home to find out about the news, their destiny is to take a leap forward in the task of purifying the digital news stream by offering context and depth to its contents.
It is like “industrializing” the news input based on a more relaxed, analytical and factual product, the same thing that digital ones do to some extent when they transform the news episode into a melting pot of different formats.
In fact, the printed newspapers that in turn created digital editions have learned a lot to manage this diversity of options that technology allows, separating one thing from the other, that is, the traditional culture from the modern one, without subtracting their essences from either. .
That is why the great phenomenon of today is that of the hybrid newsroom, in which the tables that work the two platforms — the paper and the digital one — converge at the same time with different rhythms and demands.
In the end, the main objective is to give the news, without biases that distort it, ensure its veracity, submit it to verification and confrontation tests and offer it, in the case of printed matter, as an elaborated product that contains all its angles and up to its possible repercussions.
In the same way that these journalism laws professionally govern the work of “industrializing” the news input, they also have to ensure that they reach the scope of their digital platforms.
Although, in the latter, the process of reformatting them in audiovisual and textual mode responds more to competitive requirements, to the demands of new audiences and to the necessary innovations required by technologies.
- Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 