After months of extracting and analyzing information from parliamentary websites, documents, and other public records, Demócrata — a recently launched news outlet focused on Spanish government and public policy — published a series finding that in general Parliamentary sessions, the ones that get the most attention, men gave nearly two-thirds of the speeches. Women were underrepresented on congressional committees related to “state matters” like defense, economic affairs, and budgeting, but make up the majority of members on committees focused on equality, gender violence, and children’s rights.

Stories like these are what Demócrata aims to provide news consumers in Spain: Data-based journalism that helps to holds politicians accountable. That series, for example, included a methodology of how the journalists obtained the data, organized it, and decided what to include. (For instance: “Participations of less than one minute duration have also been left out. They mostly deal with oaths to take possession of seats, questions of order, requests to speak…They accounted for less than 1% of the total interventions collected.”)

“It brings a lot of transparency to the legislative process,” said Pilar Velasco, a veteran investigative journalist and Demócrata’s editorial director. “When the noise of politics occupies the entire news cycle, it generates a space for opacity that isn’t reported on.”

The site fills a gap in Spain, which will hold its general election in December. “It’s a good year to launch a news outlet with a focus on politics and policies,” said Eduardo Suárez, the head of editorial for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “[Demócrata’s] value proposition is to report on public policies and Parliamentary debates in much more detail than mainstream publications. Newspapers in Spain are much more focused on politics than on public policies, and this might provide an opening for a publication like Demócrata, whose goal is to cover those policy debates in a more nuanced and granular way.”

Demócrata is the country’s only news outlet that specifically covers Parliament and public policy from an accountability lens daily, according to the Iberian Digital Media Map by Iberifier, a European Commission–funded initiative. (Another initiative in Spain, Civio, was founded in 2012 and focuses on data-powered watchdog reporting on the environment, healthcare, and the justice system.)

Demócrata has a team of seven. It’s funded by an initial investment from its board of directors and from advertising, though Velasco wants to expand into sponsorships, paid events, and subscriptions. The site has multiple sections: Agenda (an archive of the weekly newsletter that summarizes what’s happening in Parliament in the coming week), Actualidad (updates and play-by-play of laws and amendments), Políticas (news on proposed and ongoing policies), Quieren Influir (economy stories), and an analysis and opinion section. The site’s initial target audience is political insiders and politics junkies, but Velasco said the stories are written so that general audiences will be able to understand them as well. The Agenda newsletter has around 2,000 subscribers.

Demócrata’s goal is to use its data expertise to tell stories that other outlets can’t. Leading up to the outlet’s launch, the data team spent months building the software it uses to scrape and analyze data that, while technically public, is disorganized and difficult to parse. When the country’s far-right party, Vox, called for a vote of no confidence against the current ruling socialist party this past March, Demócrata published an analysis of Vox’s legislative footprint in the current parliamentary session, finding that the party has so far failed to pass any laws.

Velasco, who was an investigative reporter for Spain’s largest radio network Cadena SER, where she investigated political corruption cases, experienced first-hand the challenges of telling data stories for radio, where it can be difficult to delve into numbers. As a 2018 Yale World Fellow and one of the co-founders of Spain’s Investigative Journalists Association, she also saw American sites like Politico cultivated audiences for in-depth political reporting. When Demócrata founder David Córdova (who is also the director of a public affairs consulting firm, Vinces) approached her for the project, she saw it as a chance to experiment and try something new. (Demócrata is editorially independent from Vinces.)

“The mission is permanent scrutiny of institutions,” Velasco said. “Through continuous supervision of the work of politicians and legislators, information transparency, we believe, can strengthen institutional credibility. [The news] that comes to us from Parliament is often the political discussion, statements, politicians fighting with each other, and press conferences. But the legislative branch is a pillar of the State where many things happen that regulate life in society. It is what orders us and regulates us. And all of that wasn’t being covered in Spain with the specialization it deserves.”

One of Velasco’s goals in the next few months is to continue the work on a platform, already in progress, that will monitor updates to every piece of legislation in Parliament in real time. Down the line, she hopes to launch a chatbot that can answer reader questions. Demócrata has also partnered with Political Watch (a group of academics who monitor Parliament), design studio Flat26, and the think tank Ethosfera, which is helping Demócrata with its own ethics and transparency policies.

“We sort of feel like a hub for people who already had innovative ideas about parliamentary information,” Velasco said. “We get a lot of pitches for [collaborations]. When that you’re a small outlet, to grow you have to put springboards in places to get to the next level, and you can’t get there on your own.”

El País closed out 2022 with more then 266,000 paying subscribers — 227,000 of whom opted for digital-only subscriptions, according to the paper’s parent company Prisa.

More and more news outlets continue to turn to their readers for support, and that often means diversifying offerings beyond just the news. With the intention of building community for its subscribers outside of journalism, last November El País launched its first reading club. In five months, the club has grown to more than 1,100 members scattered mostly throughout Spain and Latin America.

Any paying subscriber can join the reading club. They get added to the subscribers-only Facebook group where they can talk to El País journalists, the authors they’re reading, and each other.

According to Andrea Nogueira Calvar, the editor leading the Facebook group, staffers at the paper’s culture section and its weekly arts and literature supplement Babelia had been kicking around the idea of a reading club for several years. But the demands of the daily news cycle and the day-to-day needs of the newsroom always pushed the idea to the back burner.

Reading or book clubs are hardly a new concept, though who did it first is debatable depending on the parameters you use. Some of the first records of American reading groups date back to a ship heading to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. Today, reading groups exist in a variety of formats (hello, BookTok and Bookstagram) and can be organized by genre, location, or other shared values, identities, and interests. In the United States, having your book chosen by Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon’s book club is a near-guaranteed way to become a bestseller. National news outlets like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others all have their own book clubs and reading communities.

In Spain, reading clubs gained prominence in the 1980s amid a new investment in public libraries. Blanca Calvo, who was the director of the Library of Guadalajara in Spain at the time, launched a reading club as a way to attract new public library patrons and encourage reading.

When the pandemic first forced people to stay home in 2020, Nogueira said an overall trend emerged of people reading more in their newfound free time. El País had hosted events and gatherings for subscribers before, but launching the reading club in 2022 was an experiment that proved that not only had the reading habit stuck, but that people were also looking for a forum to slow down and to connect with others over literature.

“Two things came together,” Nogueira said. “We have a very active community that highly values the culture section and Babelia. And after the pandemic, the need to stop and dedicate time to oneself was reclaimed. It’s also about dedicating time to reading and to the analysis of reading, because in the end what the club gives you, as a reader, is support from other readers.”

About once a month, a team of El País editors, led by Babelia editor-in-chief Guillermo Altares, announces what the next book will be in the Facebook group. They take into account the members’ interests in certain genres, the themes of the book (so as not to repeat the same themes in different books), the availability of the author to participate in the Facebook group and the in-person events, and accessibility of the books in both Spain and Latin America.

For book club members in Spain, they can enter a raffle to attend an in-person, interactive event with the book’s author. Then, twenty raffle winners have three weeks to read the book before the event (finishing the book is heavily encouraged). Readers outside of Spain or anyone who didn’t win a raffle ticket can watch a livestream of the event in the Facebook group. Each event is held in a different Spanish city at a local FNAC, a European bookstore chain. El País also publishes its own story covering the event the following day.

Throughout the month, members of the group can post discussion points, questions, and their own thoughts about the readings, and talk to each other. The team announces the book and shares some supplemental articles, but Nogueira has noticed that the members do their own research and share it with the group. In five months, the club, despite its growth, has managed to foster a tight-knit community that encourages critical reading.

“We were reading a book that was a bit complex in terms of structure and plot,” Nogueira said. “Sometimes there were readers who got lost and then would share it in the group, and some readers would help others to follow. One would say to the other, for example, ‘Hold on a little longer, you’ll soon understand everything.’”

With the hunch that the reading club might take off, the team’s first pick to kick it off was a risk: poetry.

It’s not the most popular genre, Nogueira said, but the star power of the author may have helped reel people in and kept them reading. The first book the club read was Un año y tres meses (One Year and Three Months), a book of poems by Luis García Montero, a renowned Spanish writer and the president of the Cervantes Institutes, which promotes the study of Spanish language and literature. The book is based on the last few months of the life of his wife, writer Almudena Grandes, who passed away in 2021.

“Poetry gives us answers that we need beyond technology or science,” García Montero told the reading club in November. “That’s what I’ve been looking for in this book.”

The reading club is now on its fifth book, Roma soy yo (I Am Rome), a narrative biography of Julius Caesar by Santiago Posteguillo. The event with Posteguillo is slated for March 30 at an FNAC in Valencia.

Nogueira said one of the project’s challenges is keeping as many members happy as possible. With every book, she said, there have been readers who weren’t interested in the subject, found the reading too difficult, or gave up.

“I believe in not disappointing the readers and offering them what they expect from us,” Nogueira said. “When we [as people] decide to join a book club or a group or a community like the one at El País, we all go in with illusions. The difficult thing is to maintain that illusion over time so that we are not disappointed. That is the biggest challenge — to keep surprising them with the books and living up to what they expect to be offered.”

And like any other attentive, engaged readers, El País book club members are quick to point out grammatical errors, whether they’re in the readings, El País stories, or in the Facebook posts. But, it comes from a good place, Nogueira said.

“They are very demanding, which is fine, because I think that happens when you really feel that you are part of something, you feel you are in a position to make demands,” Nogueira said. “I think it’s great because we’ve managed to create a community that feels part of El País, which I think is the goal of any newspaper.”

Co-founders Ana Ormachea, Luis Quevedo, Pablo Juanarena, and Angel Jimenez launched Cuonda, a podcasting platform to help Spanish-language podcasts get standardized metrics for their shows to secure sponsorship and cross-promotion deals.

Seven years later, Ormachea is the chief digital officer for Prisa Radio, in charge of the audio-first strategy for the world’s biggest Spanish-language audio production company. Prisa Radio is one wing of Prisa, a Spanish media conglomerate that also owns daily newspaper El País, sports daily AS, news radio station Cadena SER, El HuffPost, and Podium, a platform that, like Cuonda, supports podcasts by helping them find advertising deals and revenue.

