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The Spanish-language online media, in English
There’s no arguing that the English-language world sets the agenda in most of the western world when it comes to discussing “new media”. Nothing wrong with this since somebody has to set the agenda, it’s a natural thing.
The only problem is that everybody – and by this I mean both English and non-English speakers – ends up talking about the latest tweak in the New York Times or Jeff Jarvis’ last idea or Cyberjournalist’s most recent post and, by the end of the day, the trackback-driven echo is so loud that the Spanish or Portuguese online world wind-up speaking more about what’s going on in English than in their own languages, and I bet the same goes on in other languages.
Now, it’s fine to write and read about about the ailing US newspaper industry and convergence in this or that British paper, and there is a lot we can all learn from these experiences. However, things are also quite different in many countries. Papers are smaller, fact-checking is laxer and bad salaries are far more common in Argentina, to take one example, than in the US or the UK, so that is not the top issue on our minds.
A second problem with this scenario where we all leach our info off the English-language blogosphere is that the online world in English is strikingly insular when it comes to language. When was the last time any leading blogger or site commented on innovations or trends in non-English speaking online media? (The Editor’s Weblog does not count).
This is not entirely the fault of those English speakers. I am sure Andy Dickenson, Jemima Kiss, Martin Stabe and others would be more than happy to bookmark and write about Soitu.es and other Spanish-language media. It’s just that language barriers are too difficult to overcome. The best way out is for those of us who can muster half-decent English to start talking about what others are unable to.
This leads to a final issue: Does our side of the world have anything interesting to offer English speakers? Isn’t the gap between the leading media in English and it’s counterpart in Spanish too big to even compare one and the other? Yes and no.
As I said a few days ago, there are many aspects in which the online media in Spanish lags well behind the media in English for the simple reason that the later is among the best in the world (I say “among”, because I’m guessing that the Japanese and Korean markets must have some great stuff too). But the Spanish-language media has several interesting things to offer, and several talking points from where to comment and analyse what’s going on, ranging from El Comercio’s Drupal-based CMS and its Star Wars interactive graphic (one of the best I saw, anywhere) to Soitu and the experience of El Tiempo’s API competition.
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The end of blog-like structures in Latin American online papers
It’s over. The idea that the latest news article must be published at the top of a website, thereby giving priority to its visibility rather than to editorial precepts – in true blog style – seems to be agonising in Latin American online papers. The main regional papers are now putting hierarchical structures ahead of the architecture of their sites.
In Argentina, Clarin.com (one of the highest-traffic newspaper websites in the Spanish-speaking world), was the first to go for the sort of website architecture where “most recent” equals “most important.”
Clarin.com was able to transform this blog-style structure into an editorial criteria nobody else could emulate successfully, mainly because, well into the decade, few regional papers were putting their money into the Internet as strongly as Clarín was. As a consequence, there was no way other papers could have news-flows as powerful as Clarin.com’s. Even so, few newspapers had actually dared adopt such an architecture.
A few days ago, I spoke about the subject with Andrés Cavelier. Examples of blog-style presentation of information at high-traffic online Latin American papers can be counted on one hand. They have always been more of an exception than the standard, as occurs elsewhere.
The main papers in the region are playing a different game now. Save the recently re-designed Peru21.pe, part of the El Comercio Group (my employer), and which I personally believe to be beautifully designed, especially because it connects with the public who read this paper in the land of the Incas, few papers are going down the blog-style road.
About two years ago, Argentina’s Perfil.com went live with the reverse chronological design to present news stories, but it did so with a twist: although Perfil.com uses a blog-like hierarchical architecture, the most important story – always the top one in this kind of structure – is not necessarily the latest.
Instead, Perfil has always published dozens of stories a day, but reserves the top spots on the site for those it considers to be most important editorially-speaking. This means Perfil uses a design architecture the gives priority to the latest but does something else. In my opinion, this is difficult to use and hard to understand for a user. Sites should make up their mind. In my time at Perfil.com I tried, unsuccessfully, to push through some changes. I guess they will understand sooner than later, and will change.
