14,500 friends lay out cash for aggressive journalism

Amid all the bad news about business models for high-quality journalism, eldiario.es ("The Daily") in Spain shows that good journalism can be good business.

Escolar: "Journalism is a public service that has to be profitable"

Its founder and CEO, Ignacio Escolar, just announced that the publication finished 2015 with revenues of US$ 2.6 million, up 33% on the year, and a profit after taxes of US$ 235,000.

Although the digital publication is free, its 14,500 "partners" (socios) pay at least US$ 66 a year to get access to the news a few hours ahead of everyone else as well as ad-free pages, discounts, and invitations to events.

Those partners brought in about a third of eldiario.es's revenues, "And they allow us to remain independent," Escolar said in his announcement. Although advertising brings in more than the partner revenue, no single advertiser comes close to bringing in what the partners do, so none has enough leverage to influence editorial decisions, he said.

Versión en español

An exercise on usability puts theory into practice

At the end of a semester-long course in digital journalism, I asked my students at the University of Navarra in Spain to say what they thought was the most interesting or useful part of the course. The survey was anonymous, so I give it some credibility.

The question was open-ended. The second-most-mentioned item was a class exercise I gave them in which they had to judge the navigability, usability, transparency, and other factors of any website they liked. This group exercise put theory into practice and developed their analytical skills.

(No. 1 was the video interviews with digital media entrepreneurs from Latin America. They are in Spanish and can be seen on my YouTube channel. Accompanying text in English is available elsewhere on this blog.)

The exercise took 45 minutes and followed a 45-minute lecture on the theory of Internet design, especially as it applied to taking advantage of mobile and social platforms.

First, I told the students that they were going to do an ungraded analysis of various characteristics of a website or application. They could do it in groups of three or four. I showed the students a list of about a dozen websites that I knew were popular but told them they could also choose any that they liked.