These investments in Spanish-language audio are starting to pay off. Daily news podcasts in Spain are gaining momentum, according to a new analysis of the country’s audio landscape.

Researchers from Spain’s Miguel Hernández University of Elche in Spain looked at the 14 top daily original news podcasts on the Spanish podcast discovery platform iVoox and on Apple Podcasts. Of the 14, 10 are produced by Spanish news outlets like El País, El Mundo, El Diario, and Cadena SER. The remaining four are produced by independent podcasters.

In Spain, 41% of the population reported listening to a podcast at least once a month in 2021. Spanish media companies first started getting into daily news podcasts in 2018, releasing short news bulletins for smart speakers, the report’s authors — Miguel Carvajal, Cristian-Ramón Marín-Sanchiz, and Carlos J. Navas — write. Over the last couple of years, the country’s legacy news outlets have launched more in-depth news podcasts, following in the footsteps of shows like The New York Times’ The Daily and The Guardian’s Today in Focus. The researchers interviewed the founders, creators, or hosts for each podcast and asked them about their business models.

“Finding the product/market fit is more important than creating a big production in terms of sound design and script,” Marín Sanchiz told me in an email, adding, “When trying to make users build a habit, it is vital to intertwine the podcast with their routines…it’s a format that rewards a bit of journalistic intuition, as it’s almost impossible to build podcasts to just fit searches and platform algorithms.”

The report doesn’t formally compare Spanish news podcasts to those from other countries, but Carvajal said that half of the podcasts — including ones produced by legacy news organizations — had just one person working on them. El País’ podcast team is the largest and an outlier in the sample, with 10 people working on its daily podcast Hoy en El País. Eight of the 14 podcasts in the study launched between 2021 and 2022, mostly from mainstream outlets that were either launching or revamping their subscription businesses.

“The podcast sphere in Spain has been [historically] characterized by pioneers from outside the media industry, mostly entrepreneurs focused on niches, and monetization was always [an afterthought],” Carvajal told me in an email. “On the distribution side, Apple Podcasts never had the weight that it did in places like the United States due to low usage of Apple products…It wasn’t until Podium and Cuonda launched that there was an explosion of journalistic, narrative podcasts. The Serial phenomenon, the [success of] daily news podcasts in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the increase in podcast consumption in Spain woke up journalistic producers.”

Listenership varies widely among the 14 podcasts, and the researchers noted that the survey respondents had a “negative view” of the tools and data available to understand podcast audiences (though this isn’t a problem unique to Spain). The producers of the independent podcasts, however, reported their listenership as being largely on par with that of the podcasts from major news outlets.

“The daily news podcasts in international media tend to deal with immediate, current events, but they also delve into long-term or evergreen issues,” Carvajal said. “In that sense, they are similar to the niche podcasts we chose that deal with topics relevant to their communities.”

Marketing Online, a niche podcast about the marketing industry launched in 2014 by Joan Boluda, reported 65,000 listens per episode, while Hoy en El País by El País (launched in 2022) and La ContraCrónica by independent journalist and creator Fernando Díaz Villanueva (launched in 2016) each reported 50,000 listens per episode.

The study shows that podcasters have different goals in getting into the audio industry: major media outlets are focused on building trust and personal relationships with listeners and reaching new audiences, while independent creators tend to focus on carving out space for themselves in their niche in a sustainable way.

All are interested and focused on audience and business growth and sustainability, though revenue data was not included in the study. So far, podcasts have been helpful to national newspapers as they bolster their subscription offerings and create new revenue streams, mainly through sponsorship and advertising. Independent podcasts have more diversified revenue streams, which include sponsorships, programmatic advertising, corporate services, among others. Mixx.io, a daily newsletter and podcast about tech that works with Cuonda, for example, reported €45,000 in annual revenue from sponsorships, while La ContraCrónica has 3,000 patrons on Patreon in addition to revenue from advertising, affiliate linking, and selling merchandise.

You can read the full study here.

Google says the loss of Google News hurt Spanish publishers, and there’s evidence to back that up. A 2017 study found, for instance, that “the shutdown of Google News reduces overall news consumption by about 20% for treatment users, and it reduces page views on publishers other than Google News by 10%.”

Last November, Spain overturned the 2014 law and instead signed on to a European Union copyright directive that lets publishers negotiate their agreements directly with platforms. The new directive still contains a snippet tax, but “the right to restrict such links is at least waivable,” explained Felix Reda, an affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and a former member of the European Parliament who focused on copyright law. “Publishers are free to charge news aggregators and search engines who want to link to their press articles using snippets, but they are also free to allow links free of charge.” As a result, Google News no longer has to negotiate with every individual publisher it links to in Spain.

Separately, on Tuesday, Google reached an agreement with France’s government to negotiate with French publishers over payments for links to their content.

Founded by Laura Zommer of Chequeado in Argentina and Clara Jiménez Cruz of Maldita.es in Spain (both are fact-checking organizations), The idea for the venture emerged when Jiménez started noticing that misinformation in Spanish targeting U.S. Latinos was also reaching Spanish speakers in Spain. She figured that the misinformation must have made its way to Argentina too, so she reached out to Zommer.

“We’ve been seeing in Spanish-speaking countries in the past five to 10 years that misinformation travels in a different way and very often has specific topics targeting specific communities,” Jiménez said. “So at Maldita, we thought maybe all these things that we’ve learned over the years can be applicable in the U.S. and we can launch [a] fact-checking project there for Spanish speaking communities that can also benefit our own communities in our own regions. Because we see that this information has no borders, this misinformation fabricated in the U.S. comes to Spain and to Latin America, and misinformation fabricated in Spain and Latin America is probably reaching the U.S. as well.”

Jiménez and Zommer also pointed out that Big Tech companies focus their efforts and resources on combatting misinformation in English, even though misinformation on social platforms is a problem in many languages, including Spanish. That means smaller, sometimes non-profit fact-checking outlets like Maldita.es and Chequeado shoulder the responsibility of fact-checking in Spanish.

Zommer noted that when the Plandemic video came out and went viral, Facebook linked in English to the World Health Organization’s website. But with the Spanish version of the video, Facebook linked to a group called “Médicos por la verdad” (Doctors for Truth), which disseminates misinformation about issues related to the coronavirus.

“One of our approaches here is thinking if we manage [to get] platforms and the companies to put attention into Spanish-language misinformation in the U.S., that is going to benefit our regions and our languages in the long term,” Jiménez said.

Factchequeado, a team of five, is a service journalism project and its model is based on collaboration. It partners with English- and Spanish-language publications in the U.S. that want to republish its fact-checks and explainers. In return, Factchequeado asks that the organizations help them reach broader audiences and learn more about their news and information consumption habits by sharing its WhatsApp chatbot number. So far, Factchequeado’s partners are Conecta Arizona, Conexión Migrante, Documented, El Detector, Enlace Latino NC, FactCheck.org, La Esquina, MediaWise, PolitiFact, and Telemundo’s Verifica.

Factchequeado determines what to debunk with two factors: virality and level of danger. Its team won’t cover something that only one person forwarded them on WhatsApp if the reach of the content in question is low because doing so could lead to amplification. It will also focus on misinformation that surfaces in times of crisis, social movements, and elections. Since its launch, Factchequeado has covered cryptocurrency scams and how to protect yourself from them, fake polls about Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, and what will happen to abortion access if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

Spanish speakers in the U.S., of course, aren’t a monolith. Jiménez and Zommer know that different communities in different regions have all kinds of interests and consumption habits, and that WhatsApp is commonly used among Spanish speakers around the world. In Factchequeado’s pilot year, they want to quantify that information more and understand where certain narratives come from, how they get to certain communities, and what the takeaways from those findings are in order to better combat misinformation in Spanish. Then they can show how tech companies answer misinformation and disinformation in Spanish differently than they do in English, Zommer said.

But to get all that information, building relationships with news consumers and social media users is key.

“One of the approaches that Maldita and Chequeado have taken throughout their time is the idea of building trust by doing the public a service,” Jiménez said. “What we do on a daily basis is listen to the audiences, understand what their needs are and try to answer them. Once they trust us, we can start [giving them] other kinds of information that is not necessarily the one that they [came to us for].”

Factchequeado plans to experiment with different formats to reach users as well, something that Chequeado and Maldita already do. Many of Factchequeado’s stories start with, “if you only have a few minutes, read this” and a few bullets that summarize the piece. Most people likely don’t have or want to spend the time reading 2,000 word articles, but they do have 20 seconds to understand that something is false. They’ll test out shorter pieces, images, short videos and audio files to see what what resonates most with its users. Its tone gives more “friend telling you something at the bar” vibes instead of “journalist trying to explain the world at you,” Jiménez said.

“We as journalists often [face] pieces of misinformation that we might not think are super important or that they’re going to make us win a Pulitzer,” Jiménez said. “But they’re the ones that build trust within communities because you answer the questions that they have and afterwards, they will stay for the rest.”

The study collected data from 12 countries that have varied rankings in the United Nations Gender Inequality Index. Those countries are: Kenya, South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the United States, and Brazil. Kenya and Spain were new additions to the 2021 study.

Only 22% of the top editors across 240 major outlets in 12 markets are women, according to a new factsheet by Craig T. Robertson @MeeraSelva1 & @rasmus_kleis

Markets covered:
Read herehttps://t.co/G6nGJM84Yw
Findings in thread #IWD2021 pic.twitter.com/rvIr3iz5ly

— Reuters Institute (@risj_oxford) March 8, 2021

(It’s worth noting, as we did last year, that the UN Index is not without its critics; for example, it includes as inputs numbers, like maternal mortality rates, that are deeply intertwined with a country’s relative wealth, not just its gender standards.)

The study surveyed the top 10 TV, radio, print, and online news outlets in each country, totaling about 240, though it doesn’t disclose the names of the news organizations included or the editors.