A few weeks ago, I noted that Clarin.com is doing the same as Perfil. Previously, when visiting Clarin.com, a user could expect to see the latest news, the “most recent thing that happened”, at the top. The reading “terms and conditions” have now changed and there is no longer a fixed rule. The way articles are presented now varies constantly now. Sometimes, ones visits the site and finds the most recently published story on top, in line with what Clarín did for years. On other occasions, the top story is whatever is most important in the view of the paper.
Argentina’s La Nación, Colombia’s El Tiempo and Peru’s El Comercio are three examples of hierarchy in news-story importance that offer the best information and usability architectures in regional news sites.
In fact, almost all high traffic news sites in Latin America offer content based on editorial precepts and not necessarily on time of publication. Terra is probably one of the clearest examples in this sense.
Of course, examples abound of sites that present their contents based on importance while using architectures that are far from good.
Chile, a regional leader in all matters-digital (if not “the leader”), has a digital divide envied by its neighbours and enjoys deep-reaching and complex usability among even average users. But the main news websites do not stand out with their design, be it LaTercera, La Cuarta or El Mercurio. Montevideo’s El País would also fit into this group, as do the Venezuelan, Paraguayan and Bolivian online newspapers. Further north, Mexico’s El Universal appears to be one of the clearest and best organized in the region.
The era of the “blogger style presentation of information” in Latin American online papers seems to have ended. Many news sites simply know they need to offer more complex interactions and services to their users, and to make unparalleled efforts to offer information visually. I wouldn’t be surprised if in little time the main regional papers start integrating social network systems and deep-reaching personalization for users. Mainly because, they are starting to grasp that the age of “all things massive” has ended and audiences demand multiple offers of information and services. It would be impossible to meet these demands without having the right architecture to back these services.
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Labs and data visualisation at La Nación
The Spanish-language online media lag well behind their English counterparts as far as software development and innovation in the presentation of information goes. Money is not the issue, since the likes of El País and El Mundo in Spain, Clarín in Argentina, El Tiempo in Colombia and El Comercio in Peru could surely set up in-house labs if they wished to do so.
The leading online papers have their share of good multimedia content and production: Clarín, El País and El Comercio, for example, all have good, even great, interactive presentations. But nobody seems eager to break new ground in other aspects of online production, let alone go up against world-class trendsetters. The concept of Labs and APIs like those of the BBC, The Telegraph, The New York Times, NPR, MTV.com and Reuters are non-existent among Spanish-world media.
Lately, La Nación, Argentina’s second most read paper both on paper and online, seems willing to change this. A few weeks ago the paper made public its “Labs” – although they don’t have a domain – and presented the first product, a neat visualisation of related stories (actually it’s a “People who read this, also read this” feature).
As a Flash-based swarm that interlinks stories, the feature may not be as complex as the South African Mail & Guardian’s Newsswarm, but still deserves a close look.
This is how it works. La Nación puts a static image of the swarm at the foot of all stories published originally in the print edition (online only content does not have swarms).
The image in turn serves as a link to the actual “People who read this….” visualisation, which is formed by several interlinked bubbles (here’s an example).
The visualisation is simple. For starters it does not even have its own URL. But it does have several other interesting features: each bubble is a story and includes the name of the story, a link to the story, the number of comments on the story and a “+” sign. Click on the plus-sign and you see what articles were read by whoever read the “bubble” in question, thereby linking to a new set of bubbles and extending the network.
The visualisation is little more than a treat for the eye, but indicates a willingness by La Nación to try out new features, to look for new ways to present information. Kudos to them, given the shortage of innovation the Spanish-speaking online press. What remains to be seen is if “La Nación Labs” will grow into something bigger and public, something outsiders can interact with. If it does, it would bring much needed freshness to the online press in Spanish, and may even move others to raise their game.
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El Comercio goes mobile: Blackberry, iPhone
The iPhone and Blackberry versions of El Comercio, the Peruvian newspaper, have been online for several days now. They both have an extremely simple interface and can be accessed at m.elcomercio.com.pe. The type of phone is automatically recognized when a user access the site, so there is no need to fidget around with set-ups and the likes.
Unlike some other publications who offer text only versions for mobiles, all article photos are included in El Comercio’s mobile versions.
iPhoners have an option to install a shortcut button with the logo of El Comercio, which would make their iPhone look like this:
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A blog to inteview President Cristina Kirchner
Quiero entrevistar a Cristina is a new Perfil.com blog where two relatively young political reporters write about their efforts to interview President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – neither of them is over 25 and they have a combined working experience of under three years.
