Cultural publication 'flirts with the Dark Side' in Spain

El Pais announces the alliance on its website.

(Updated Aug. 22, 2015; versión en español)

The iconoclastic Spanish culture magazine Jot Down is a strange creature in many ways. At a time when people supposedly read little and do it rapidly, it publishes long interviews and essays.

In an age of minute-by-minute updates and clickbait, Jot Down makes its money by charging about US$16.75 for each copy of its massive 320-page quarterly, which carries only two or three pages of advertising.

Another oddity: its target market is not the famous millennials so sought after by many media but rather more-mature folks in their 40s and 50s. It is an edgy publication that attracts people “who think of themselves as young,” says publisher Angel Fernandez, 44, who co-founded it four years ago.

Marriage of convenience

Surprisingly, it is viable, profitable, and growing. But possibly strangest of all, it has just reached agreement to share its content with one of the media icons of Spain, in fact a symbol of much of what Jot Down criticizes about traditional media, namely El Pais. Ironically, several of the magazine’s contributors were laid off by El Pais during the long economic downturn and have not hesitated to bash their former employer.

Are newspaper brands back? Report from Spain

Rosalia Lloret: People are searching for credible
sources amid an avalanche of information.

Versión en español aquí.

El País is widening its lead as the No. 1 newspaper website in Spain with 7.6 million unique users in June (for comparison, the number is 74 million for the New York Times).

At the same time the newspaper's corporate parent, Prisa, is struggling financially and faced a one-day strike over 200 layoffs at its radio affiliate and employee anger over cuts at its financial daily.

Despite the bad financial news, Prisa's chief digital officer, Rosalía Lloret believes there are signs that El País is strengthening its brand. She made her comments during the recent summer course of la Universidad Complutense de Madrid in El Escorial.

Two-thirds choose the brand

Lloret noted that more than half of the users of El País and its affiliated websites come directly to the site, either by typing in the web address or from a bookmark. That is, they are coming intentionally, not by chance.

With crisis in Spain, El Pais expands globally

Spain is suffering through a newspaper crisis as severe as that in the U.S., and the response of one of its leading newspapers has been to expand into new markets.

El Pais, part of Grupo Prisa, is cutting editorial staff at its headquarters in Madrid, but it just announced an expansion of its coverage of Mexico and Latin America.  The Mexico section will have its own digital front page and six new staff people based in Mexico City. This follows on El Pais's launching of a digital front page for the U.S. as well. For journalists in Spain -- who have seen 7,000 of their peers laid off in the past three years -- the expansion in the Americas has to be a slap in the face. But it has a a cruel commercial logic. 

Newspaper culture still blocks move to digital

Gumersindo Lafuente of El Pais (photo by James Breiner

Versión en español aquí.

The culture war of print vs. digital rages on and continues to block the transformation of the newspaper industry. An incident at Spain's most prestigious daily and a study of 38 U.S. newspapers both made this clearer recently.

At El Pais in Spain, the newsroom protested after Gumersindo Lafuente, the head of digital operations, told a journalism conference that a prime consideration when hiring a journalist should be the number of his or her Twitter followers.

It didn't help that Lafuente and his team were imported two years ago from a failed web operation amid layoffs of print journalists, according to the report in prnoticias.com.

Archives have great potential for traffic, debate, manipulation

A news story from the 2005 archives in which a psychology professor called homosexuality a disease recently rocketed to the top of the most-read list of El Pais, one of Spain's leading newspapers.

The strange incident demonstrated several things: what you produce on the Internet never goes away; in social networks the readers, not the editors, choose what's interesting; ruthless political operatives can manipulate these popularity measures for their own use; and newspapers themselves should more actively control and promote archived stories.

Newsroom integration at El Pais: change the systems to change the culture

Borja Echevarria with El Pais digital desk in the background. (Photo by James Breiner)

Versión en español aquí. 

El Pais is perhaps Spain’s most prestigious newspaper, but its parent company has been suffering financial problems, the print edition has lost readers and it trails its chief competitor in web traffic.

All of these factors have set the stage for the radical changes under way in the newsroom.