Just 22% of the 180 top editors across the 240 outlets studied are women even though 40% of journalists in the 12 countries are women. There was no change among the 10 countries that were studied last year, meaning that 23% of top editors in the previous sampling were women. In every country except South Africa, the majority of top editors are men. In Japan, no outlet included in the study has a female editor.

The report concluded that despite the fact that 2020 forced a reckoning, especially in the United States, about the lack of diversity, inclusion, and equity in the news industry, there hasn’t been any major change in leadership. The study was conducted in February 2021, and at least in the United States, several top editor positions at major publications are open right now, which could lead to an increase in the number of top female editors in 2022. After South Africa (where 60% of the top editors of the publications included are women), the United States is closest to gender parity at 47%.

Whilst the last year has seen an increasing reckoning with the frequent lack of diversity in newsrooms, especially in top positions, we find no clear overall trend towards greater gender equality in top editorial positions from 2020 to 2021. While there are more women (16%) among the 37 new names in our dataset than among those who held the same posts last year (14%), the number is still comparatively low.

So despite greater focus on diversity, we find no significant evidence of change. This, of course, often takes time, and with the severe impact of the coronavirus pandemic, lockdowns and among many other things a consequent wave of layoffs at many news media, the past year has been unusual and unusually demanding in many ways. Perhaps there is more to come? Several important news brands will be appointing new top editors in the year ahead, many journalists are pushing for more diverse leadership, and some news media are publicly recognising how they have fallen short on diversity for a long time. We will know more about how this might change the overall profile when we repeat this analysis in 2022 to track developments in gender equality among top editors across the world.

Read the full report in English here and in Spanish here.

A quick reminder in a survey by @risj_oxford 22% of the 180 top editors across 240 media brands are women, despite on average 40% of those journalists surveyed being women https://t.co/RCjc9kavfv

— Rhi Storer (@rhistorerwrites) March 8, 2021

Gentlemen, if you’re looking for something to do to recognize #InternationalWomensDay, try tweeting out your salary or telling a female colleague what you make. Transparency is a powerful tool in closing the wage gap.

— Emma Carew Grovum (@emmacarew) March 8, 2021

So cool that every brand and media company tweeting about #InternationalWomensDay is ALSO tweeting its policies on wage transparency and paid family leave!!!

— Julieanne Smolinski (@BoobsRadley) March 8, 2021

El País announced on Monday that it has nearly 110,000 subscribers. Of those, 64,200 are digital-only, 37,923 are print and digital, and 7,842 are to Kiosko y Más, the digital version of the print newspaper. About 20% of those subscribers are from outside of Spain.

As the news industry’s finances have been upended by the coronavirus pandemic, the success of El País’ subscription program shows that people are willing to pay for news. El País employs more than 400 journalists around the world and has bureaus in Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City, Mexico, and São Paulo, Brazil.

The announcement reads, in part:

The current data indicates a promising outlook for the EL PAÍS subscription model, which was launched in May, two months after the pandemic broke out. But it is just the beginning of a long journey. In the United Kingdom, a country with nearly 70 million inhabitants, the British daily The Times reached 100,000 subscribers a year after they began to charge readers — despite having a market as vast as the English-speaking community. The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal have been on this road for more than two decades; and The New York Times, which all news outlets look up to, given its successful business and digital transformation, made a hesitant start in 2011, but did not see a full bloom of its digital subscription model until 2016, when Donald Trump was elected US president. In Spain, the newspaper El Mundo made the first step to a subscriber system at the end of October last year; the communications group Vocento has been progressively moving its local newspapers in this direction for years; and it is expected that the Spanish newspapers Abc and La Vanguardia will also switch to this model soon. The subscription model has also been pursued by some online news outlets, most recently El Confidencial, while elDiario.es has been using this system since it was founded.

Miguel Carvajal, the director of the master’s in journalism innovation program at the University of Miguel Hernández, compiled a list of Spanish publications with paid subscribers and members alongside the years that they launched those programs and the most recent month and year of the data.

El dato de @el_pais (64.000 nuevos suscriptores, exclusivos digitales, en 4 meses) tiene un mérito especial frente a otros casos con matriz impresa, porque no agrega usuarios de productos previos (Orbyt, Kiosko y Más o papel).

Tabla actualizada: https://t.co/so71PMmLhh pic.twitter.com/Juh8PoR5uj

— Miguel Carvajal (@mcarvajal_) September 5, 2020

ElDiario.es, an online publication in Spain, has 56,000 paying members since it launched in 2012 with a membership program out of the gate. The total number of paid digital subscriptions and memberships, based on the table, is about 347,000. El País accounts for 18% of that, according to Dircomfidencial.

Read the full announcement in English here and in Spanish here.

.⁦@el_pais⁩ ha sumado 64.200 suscriptores digitales desde el lanzamiento del nuevo modelo el 1 de mayo.

En total tiene 110.000, sumando los 37.923 de la edición impresa y 7.842 de Kiosko y Más.

Son cifras esperanzadoras. Más detalles en este hilo https://t.co/JoPWdA3237

— Eduardo Suárez (@eduardosuarez) September 6, 2020

EL PAÍS logra 110.000 suscriptores tras lanzar su modelo de pago digital via https://t.co/8a3VZhdmF2 “no solo crecen los suscriptores, sino el número de personas que se han registrado. #ElPais

— Ana Lopez (@analopezh) September 7, 2020

Producir información de calidad es caro y alguien tiene que pagarlo. No serán los anunciantes. Medios de pago o no hay calidad. No hay de otra, señores ciudadanos. https://t.co/BA52Wut0Rm

— Melvin Peña J. (@melvinpenaj) September 6, 2020

Un fantástico inicio para un camino de largo recorrido. Felicidades @el_pais ! https://t.co/HLwwHxfTRv

— Susana Sánchez Riu (@SusanaSRiu) September 6, 2020

EL PAÍS cuenta con un equipo de más de 400 periodistas y la red de corresponsales de habla hispana más amplia del mundo. El ADN de EL PAÍS es global, europeo y cada vez más americano —un 20% de los nuevos suscriptores ya viene de fuera de España—. @el_pais https://t.co/6uX9AZTYzv

— Amanda Mars (@amanda_mars) September 6, 2020

The first step to getting that help? Asking the users if (and how) they could help.

Maldita.es, a nonprofit fact-checking organization in Spain, set up just 10 questions in a survey that ended up getting 2,500 people to offer up their skills, as the Engaged Journalism Accelerator’s new case study details. (The accelerator has provided funding to Maldita, as well as several other European news organizations, to build out their membership practices.)

From the case study:

How did they do it?

1. The survey sought to gather data on what users thought about Maldita.es, how they found out about it, which projects they knew about and the skills they were prepared to contribute to the organisation. The team dubbed these skills ‘superpowers’.
2. Clara Jiménez Cruz, co-founder of Maldita.es, put together 10 questions including ‘did you know Maldita.es is an independent media and a not-for-profit?’ and ‘if you had to define Maldita.es in a tweet or phrase to explain it to a friend, how would you do it?’
3. She wanted to make it fun to fill in so she used simple, playful language and included emojis, a picture of Homer Simpson wearing a Maldita.es t-shirt and an explanation of why engaging the community was important.
4. The survey included some light-hearted asks, for example, whether anyone in the community was able to fix the door of the organisation’s offices in Madrid, which had been off its hinges for some time (spoiler: someone came forward to fix the door).
5. Those who filled in the survey were invited to a party to meet the Maldita team and other malditos.

More than 2,600 responses came through in only four days, and 30 percent were from people who hadn’t engaged with Maldita before. The team decided to focus the response fields on short answers vs. drop-down menus, since — of course — “everyone defines their superpower in a different way.”

As a journalist, obviously, there are some hesitations; the debate on where the line falls between journalism and activism continues to simmer. But the activist-for-truth role of a journalist is part of the core of Spanish nonprofit news organization Civio, which believes that when it uncovers problems in government, part of its job is to lobby for specific solutions.

Eva Belmonte, Civio’s managing editor, has shown up at Spanish legislators’ offices with 100-page proposed amendments in tow. Some of her legislative language has made it into Spanish law. After reporting extensively on the procurement process, Belmonte became Civio’s main outreach to government officials.

CIvio doesn’t lobby on every issue it reports on. But if its reporting shows that the government is standing in the way of transparency or accountability, it’s not afraid to take a stand.

“You know so much of the problems you have implementing the law, what kind of information you need to try to avoid corruption or similar,” she said. “You feel all this knowledge would be useful for something, for trying to change something.”

Belmonte, an eight-veteran of the newspaper El Mundo, joined the then-two-year-old Civio in 2013. The group, founded by software developer David Cabo and entrepreneur Jacobo Elosua, modeled itself after the Sunlight Foundation and pushed for open data practices and tools to help citizens see the intricacies of public institutions. Civio pivoted to add journalism as a core component (yes, a pivot to journalism!) to help tell stories from the data a few years later, taking inspiration from ProPublica this time. Now it has a staff of four journalists and two or three (if you count Cabo) tech folks in its Madrid office.

“The whole narrative was naive — a tech utopia. We realized we needed to have lobbying to make things work and the journalism was very important to us,” Cabo, Civio’s executive director, said. “Now, we are a nonprofit investigative newsroom with a strong technical angle, because we still have tech skills, but are now focused very much in data journalism.”

Many of its lobbying efforts have been prompted by that need for public data to fuel its journalism. “Very quickly we realized we didn’t have an access-to-information law like FOIA,” Cabo said. “Many of the investigations we couldn’t do because there was no public data available. We realized we had to push for that.”

In its seven years, Civio has reported on the details of daily government bulletins, closely tracked 10,000 pardons from the past 20 years (building its own Pardonmeter with scraped results), and investigated pharmaceutical pricing differences and access worldwide. It’s very close to convincing public officials to make their daily meeting schedules public for transparency, Cabo and Belmonte told me.

Civio is upfront with readers about their lobbying every step of the way, with their goals, recommendations, and even a running list dating back to 2015 of which officials they met with when and what their intentions were. An example:

(In English, this entry talks about a video conference Civio held with the deputy spokesperson of the Finance and Public Administration Commission in order to present proposals for public-sector contract reform, identifying the members of the meeting from Civio and the government.)