One of the reporters, Payito Blanco, works for Perfil.com and the other, Ana Clara Pérez Cotten, works for its sister publication Noticias, Argentina’s top current affairs magazine (Perfil.com and Noticias share the same floor, without even a wall standing between them). The pair’s chances of interviewing Fernández de Kirchner are as slim as they get because she doesn’t speak to publications owned by the Perfil publishing house due to its criticism of the administration (her leading officials follow suit).
The idea is to approach the blog with a lighthearted touch. The feat is nearly impossible, so Payito and Ana Clara believe they may as well do it with a bit of humour even though they do their work as seriously as possible. They have a three month deadline.
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Fiction blogs and reality blog shows in online papers
On the web, the labelling of “literary genres” seems to be unimportant, sentenced as genres are to mutate and to be remixed. “Online fiction” is a whole constellation of unexplored opportunities.
The famed “blog novels” where extensively discussed in recent years and gave place to many opinions in favour of them and many against them. But they were always part of a “literary” genre.
“Reality blog shows” have also proven to have an unprecedented ability to draw attention. Two formulas created at El Comercio, “Busco novio” y “Busco novia” (“I’m Looking for a Boyfriend” and “I’m Looking for a Girlfriend”), both subsequently copied by Clarín, are points in case.
Will mobile content change the scenario and lead to a distribution of fiction never seen before? Maybe. But before that happens, we have film shorts. Queinsania is a step in that direction.
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Geographical location of news
Every week, we offer a new map on the homepage of El Comercio.com.pe. Each week the theme of the map changes – today’s is about recent airplane tragedies. We work with Google Maps.
Maps are an extremely powerful tool that allows us to re-write stories and set contexts for them, showing precedents, historical records and the evolution of events. With maps, information can be presented in a visually attractive way. Plus, maps are understandable at a glance and show at lot in little space. They are simple and go to the heart of stories.
Some other maps published by El Comercio recently were Circuses in the capital, Peruvian footballers playing abroad, Noise pollution in Lima, Wi-Fi areas in Lima and Earthquakes in Perú. There are many more, always published right under the podcasts and on top of the blogs.
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Star Wars @ Perú
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Peru21.pe: producing software tools
A few days ago, just before Perú21.pe redesigned, I visited Guillermo Culell and his team at El Comercio in Lima, where I met César Soplín Sánchez, web development chief.
César and I spoke for over an hour about the stuff they are doing with the sites they mange, but we spoke mostly about the development behind Peru21.pe – which works on a version of Drupal based on a combination of open source packages: Linux + Apache + Lighttpd + PHP + MySQL.
César has commented details the redesign on his own blog, Backdraft (Spanish). The redesigned Peru21.pe went public on Wednesday, the same day Le Monde made its own latest redesign public.
(A quick footnote: Peru 21 is one of several papers owned by the El Comercio holding, as is El Comercio, Perú’s biggest paper. Guillermo Culell is head of all digital content at the holding.)
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Perón’s blog at Perfil.com
Even though he’s been dead for 24 years, Juan Doming Perón starts to rant today on his own blog at Perfil.com. One of his first blows is aimed at The Simpsons, where a character called him a dictator and he retaliates by calling Matt Groening a “gorilla” – insults don’t get harder than that coming from a Peronist (traditionally “gorilla” has been the word used by Peronists to define their rightist critics).
El Blog de Perón is basically a satirical take on history as a means to comment current affairs with a touch of humour. It’s written by a 21 year old Perfil.com reporter.
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A plug-in to analyse presidential speeches
Palabra presidencial is a Wordpress-based blog at Perfil.com that gathers all of Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s speeches since she was sworn into office on December 10, 2007. The blog automatically ranks the words Fernández uses according to their frequency so as to see what themes she recurs into most in her speeches and what her main concerns are. The name “Palabra presidencial” literally means “Presidential word” or, more appropiatly, “Presidential talk”.
To rank words, the blog uses a plug-in for WordPress developed in-house at Perfil.com. Each entry, or post, is a speech and at the bottom of each entry are the words most frequently used in her speeches. On the sidebar, a tag cloud shows a summary of the most frequent words (the cloud can also be accessed here).