“Every meeting we have — we talk about it, publish the documents we use in those meetings,” Cabo said. “We thought it was the right way to show it can be done.”

But as a nonprofit newsroom, the team is limited by the lack of a major philanthropy-in-news culture like the one the U.S. has spent the past decade been cultivating.

Only 2 percent of Spaniards currently donate to news organizations, but 28 percent told researchers with the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report that they could see themselves donating in the future. (To be fair, the U.S. was only at 3 percent/26 percent on those same questions.) Independent Spanish media outlets have been experimenting with donation structures in recent years — digital news organization El Español raised €3.6 million in a 2015 crowdfunding campaign.

Still, Cabo has had to become creative with Civio’s funding sources. It made money off of helping Barcelona and Madrid create visualizations of their budgets using a Civio open-source tool.

In 2017 alone, Open Society Foundation (€68,180), the European Union (€61,926), and the European Journalism Center (€16,302) have given grants for Civio to work on projects or for general operations. On the individual level, Civio has more than 400 donors — no anonymous contributions allowed — with many chipping in around 5 to 10 euros a month. Most of Civio’s readers are between ages 35 and 50, with a lot of middle-manager public officials, journalists who share Civio’s mission, and tech workers who appreciate open data efforts, Cabo said.

Civio is not the only news organization taking a more pointed approach, though again it lobbies only for issues of government transparency and lowering barriers for journalism in Spain. Schibsted created a director of public policy role earlier this year, and of course industry organizations lobby Facebook for more pieces of the pie and governments about market regulations, for example. But it’s one thing to have your work stop when readers start clicking on the story — and another to advocate fixes for the problems you’ve found.

“If we are eight people and manage to do this, I don’t want to know what bigger companies are doing,” Cabo said.

The Scandinavian media giant Schibsted’s annual trends report — part predictions, part survey research, part self-promotion — is out today, free for anyone interested. The report features essays on everything from the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence to sustainability to the future of bicycles as a consistent mode of transportation, as well as a survey of millennials in France, Spain, and Sweden on their concerns about their digital footprint. (It’s also a useful document to browse in case you’re wondering what a 7,000-employee media company considers the most important new focus areas for its business in the coming years.)

Here are a few interesting points from the report to note.

— Svenska Dagbladet, Schibsted’s Stockholm-based daily newspaper, is designing a ratings system for the relative newsworthiness of each piece of news it publishes. An algorithm, trained on that data, is helping put together its homepage:

“What is a particular piece of news worth on a scale from 1–5?” … We tested different news scenarios. Stock market down 4 percent (news value 3.5), the Prime Minister proposes more CCTV cameras in central Stockholm (news value 4.0). A Strindberg play opens at the Royal Theatre (2.5).

These news ratings, combined with a time marker, how long we think the piece will draw interest and be relevant to the readers, are the very basic data in the algorithm that from now is going to steer our new front page. It was self-evident that it is journalism and the editors that, also in the future, are going to influence how news are evaluated on our front page.

— The context in which a digital ad appears is definitely important.

A study conducted jointly by Schibsted Sales and Inventory and the Stockholm School of Economics studied the impact of ads from 16 Swedish advertisers, including the buying intentions of people who saw the ads: “On average the effect doubles with the right audience and triples with the right context and the right target group. Therefore, even when there is a lot of data about who is being reached, the context almost always trumps data, especially when it comes to getting customers to act and, not least, with lesser-known brands.”

— Millennials in France, Spain, and Sweden might love to post about their lives on social media, but they’re also wary of how the information they leave online can be used for more targeted and sometimes more nefarious purposes. This is according to a study Schibsted commissioned, looking at 1,200 people born in those three countries between 1983 and 2001.

— Sixty-seven percent of Spanish and French millennials surveyed reported worrying that “the information they provide on social media can be used to influence political views.” Fifty-five percent of Swedish millennials felt the same.

— Sixty-one percent of Spanish millennials reported being willing to give up additional personal information online in order to receive better tailored products and services. That’s true for 51 percent for French millennials and 39 percent of Swedish millennials.

— Fifty-four percent of Swedish millennials have in the past year changed their phone settings to improve their digital privacy (49 percent for Spanish millennials; 37 percent for French millennials).

There’s more in the report to read here.

First launched last June during Spain’s general election as a Telegram bot experiment, Politibot tried to offer Spanish audiences a more whimsical and comfortable way to keep up with a tense political cycle and dissect facts and figures politicians and their parties spouted. (Quartz’s news app and Purple’s messaging app were among the inspirations.) Promoted only through its founders’ networks, the spunky Telegram bot built up a reliably loyal following of 8,400 users.

Then a couple of the Politibot project’s founders, María Ramírez and Eduardo Suárez (who launched Politibot after they parted ways with the Spanish digital news startup El Español, where they were also cofounders) left for Univision to cover the U.S. election, and the news and information side of Politibot “went on holiday” last summer to the Spanish seaside resort city Torrevieja.

Ha vuelto ya @politibot de vacaciones. Vuelve te echamos de menos

— Daniel Torrejón (@Dtorrejonm) July 4, 2016

In Politibot’s case, it’s been more of a working vacation, as the team behind it began building out a full-fledged bot-making platform based on what it had learned from its Spanish election summer experiment, with the help of a €50,000 Google DNI grant from November 2016. The completed “bot management system” that other media organizations can use to build custom chatbots includes analytics more useful for newsroom purposes than either Telegram (through Yandex) or Facebook Messenger offer now, and more personalization on the messaging journey of individual users. The makeup of the eight-person team suggests the founders’ ambitions: On board are journalists, a designer, engineers who’ve worked on natural language processing, and political and data scientists. (Politibot chief of technology Miguel Gil Biraud detailed these new platform developments to me during a pitch event at the Global Editors Network conference last month in Vienna.)

“Someone describing Politibot once said it was almost Socratic; he had the impression he understood things better this way,” Suárez told me. “We have the platform and we have the expertise. Problems news organizations will run into, we’ve run into before. We can help them with that, and we can hopefully help them get the same retention and engagement we did.”

About two thirds of the Google DNI money went into platform development, and a third to producing original content for Politibot. After an overhaul of the backend bot platform, the team resuscitated Politibot for Telegram and added a Facebook Messenger version for a limited run in the spring. It began testing expanded editorial content again, including news digests, analyses of issues outside of Spain, newsy charts for Instagram, and an original politics podcast. It had to give up its audience from last year after it closed down the original bot, but the bot’s second season attracted more than 6,200 users across the two different platforms, about 3,400 of whom opened the bot once each week and 2,400 of whom opened it every day — a prime user base to target for any potential paid subscription or membership program, Suárez said.

Just this month is started to raise funds through a Patreon drive to build out the editorial side of the company. Suárez said the team would love to hit $2,000 in monthly reader support to add a journalist and help pay for its servers, and is working on exclusive content for paying supporters (it’s about a fifth of the way to that goal).

The company’s other planned source of revenue will be the clients who pay to use its bot-making platform, and for installation, troubleshooting, and advice. It’s also considered advertising (a narrative, serialized ad-bot, Suárez suggested), but hasn’t built anything. At the moment, it’s in talks with a couple of publishers in Spain, and according to Suárez and Biraud is looking at tiered monthly payment levels tailored to the organization, based in part on the number of messages the customized bot sends and the complexity of the bot required by the news organization.

“We’re more of a consultancy at the moment, and having conversations with newsrooms about installing the platform. The first part of the conversation is always, what do you want a chatbot for?” Suárez said. “If you just want a chatbot that is an RSS [feed], that gives you content from your news organization tailored to a user according to the user’s tastes, and pushes notifications around that, sure, that’s one option. Our experience says it’s probably more useful for an interested news organization to build this kind of interactive conversation through a chatbot, a conversation that really gives the reader a reason to come back.”

Suárez and Biraud both acknowledged that alternatives like Chatfuel or the free Wit.ai exist, but said that the various features in Politibot’s bot-making platform were honed with news organizations’ needs in mind. For its Spanish election experiment, for instance, Politibot profiled users on their age and gender, and then showed them how their specific demographic was voting, based on polls. In another chat interaction, it asked users for their location, and then returned a chart showing the results of their constituency. And if you wanted to offer different extra content to a segment of paying subscribers, the Politibot platform can help with that, too.

“You need different analytics for chatbots, since pageviews don’t make sense. It took us a while to find metrics that wouldn’t be easy to game,” Biraud said. “Now we have a way of showing a heatmap of the conversation tree, showing where an organization’s bot lost users, what branches of the conversation individual users followed, what individual users are interested in. We might have one conversation option on Brexit and another on French politics, and if the user never takes the Brexit branches, we need to think, what else can we show them?”

Some larger news organizations like The New York Times or the BBC will inevitably go in-house anyway when it comes to building bot experiences, Biraud said, but “smaller media groups are barely scraping by. They don’t have the resources. We can solve some problems for them.”

Lanzado por primera vez durante las elecciones generales de 2016 en España como un experimento vía Telegram, Politibot intentó ofrecer al público español una forma más original y cómoda de mantenerse al día con un ciclo político tenso, y explorar hechos y cifras difundidas por los políticos (la aplicación de noticias de Quartz y la aplicación de mensajería de Purple estaban entre sus inspiraciones). Promovido solo a través de las redes de sus fundadores, el bot de Telegram generó un seguimiento fiel de 8.400 usuarios.

Luego dos de los fundadores del proyecto Politibot, María Ramírez y Eduardo Suárez (quienes lanzaron Politibot después de separarse del emprendimiento digital El Español, al que también cofundaron) se fueron a Univision para cubrir las elecciones estadounidenses, y el costado noticioso de Politibot “se fue de vacaciones” el verano pasado a la ciudad balnearia de Torrevieja.

Ha vuelto ya @politibot de vacaciones. Vuelve te echamos de menos

— Daniel Torrejón (@Dtorrejonm) July 4, 2016

Pero han sido más bien unas vacaciones laborales, ya que el equipo comenzó a construir una plataforma de bot-making basada en lo que había aprendido de su experimento del verano electoral de España, con la ayuda de un subsidio Google DNI por un valor de EUR50.000 en noviembre de 2016. El “sistema de gestión de bots” que otros medios podrán utilizar para construir chatbots personalizados incluye analíticas más útiles para los propósitos de una redacción que las que ofrecen Telegram (a través de Yandex) o Facebook Messenger, y más personalización para usuarios individuales. La composición del equipo de ocho personas da cuenta de las ambiciones de sus fundadores: a bordo hay un periodista, un diseñador, ingenieros que han trabajado en el procesamiento del lenguaje natural, cientistas políticos y científicos de datos (el jefe de tecnología de Politibot, Miguel Gil Biraud, me explicó estos nuevos desarrollos de la plataforma durante la conferencia de la Global Editors Network el mes pasado en Viena).

“Alguien dijo una vez de Politibot que era casi socrático; tenía la impresión de que entendía mejor las cosas de esta manera”, dijo Suárez. “Tenemos la plataforma y la experiencia. Los problemas con que se encontrarán ya los hemos tenido antes y podemos ayudarles con eso, esperando que consigan la misma retención y compromiso que nosotros”.

Aproximadamente dos tercios del dinero de Google DNI fueron destinados al desarrollo de la plataforma y el tercio restante a producir contenido original para Politibot. Después de una revisión de la plataforma backend del bot, el equipo resucitó Politibot para Telegram y añadió una versión limitada para Facebook Messenger durante la primavera. Comenzó a probar nuevamente contenido editorial ampliado, incluyendo resúmenes de noticias, análisis de temas fuera de España, tablas informativas para Instagram y un podcast político. El equipo tuvo que renunciar a su audiencia del año pasado tras cerrar el bot original, pero la segunda temporada del bot atrajo a más de 6.200 usuarios a través de las dos plataformas, de los cuales 3.400 abrieron el bot una vez por semana y 2.400 todos los días; una excelente base de usuarios para apuntar a cualquier posible suscripción o programa de membresía, dijo Suárez.

Recién en julio acaban de comenzar a recaudar fondos a través de Patreon para construir la parte editorial de la empresa. Suárez dijo que al equipo le encantaría recibir US$2.000 mensuales de ayuda de los lectores para sumar un periodista y ayudar a pagar los servidores, y está trabajando en contenido exclusivo como forma de pago a los seguidores (les falta una quinta parte del total para llegar a este objetivo).

La otra fuente de ingresos de la compañía serán los clientes que pagan por utilizar su plataforma de creación de bots, por su instalación, por la solución de problemas y por el asesoramiento. También están considerando la publicidad (bots publicitarios en serie, sugirió Suárez), aunque no han avanzado en ese sentido. Por el momento, están en conversaciones con un par de publicaciones españolas y, según cuentan Suárez y Biraud, se están buscando niveles de pago mensuales escalonados adaptados a la organización, basados en el número de mensajes enviados por el bot personalizado y la complejidad del bot requerido por el medio.

“En este momento estamos funcionando más como una consultoría y conversando con salas de redacción sobre la instalación de la plataforma. La primera parte de la conversación es siempre igual: ‘¿para qué quieres un chatbot?'”, cuenta Suárez. “Si solo quieres un chatbot que sea un RSS [feed] que brinda contenido adaptado al usuario de acuerdo a sus gustos y envía notificaciones en torno a eso, claro, es una opción. Pero nuestra experiencia dice que probablemente sea más útil construir un tipo de conversación interactiva a través del chatbot; una conversación que realmente le dé al lector una razón para volver”.

Suárez y Biraud reconocieron que existen alternativas como Chatfuel o la gratuita Wit.ai, pero las características de la plataforma de bot-making de Politibot fueron perfeccionadas con las necesidades de las organizaciones de noticias en mente. Por ejemplo, para su experimento electoral español, Politibot perfiló a los usuarios por edad y género, y luego les mostró cómo estaba votando su franja demográfica según las encuestas. En otra interacción, le pidió su ubicación a los usuarios y, a continuación, devolvió un gráfico que mostraba los resultados de su distrito electoral. Y si quieres ofrecer contenido exclusivo a un segmento de suscriptores pagos, la plataforma Politibot puede también ayudar con eso.

“Necesitas diferentes analíticas para medir chatbots, ya que las páginas vistas no tienen sentido. Nos tomó un tiempo encontrar métricas apropiadas”, dijo Biraud. “Ahora tenemos una manera de mostrar un mapa de calor de las conversaciones, que marca dónde el bot de un medio pierde usuarios, qué ramas de la conversación siguen los usuarios individuales y qué usuarios individuales están interesados. Podríamos tener una opción de conversación sobre el Brexit y otra sobre política francesa, y si el usuario nunca va por las ramas de Brexit, necesitamos pensar qué otra cosa podemos mostrarle”.

Algunos medios grandes como el New York Times o la BBC inevitablemente ganarán cuando se trata de construir experiencias de bot, dijo Biraud, pero “los grupos de medios más pequeños apenas están sobreviviendo. No tienen los recursos. Podemos resolver algunos problemas por ellos”.

The site, called Verne — after the author Jules Verne — features a mix of first-person narratives, explainers, quizzes, and native social videos.

“New directors [from El País and its parent Prisa] were eager to try out something new, they realized that there was a void to fill,” said Verne founder Delia Rodríguez, who is Univision Digital’s managing editor of audience engagement.

Verne launched in September 2014; in its first six months the website reached a peak of 6 million monthly unique users unique users, Rodríguez said. Verne declined to release current traffic figures. More than 60 percent of Verne’s traffic comes from social — especially Facebook.

The idea behind Verne is straightforward: coming up with stories that trigger emotions, that make people feel like sharing them. What sets Verne apart from other similar attempts to deliver viral news is how seriously it takes its mission: fact-checking sources and information, making sure it’s not being misled, and being honest with its audience.

“We shared a small newsroom culture,” Rodríguez recalled, “we were free to publish an absurd video, to laugh our heads off, we felt safe.”

Since Verne launched, its staff has doubled in size from its initial five staffers, who worked on a floor separate from the rest of the El País newsroom. Verne now has 10 employees, including two who work from Mexico.

In those early days, Verne relished the freedom of working separately from the main newsroom. They used blackboards to draw up new story formats and test out concepts. Now, Verne has matured, and its members are more integrated with the rest of the paper — sharing the same office space with the rest of El País newsroom, a result Verne’s reporters perceived as a natural evolution of its relationship.

“Verne has been like a lab to El País,” said Lucía González, who now leads Verne, and has been part of the team since the beginning. “We have incorporated new dynamics and different forms to achieve Internet reporting.”

El País says Verne is profitable, though it wouldn’t provide more details. It runs a mix of display and native ads, which are sold by El País’ commercial team. Native advertising is differentiated from news stories with a special layout, a label that states “sponsored content,” and a generic byline of “Verne” rather than a reporter’s name.

On the editorial side, Verne has helped El País reach new audiences and try out new story formats. “Verne deals with topics that El País wouldn’t traditionally cover, and Verne does so in a way that allows us to connect with a younger audience,” El País managing editor David Alandete Ballester said. That different approach has proved contagious, he said: “Verne has brought changes to the way we think about information at El País, and how we frame stories to make sure they have an impact on social platforms.”

After the March terror attack in London, El País of course covered the news with regular breaking news updates, but it also used a first-person narrative format pioneered on Verne to provide the perspective from a Spaniard who witnessed the attack.

First-person stories are just one of many Verne-inspired new formats. Verne’s creators put together a book they call the Bible that features best practices for headlines, story formats, and other ideas; it gets checked daily and added to with new ideas continually.

Verne staffers are encouraged to experiment on social platforms and in new mediums. The team works in a relaxed manner: They vote on the best headlines, and instead of selecting topics in morning editorial meetings, stories emerge during informal conversations among members of Verne’s team. Verne also publishes a handful of stories each day, focusing on quality over quantity.

“Verne’s DNA is all about testing stuff all the time,” said Verne reporter Mari Luz Peinado, who oversaw the launch of Verne Mexico. (Some articles are also translated into Brazilian Portuguese.) When it came to launching the Mexican site and training new staffers, Peinado focused the group’s culture, and the importance of headlines, storytelling, distribution and audience, listening constantly to what they say on social media.

As a result, Verne has learned that different types of stories perform better in each country. In Mexico, stories about social justice, sexism, and indigenous cultures are popular. In Spain, there’s a shared sensitivity to what happens to Spaniards abroad, the Spanish language, news from regions across Spain, philosophy, and data-driven narratives about cultural matters.

Verne is planning to also move into new platforms, especially messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. But no matter what, González said Verne will be ready for what’s next.

“We respect the Internet, learn by doing and we are very flexible because this area is in constant change,” she said.

El sitio, llamado Verne, en homenaje al escritor Julio Verne, es una mezcla de narrativas en primera persona, artículos explicativos, juegos de preguntas y videos sociales nativos.

“La nueva dirección [de Prisa y El País] tenía muchas ganas de probar algo nuevo, se dieron cuenta que había un hueco que llenar”, dice su fundadora Delia Rodríguez, actual directora de interacción con la audiencia en Univisión Digital.

Verne se lanzó en septiembre de 2014 y en 6 meses el sitio alcanzó un pico de audiencia de 6 millones de usuarios únicos al mes, dijo Rodríguez. Verne se negó a declarar números de tráfico actuales. Más del 60 por ciento del tráfico de Verne proviene de redes sociales, especialmente Facebook.

La premisa detrás de Verne es simple: crear historias que provoquen emociones, que den ganas de compartir. Lo que diferencia a Verne de otros intentos virales similares es lo serio que se toma su misión: el chequeo de la veracidad de las fuentes y los datos, y el asegurarse de estar bien informados y ser honestos con su audiencia.

“Compartíamos una cultura de redacción pequeñita”, recordó Rodríguez, “éramos libres como para publicar un video absurdo, para poder reírnos, nos sentíamos seguros”.

Desde que Verne nació, su equipo dobló su tamaño, que comenzó con tan sólo cinco miembros, que trabajaban en una planta separada del resto de la redacción de El País. Verne ahora tiene 10 periodistas, incluidas dos personas que trabajan desde México.

En esos días del comienzo, Verne disfrutaba la libertad de trabajar de forma separada del resto de la redacción principal. Los periodistas de Verne usaban pizarras para delinear nuevos formatos de historias y para probar nuevos conceptos. Ahora, que Verne ha madurado, sus miembros están más integrados con el resto del periódico: comparten el mismo espacio de la oficina con el resto de la redacción de El País, un resultado que los cronistas de Verne percibieron como una evolución natural de esta relación.

“Verne sirvió como un laboratorio dentro de El País”, cuenta Lucía González, que hoy está al frente de Verne y que se unió desde sus inicios. “Incorporamos de a poco nuevas dinámicas y diferentes formas de hacer reporterismo de internet.”

El País dice que Verne es redituable, aunque no dieron más detalles. El equipo comercial de El País vende avisos de display (banners) y publicidad nativa, ésta última diferenciada de los artículos noticiosos por un diseño especial, con una etiqueta que aclara que es “contenido patrocinado”, y una firma genérica con crédito a “Verne” en vez del nombre del reportero.

En su aspecto editorial, Verne ha ayudado a El País a alcanzar nuevas audiencias y a experimentar con nuevas narrativas. “Verne trata temas que tradicionalmente El País no cubriría y lo hace con un tono que le permite conectar con una audiencia más joven”, dice David Alandete Ballester, Director Adjunto de El País. Este enfoque diferente ha demostrado ser contagioso: “Verne ha traído cambios a cómo concebimos las informaciones y cómo las titulamos para asegurarnos un mayor impacto en plataformas sociales”.

Luego de los ataques terroristas de marzo en Londres, El País, por supuesto, cubrió las noticias con actualizaciones periódicas en tiempo real, pero también utilizó un formato que fue pionero en Verne: un ensayo en primera persona, desde el punto de vista de un español que fue testigo del hecho.

Los relatos en primera persona son tan solo uno de muchos formatos inspirados por Verne. Los creadores de Verne escribieron un libro que llaman la Biblia con buenas prácticas para titulares, formatos de historias, y otros conceptos; y revisan este material todos los días para agregar nuevas ideas de forma continua.

Se espera que los miembros de Verne experimenten en plataformas sociales y en nuevos medios. El equipo funciona con una dinámica relajada: votan los mejores títulos, y en vez de seleccionar los temas en reuniones matutinas, las historias surgen de las conversaciones informales entre compañeros. Y producen sólo algunos artículos por día, porque se concentran en la calidad sobre la cantidad.

“El ADN de Verne es estar constantemente probando cosas”, dice Mari Luz Peinado, periodista de Verne, que estuvo a cargo del lanzamiento de la edición Verne México. (Algunos artículos se traducen también al portugués). A la hora de entrenar a estos nuevos miembros de la comunidad, Peinado les transmitió la cultura del grupo, y la importancia de los titulares, la narrativa, la distribución y la escucha constante de redes.

Como resultado, Verne descubrió qué tipo de historias funcionan mejor en cada país. En México, los artículos sobre justicia social, sexismo y cultura indígena son populares. En España, existe un gusto compartido por lo que les sucede a los españoles en el exterior, el idioma español, las noticias sobre las regiones, la filosofía, y la curación de datos sobre cuestiones culturales españolas (como la jornada de trabajo).

Verne está planeando su expansión en nuevas plataformas, especialmente en aplicaciones de mensajería como WhatsApp y Telegram. Pero, pase lo que pase, González dijo que Verne estará listo para lo que venga.

“Somos gente que respeta internet, que aprendemos haciendo y que somos muy flexibles porque esto está en constante cambio”, sintetiza González.

We’ve gotten a small grant from the Open Society Foundations to expand our international coverage. To help us out, we hope you’ll consider joining a Slack community (sign up with the form at the bottom of this page) we’re starting to help us improve our international coverage.

We’re looking for tips and story ideas. Are you starting your own digital journalism project we should be aware of? Is your newsroom trying out something unusual, whether it’s a paywall innovation, a new distribution channel, or a smart way of moderating comments? Is your news outlet doing something particularly well, and we should check out how you’ve managed to do it (or was there a flopped experiment, that can serve as a good case study)? Is there a cross-country partnership on fact-checking that we’ve missed? Is there someone we should definitely do a Q&A with? Anything particular we’ve undercovered in the past? These are just rough suggestions — we’re open to lots of ideas.

We’re looking for freelancers. You know far better than we might what experiments are brewing in your country! Pitch us stories about non-U.S. digital media that you’d like to write, and that you think are a good fit for Nieman Lab (if you read our site regularly or subscribe to our newsletter, you should have a sense of what we focus on). Can you write fluently in more than one language? We’d love to hear from you even more.

We’re looking for translators. Do you work for a non-English-language publication that might want to translate and run our stories, either as a one-off or as part of a larger partnership? Can you help us translate what are sometimes pretty wonky pieces of media reporting? Please reach out.

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The report — written by Tom Nicholls, Nabeelah Shabbir and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen — says that European startups tend to be launched by journalists who’ve often had long careers at traditional news organizations before deciding to strike out on their own.

“Although digital born, they seem to have started more frequently with disappointment with the state of journalism (and a commitment to do better) than with wonder at the technological or commercial possibilities of digital media,” the study says.

Startups in all four countries tend to be smaller than their traditional counterparts. However, digital news orgs in France and Spain tend to be more prominent than startups in Germany and the United Kingdom, where newspapers and legacy media outlets are stronger.

“New journalistic ventures seem to have found the most success where old ones are weak, rather than where digital media are most widely used or where the online advertising market is most developed,” the study found.

The report identified three primary business models for these European startups: advertising, subscriptions, and crowdfunding.

In Spain, advertising composes the bulk of El Confidencial’s revenue. The for-profit site, which launched in 2001, says that 90 percent of its revenue comes from advertising. El Confidencial executive director Alberto Artero:

Our most important source of revenue today is still advertising, to tell you the truth. We have two sources: pure advertising, which is programmatic, and native advertising, an area in which we invested this year and which is [making] a lot of money. We also organize some events, but events (like round tables) are less than 10% of the whole turnover. The industry we are looking towards is via brand content, events, even subscription. We have a high cash position; we don’t have debt. We’re making money.

Mediapart, in France, is pursuing a subscription model; the report calls the investigative site “a trailblazer for subscription-based digital-born news media.” When it launched in 2008, Mediapart’s goal was to attract 50,000 subscribers. It now has 128,000 subscribers — 123,000 individuals and 5,000 group subscriptions — and 96 percent of its revenue comes from subscribers:

The site has experienced considerable churn in its subscriber base, explains [co-founder and director-general] Marie-Hélène Smiejan —’There are 360,000 people who have paid for Mediapart at least once’ — but also continues to attract new paying readers. ‘There is not a single day where we haven’t recruited new subscribers; we always have done, every day — 100, or 300, 600, or 1800.’ Mediapart argues that their investigative scoops have been key to attracting subscribers. ‘Yesterday we published a huge scoop on Sarkozy, and got 300 new subscriptions,’ says François Bonnet [IDENTIFY]. ‘After the story was repeated on evening television, we saw a new peak in subscriptions. I’m obsessed with checking subscriptions. You see an immediate impact.’

The report cites the Dutch site De Correspondent as a leader in the crowdfunding realm. In 2013, the site raised more than €1 million from 15,000 people. De Correspondent now has more than 47,000 subscribers.

In Germany, Krautreporter raised nearly €1 million from more than 15,000 individuals when it launched in 2014, but it now has only about 5,000 paying members. The French site Les Jours attracted 1,500 subscribers and raised €50,000 in its first week of pre-launch fundraising. It ultimately raised €80,000, said co-founder and CFO Augustin Naepels “[It’s] not at De Correspondent’s level, but for France it is unusual to raise such a high sum,” he said.

And before it launched last year, El Español raised €3.6 million from 5,624 individuals. One of the factors that contributed to its success was the high profile of its founder, Pedro J. Ramírez, a co-founder of the newspaper El Mundo who was fired from the paper after the Spanish prime minister accused him of slander.

Deputy editor María Peral said Ramírez’s history of independent journalism helped define the site and gave readers an understanding of what they could expect from El Español:

Pedro J. is successful because he discovered many things about our Spanish history. When El Mundo published on the the government’s illegal party finances, he was fired. Even if you don’t agree with him, you have to recognize his work in changing our country. We have certain ideas for changing our country and reforming institutions.

The full report is available here.

Cebrián declared legal action against the three-and-a-half year old Spanish digital publication, the digital news outlet El Confidencial, and the television channel La Sexta, for reporting on his alleged links to the Panama Papers. (Eldiario.es was not among the original reporting partners in the Panama Papers, but has been doing its own investigations and is digging into the database ICIJ released May 9.)

“These are not easy stories to decide to publish. The people who appear in the leaks are quite powerful people, with powerful connections,” Juan Luis Sánchez, deputy editor of Eldiario.es, said. “But we published the stories. It allows us to vow for our independence. Obviously, this caused a very strong reaction. But the reaction from our own community has also been very powerful.”

Now among the most popular news sites in Spain, Eldiario.es — which hit over six million unique visitors in December — is a free online publication with a progressive bent whose coverage is focused heavily on politics with reporting on human rights, cultural issues, and the environment. No sports, no celebrity gossip. In addition to daily stories, Eldiario.es has been able to push out multi-platform projects, such as this year-long investigation into migrant deaths on the Moroccan-Spain border and the larger human rights issues highlighted through the incident. There’s room, too, for fun interactives.

Advertising makes up 60 percent of the site’s revenue stream, but another significant portion — around 40 percent — now comes from socios: Partners/members of the site who pay five euros a month (about USD $67.31 per year) for perks such as early preview of stories the night before publication, a special newsletter, access to Eldiario.es reporters, and an ad-free version of the site. (A tiny percentage of the company’s revenue comes from sales of its print quarterly, which is also goes out to paying members.) But the 18,000 or so socios who are part of the Eldiario.es community are primarily paying to support the mission of independent journalism, Sánchez said. And high-profile coverage, such as of the Panama Papers leaks, led to a great uptick of member support.

“In Spain, we’re coming out of a deep economic and media crisis. I came from a newspaper that closed because of the crisis. Maybe an outlet could survive one month after another with money from a person or institutions, but this money was not free money. It is an exchange for some kind of coverage or some kind of silence,” Andrés Gil, the Eldiario.es politics editor who previously worked at a number of traditional publications, said. “The main thing here is that, unlike traditional media companies in Spain that are owned by banks and important companies, we are owned by ourselves and our members. It’s a wall. It’s something that makes you free from these other pressures.”

There were some concerns that the buzz around the site’s founding, in September 2012, would wear off, but the community of paid members has grown steadily each year. Still, Sánchez said, “we have a potential of six million readers. You may not convince all six million people to be your socios, but if you learn more about their interests in public affairs and their thoughts on and reactions to issues in Spain today, you can get closer.”

“This is not about learning about their commercial profiles to sell to advertisers,” he added.

The site has always been profitable, according to founder and director Ignacio Escolar (members get detailed company financial reports twice a year), though the small early team (about a dozen at launch) had to make “many sacrifices.” Eldiario.es now has a staff of more than 50 in its main Madrid newsroom, and has been able to give its journalists steady pay raises. With some funding this year from Google’s Digital News Initiative, it will ramp up its outreach efforts and deepen its coverage in hopes of inching toward those potential millions of paying members.

Eldiario.es is far from the only notable presence in the Spanish digital news space. There’s El Confidencial, which has been around since February of 2001. There’s El Español, which burst onto the scene with an enormous pre-launch crowdfunding push and a famous director. El Español co-founder María Ramírez recently told Journalism.co.uk that the site has seen three times as much traffic as it expected, but has found it more challenging to grow its paying subscriber base (it started with 10,000 subscribers and has 12,000 seven months later). “People in Spain are not used to paying for news, especially online,” she said, “and those who are subscribing are doing so because they associate it with belonging to a community.”

A growing “community” of supporters is precisely what Eldiario.es is banking on for growth. It also maintains a politics-focused channel on chat app Telegram that has about 10,000 subscribers, which allows it to address readers more intimately. It sends out several topical newsletters — on culture and technology, on human rights, on the economy — and asks for subscriber input on coverage areas. Big investigations and scoops are opportunities to launch marketing campaigns to encourage more readers to sign up as socios.

“We try to work in more than one speed: if there’s breaking news, we cover it, we try to be the fastest. Afterwards, we do the context, the analysis, the op-eds. And then there’s part of our newsroom that’s working on tomorrow’s stories, for our members,” Gil said.

“You gain a lot of community by being the fastest, and you gain a lot of different community by trying to be the best in the slower rhythm. We do all the rhythms. We publish daily, but we also have a print monograph,” Sánchez said. “All of that creates community for us. What we don’t do are all those things that a lot of mainstream media end up doing to gain a non-quality audience, just to raise their traffic rankings.”

The majority of the Eldiario.es paying community is from Spain, but through an exclusive agreement with the Guardian starting this past January, it’s been translating and publishing Guardian stories in the site’s new international section. The section comes with a weekly newsletter that so far boasts a few thousand subscribers.

“We are impacting Latin American readers more than we were six months ago, thanks to the agreement,” Sánchez said. “But it’s one thing for someone to be aware of us, and another for them to be willing to pay to support us.”

The site also features plenty of local coverage, thanks to multiple content partnerships with smaller regional outlets. At the very top of the site is a navigation bar with the various regions of Spain — Catalunya, Andalucia, Catabria — that takes readers to these local portals. The content comes from 13 partner sources (who publish directly into the Eldiario.es CMS), such as local news blogs started by journalists who left or were laid off from traditional newspapers. Other content sharing-agreements, including one with a separate podcast team that also shares the Eldiario.es offices, help broaden its scope of coverage.

“I think in Spain now we are the digital newspaper that has the biggest presence across the entire country, and that’s due to cooperation with these different projects,” Sánchez said. “What we do on a national level, they do on a regional or thematic level. It’s a lot of people who are trying to find a new angle, who’ve talked to us and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we share resources?’ Otherwise, it’s a lot of little journalistic projects fighting for survival.”

El Español generated plenty of interest leading up to its launch, thanks to its famous, and famously outspoken, editor. But the country’s current political and economic environment may also have played a part.

“I think maybe if El Español had been born two years ago, or five years ago, it would’ve been different,” said María Ramírez, the news site’s co-founder (and Pedro J. Ramírez’s daughter). “People were really tired of things that are related to old institutions, including newspapers.”

El Español is now approaching 11,000 subscribers, the majority of whom signed on before the site in its current form officially launched to the public (a blog-like placeholder was already running stories over the summer). Non-subscribers can read 25 free articles a month before hitting a wall, while subscribers have access to the full site, a tablet and smartphone app featuring a “newspaper-ish” digital edition of its important stories, and other deals such as entries to lotteries for various sporting event tickets. (The cost for this access is €10.99 per month or €84 per year.) Given its remarkable beginning, all eyes have been on whether El Español can now sustain its initial successes and grow its subscriber base.

I spoke with María Ramírez, whose journalistic credits include political reporting for Univision and for El Mundo, about El Español’s ambitions as a digital news site competing with legacy media as well as an increasing number of other digital news outlets. Below is a lightly condensed and edited version of our conversation.

While it’s still uncertain how much companies like Google would have to pay every time an article appears, the penalty for not paying the fee is almost $750,000. That was apparently more than enough reason for Google to take its ball and go home. Richard Gingras, head of Google News writes:

This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable. So it’s with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes into effect in January) we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain.

According to Mark Scott of The New York Times, Google plans to remove all Spanish publishers from its “global news aggregating products.” What effect Google’s decision will have on traffic for the Spanish news sites remains to be seen. As SEO consultant Adam Shrek’s recent analysis showed, the amount of traffic a site gets from Google News can vary.

All across Europe publishers have been demanding that Google start paying for content. Media companies in France, Spain, and Germany have led the fight, accusing the search company of becoming rich off copyrighted work from publishers. A similar law was passed in Germany, but rather than paying the fees outlined in the law Google gave publishers the choice to opt in to show up in search results. By opting in companies would waive their right to get paid. As Catherine Stupp wrote for the Lab earlier this month, there were immediate results:

To avoid paying the collection agency, VG Media, which represents the publishers that chose not to opt in, Google stopped showing snippets from their news articles on Oct. 23. Shortly after that, the publishers in VG Media gave Google a license to restore snippets to their search results — for free. Berlin-based Axel Springer, one of Europe’s largest publishers, announced on Nov. 5 that it had caved to Google’s pressure after traffic to its websites from Google dropped by 40 percent and from Google News by 80 percent when snippets were left out of search results.

According to the proposed law — passed in the lower chamber and pending in the Spanish Senate — Google and other platforms would have to pay a tax for each time it uses “non-significant fragments” of a news story. Julio Alonso is the founder of Weblogs SL, a digital media company in Spain that could stand to lose a lot via this tax. On Medium, he writes:

It is aimed generally at “electronic news aggregation systems”, and, therefore it includes basically anyone who links with anything more than an anchor text. Center on its target is Spanish aggregation site Menéame. A Spanish free software based version of Digg/Reddit launched in 2005, Menéame is a very popular destination for news discovery in Spanish. Obviously any other service that does aggregation of any type or form is also potentially affected. This includes Flipboard, Zite, Pocket, even Facebook or Twitter.

Another blogger in Spain, Marilín Gonzalo, writes that Menéame has threatened to leave the country. Writes Alonso:

It is rumored that if the law is finally passed, Google is ready to shut down the Spanish version of Google News. It clearly does not want to create a precedent of a country in which it is basically paying to link.

Of course, news organizations rely on these websites, especially Google News, to drive traffic to their stories, so Google abandoning the country could have major consequences for Spanish news publishers.

How the law will actually be enforced remains to be seen. Over at Quartz, in a piece called “Nobody seems quite sure how Spain’s new ‘Google tax’ will work,” Kabir Chibber says the Spanish government has insisted that Facebook and Twitter won’t have to pay the tax, but the rest is still up in the air.

The fact that Spain’s law protects only its daily newspapers and not other publishers may make it harder to defend, but now that it has passed, we’ll have to wait for the first test cases. How they’ll be enforced is still unclear, but it’s worth remembering that Spain gave us the case that led to another controversial ruling that went against Google: the “right to be forgotten.”

That’s according to a new survey published today by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford. Smartphones continue to take a bigger share of our attention: 37 percent of survey respondents said they access news on a phone at least once a week, and 20 percent said they primarily accessed news via mobile devices. But the percentage of readers who actually pay for news has remained stagnant.

“People talk about smartphones and tablets together, but I think the smartphone is really the disruptor,” said digital strategist Nic Newman, one of the paper’s co-authors. He noted that tablet users tend to skew older. “It’s so much more mobile, and so much more personal.”

The survey asked respondents about their news habits in the United States, the U.K., Germany, France, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Italy, Japan, and Brazil’s urban areas. Even in Japan and Finland — two countries with traditionally strong print cultures — people under the age of 45 access more of their news online than in print.

Still, only 11 percent of survey respondents said they paid for online news in the past year:

But after a sharp upturn in 2012–13 — when a large number of paywalls were introduced — our data show very little change in the absolute number of people paying for digital news over the past year. In most countries the number paying for any news is hovering around 10% of online users and in some cases less than that.

Even so, our findings are consistent with the recent Pew research report in the United States which suggests that industry activity does not necessarily mean more individuals are paying for news but rather that ‘more revenue is being squeezed out of a smaller, or at least flat, number of paying consumers’.

“There’s a group of about 10 percent who are very interested in news,” Newman said. “A lot of those are the people who are paying for news. If you’re casually interested in news, why would you pay for it when you can get it for free?”

Among those who don’t pay for news, the percentage who said they would consider paying in the future varied from country to country. While 61 percent of Brazilian respondents said they would think about paying for access to news in the future, only 7 percent of British respondents said they would pay:

The low figures for the likelihood to pay in the future (for those not already paying) make particularly worrying reading in the UK and may be explained by the abundant supply of quality free news from the BBC, Sky, Mail Online, and the Guardian. But in other markets such as (urban) Brazil, Spain, and Italy there is more potential for growth.

The full report — 93 pages and even more charts — is available here, but here are five findings we found particularly interesting.

Social media use differs greatly among countries

How people consume news on social media varies wildly from country to country, though there is one constant: Facebook. 60 percent of all respondents said they use Facebook, and 57 percent of those who use Facebook said they use it to consume news. Compare that with only 19 percent of respondents who said they use Twitter. (But 50 percent of those Twitter users said they use the platform for news.) The other main social media outlets for news are YouTube and Google Plus, which is big in Finland: 30 percent of Finnish respondents said they use Google Plus, with 11 percent saying they use it for news.

Beyond these main social media platforms, many people use social media platforms that are popular in their own individual country for news. This means it might be more challenging for some larger international news organizations that are trying to draw in readers via social media, Newman said. “It makes it very difficult if you’re trying to be a global publisher,” he said.

But what Newman said the researchers found most surprising about how people are sharing content is the extent to which they use messaging apps like WhatsApp to share news. In Spain, for example, 60 percent of respondents said they use WhatsApp, with 26 percent saying they use it for news. A high percentage of WhatsApp users in Brazil and Germany also said they were using it for news.

News apps are often the main way people access mobile news

The latest trend in web design is mobile responsive sites, but the survey found that many people still access news on their mobile device via apps. In the UK, for example, 47 percent of smartphone users said they mostly use apps for news on their device — that’s a 6 percent increase from last year, and higher than the share who said they stick mostly to the web browser (38 percent).

The authors of the study were surprised by this finding, especially because of the advent of responsive design:

To some extent these data may reflect the strong penetration in the UK of Apple smartphones, which have tended to favour the use of apps. By contrast, in Finland where many people use Nokia phones, the use of apps on smartphones is far lower (around 30%), with most users preferring their web browser for news.

People use fewer news sources on mobile

The limited real estate on a phone screen and the more personalized nature of a smartphone may be responsible for people limiting the number of news sources they use on their mobile devices. 37 percent of respondents said they just use one source of news on their mobile devices, compared to 30 percent who only use one source on a computer.

But that doesn’t mean those that who are accessing only one news outlet via smartphone aren’t getting other sources of news on other platforms:

But multi-platform is not just about digital news. Across all of our countries, an average of 50% of those who access news on a tablet say they also read a printed newspaper at least once each week; 86% also watch TV news and we see similar patterns with smartphone users.

Users prefer text to visual content

Despite heavy investment from many news organizations in expanding their video and photo capabilities, most global news consumers still spend more time getting their news via text — traditional articles and lists — though video usage is higher in some countries, particularly the United States and Brazil.

The survey asked respondents in five countries (the U.S., the U.K., Finland, Spain, and Germany) more detailed questions on video news. 24 percent of respondents, especially older participants, said they would rather watch video on larger screens while 18 percent, predominantly younger people, did not like how long it takes for videos to load online.

Viral content is spreading

Both BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post have several international editions and the type of “fun” viral content that they specialize in is becoming more commonplace around the globe. These types of stories — i.e. 27 Things That Are So Weird When You Actually Think About Them — are particularly popular in Japan, France, and Italy.

Overall, these types of stories are more popular than celebrity and entertainment news, according to the survey, because they interest both young men and women, whereas celebrity news predominantly interests women.

Google and Yahoo executives were livid at the news, and the NSA’s chief made a statement that, as Techdirt’s Mike Masnick noted, amounted to a non-denial denial. The Post’s Andrea Peterson explained why the NSA felt it needed a back door to tech data in addition to its front-door access, and David Holmes of PandoDaily argued that the revelation reinforced the continued importance of encrypting online data.

For the rest of the week, most of the NSA news was coming from Europe, where the agency was reported to be collecting data on 60 million phone calls in Spain, in addition to previous similar reports about France and about the phone calls of dozens of world leaders. U.S. officials claimed they got the French and Spanish records from those countries’ intelligence services, but support in Congress is showing signs of waning, as Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein came out against the NSA’s surveillance program.

Sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci wrote that the issue at the core of the NSA story is not the fact that it’s spying on its friends and its own citizens, but that the distinction between insiders and outsiders that it relies on is collapsing. If your institution “relies on outsiders staying outside while you talk in jargon and acronyms with your fellow insiders, it’s time to look for a safety net and a harness,” she said. At The Atlantic, Bruce Schneier framed the story in terms of the ongoing struggle over control of the Internet.

Leaks, advocacy, and objectivity: There was plenty happening on the journalism side of the story as well. NSA chief Keith Alexander said that “we ought to come up with a way of stopping” news organizations’ publication of information from the leaked documents. In the U.K., Prime Minister David Cameron gave The Guardian a vague warning that essentially told them to exercise more “social responsibility” with the documents, or else. The Spectator’s Nick Cohen lamented the fact that other newspapers in Britain have attacked The Guardian as well.

There were three long, thoughtful pieces on the NSA leaks and journalism this week, all well worth a read: The first was by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, explaining why his paper is publishing information from the leaks and what its relationship with the British government has been like. The second was by NYU’s Jay Rosen, thinking through the question of why some major investigative stories stir the public and others don’t and concluding that “making knowledge public does not a knowledgeable public make.”

The third was an exchange between former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and Glenn Greenwald, the blogger and journalist who has broken the leak stories for The Guardian. Much of their conversation revolved around the question of whether journalists should report from an openly declared political perspective (as Greenwald argued) or should maintain a professional form of objectivity (as Keller argued).

Blogger Andrew Sullivan said we need both styles but argued that Greenwald’s is inherently more honest. Likewise, Mathew Ingram of paidContent didn’t see advocacy and fairness as mutually exclusive. On the other hand, Hamish McKenzie of PandoDaily also saw the need for both, but emphasized the importance of impartiality: “Facts need context, but not immediate spin. We need the boring “impartial” reports as much as we need Glenn Greenwald.”

Twitter goes visual: As it approaches its initial public offering, Twitter made a significant change in its display of users’ tweets, showing pictures and Vine’s short videos in user timelines by default, without a click. As The New York Times noted, the change makes visual ads on Twitter much more prominent, positioning the company to capture more of the mobile ad market. Digiday’s Jack Marshall called the new timeline Twitter’s version of banner ads.

Mike Isaac of AllThingsD pointed out that the change has Twitter looking more like Instagram (which is owned by Twitter’s chief rival, Facebook). BuzzFeed’s John Herrman wrote that while Twitter will look more like Instagram, it will become less like Instagram — rowdier and more random, because of the lower threshold for interacting with tweets. The update, Herrman said, will also help Twitter make more sense to a broader set of users: “There’s an image, I’m going to like it is a series of events virtually every internet user is conditioned to perform and understand.”

Wired’s Mat Honan made a similar point and said it makes it easier to widely share a photo on Twitter than on Facebook. Slate’s Will Oremus celebrated Twitter’s new image-centric orientation, saying it finally gets the primacy of images over text on today’s web. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM compared Twitter’s metamorphosis to the web’s clumsy ad-centered shift from text to visual in its early days and wondered if it would alienate users.

Reuters’ Jack Shafer argued that social media platforms like Twitter aren’t too concerned with alienating their users, since those users have largely accepted that they’ll swallow every change in their terms of service in order to keep their access to a free service they’ve come to consider indispensable. “Everyone now knows that the ToS noose is designed to grow tighter and tighter until it turns customers into the service’s revenue-producing slaves,” he wrote.

Henry’s vision for the Globe: John Henry, the billionaire owner of the world champion Boston Red Sox, finalized his purchase of The Boston Globe late last week, then published a column over the weekend explaining his motivations for buying the Globe and his plans for the paper. “My every intention is to push the kind of boldness and investment that will make the Globe a laboratory for major newspapers across the country,” he wrote.

Here at the Lab, Boston journalism professor Dan Kennedy outlined four takeaways from Henry’s column, dinging Henry’s commitment to getting readers to pay for online news but praising his overall focus: “Henry articulates a vision in which journalism comes first — which is another way of saying the customer comes first. Too many newspaper owners have forgotten that.”

Om Malik of GigaOM echoed Henry’s case for the importance of local newspapers in the life of a city, while journalism professor Christopher Daly (another Bostonian) wondered how the Globe will cover Henry.

Reading roundup: A few other stories that cropped up on the journalism/tech beat this week:

— The trials of several of the principal figures in the phone-hacking scandal of News Corp.’s British newspapers (centering around the now-defunct News of the World) began this week, and three former News of the World journalists pleaded guilty. The jury has also heard evidence of numerous allegations in the scandal, including that the paper’s journalists hacked their rivals as a way of scooping the competition. Gawker has a good, quick explainer of the case as a whole.

— That phone-hacking scandal was what prompted the British press reforms that were officially passed and signed into law as a royal charter this week, after the rejection of a last-minute court challenge by the nation’s newspapers. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg assured the public, however, that the new regulatory system is entirely voluntary for the press.

— The Knight Foundation released a report on nonprofit news organizations’ search for sustainability with extensive data on 18 nonprofits. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds and MediaShift’s Paige Cooperstein both offered apt summaries of the report, and Mathew Ingram of paidContent focused on the importance of diversifying revenue sources.

— Author Tim Kreider wrote a column in The New York Times decrying the practice of writing for free online, an argument to which many, including paidContent’s Mathew Ingram, objected. Writer Dan Lewis explored the ins and outs of writing for exposure, and author and journalist Laurie Penny explained the dynamics of writing for print alongside the web.

— Finally, The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Jason Linkins did everyone who reads American political journalism a favor with their guide to decoding the byzantine language of anonymous sources in Washington. Even if you’re hardened veteran journalist, it’ll make you a smarter news consumer.

Photo of Keith Alexander testifying Oct. 29 (with protesters behind) by AP/Susan Walsh.