Jose Rubio
Based on his personal website, Ignacio Escolar founded eldiario.es in 2012 with some journalist colleagues that lost their jobs after the 2008 crisis. Back then, Escolar had collected some audience online and took the step to build an exclusively online newspaper. Today it has over 75 thousand subscribers and he gathers more than a million followers on Twitter.
The director of eldiario.es before the afternoon editors meeting
When you enter the newsroom of eldiario.es it feels like you are at a cozy office in Manhattan with gray modern style and plants covering the walls. However, this one is set on the most strictly center of Madrid, under the offices of the Spanish Press Association and looking at thousands of tourists that walk along Callao. Only set to publish on the web.
After taking a look at the newsroom for some minutes, Ignacio arrived from “having lunch” and kindly invited us to enter an office occupied by a long table. When we sat, he told us that room was where “every day's news are decided” and, therefore, where tomorrow will be determined. Small talking and holding the urge to ask which politician was he having lunch with, I stuck to the very beginning of eldiario.es.
What was the key that led you to turn your website into a medium that now has more than 100 employees?
The great advantage of the newspaper compared to other media born at that time is that we already started with a second floor built, which is the audience that existed in my blog and the one that followed the journalists who founded diario.es. (...) At that time, blogs were proto-social networks, (...) self-publishing systems that allowed normal users, without the need of a company behind, to start broadcasting information and interacting with the audience through comments. So it is this small social capital that allowed us to set up eldiario.es in 2012 without the need for as much investment as was necessary.
"Our business model is based on convincing people that the journalism we do is worth paying for"
And how do you do quality journalism taking into account search engines(SEO)?
Well, we are less obsessed with search engines because our business is not about generating page views. Our business model is based on convincing people that the journalism we do is worth paying for.(...) Because we have always thought that building audiences based on search engine results is short-sighted. The algorithm now points here, then points there. It's a bit like trying to erect a building on a promenade. Then the water comes and knocks it down.
Is it possible to do digital journalism without counting on clickbait?
What happens is that you are fighting in an unequal competition. I mean, sometimes I feel... in the Tour de France being the only one who is not doping, because I'm compared to media that are making 90% of their audience with SEO news. I mean, is that really the audience that makes the kind of content that I do? I don't think so. That kind of audience is useful to increase the metrics in the meter, but it is not useful to generate a community that pays for your newspaper.
Your presence in networks is notorious as well, how do you get a person to go beyond the post and the headline on Instagram?
Let's see, in social networks I differentiate between those social networks where the content stays in the social network, the Reels, TikTok, and that social network that sends an audience to your website (Twitter).
On TikTok and Instagram, what we do above all is brand presence. Actually what we are trying to do is that when people then something happens that affects them, they go and look for it in our newspaper because they already know our newspaper.
- So you will also appeal to a lot of young people....
The drama, not only ours, but of the entire press, is that most young people consume very little information. I think there is a big difference between looking for information and finding it.
If you find it by doing it this way, with your little finger, you are not going to find the information you need. You will find the one that the algorithm has decided is the most interesting for you. And it will also bias you according to your interests, your vote, your age... a lot of factors that make you not find out the reality, but the reality that the algorithm has decided that it is good to generate a second more of attention for you.
The interest in the type of information that we do, has a lot to do with the fact that “I have become emancipated, I pay taxes, I think about my vote”. Suddenly corruption is no longer something that affects your morals, but your pocket. And that makes you have a different interest in information.
"Suddenly corruption is no longer something that affects your morals, but your pocket"
How do you deal with informative short videos on social media? Do you see it as a threat of disinformation or an opportunity to inform?
I think that right now there is more of a threat than an opportunity. What an algorithm is looking for is that you spend as much time as possible in that network (...) This makes it more of a disinformation system by definition than an information system(...) It puts those who provide information on an equal footing with those who do not. What I think we have to do is, understanding this language, to see what things we can do to reach these people.
For example, we sent Gabriela Sanchez, one of our heads of International, to Ukraine, she was in the Donbass. Do you know what worked best? She did a TikTok piece in very few seconds entering a trench. Then she would come out and show you the trench. Was that the most important thing, what she made of that coverage? No. But it's a good example of how you can try, with different codes, to get to information that otherwise is very difficult to digest in the social network.
AI is a threat or can it be an opportunity for journalism?
Both (...) I have experienced this before. How a technological threat arrives, how at first it is overestimated or underestimated or both at the same time, its consequences, and how in the long run you say: wow, what happened here? And this is going to be exactly the same.
Any way to incorporate it in your newsroom?
There's a very simple thing that we've been doing for many years now, which is transcribing interviews. The editing time for an interview used to be four hours of editing. This is now done in ten minutes.
And then we have an internal system called Copilot that does AI-based analysis of articles. We've talked a lot internally, also from a deontological point of view, we're not going to allow AI auto-generated content not supervised by humans ever. And when there is AI-generated content they have to warn the reader that there is.
What's the next thing we're probably going to face? Translations. It is possible that what we will do is that the same translator that we commissioned to do one article, we will commission five and he will do it with the AI and he will supervise it to make sure that they are well done.
Regarding the new working hours that are being established in many sectors. What is the future of journalism in this matter?
When I worked as a director of Publico, this is the year 2007. I started working at 10 a.m. and finished at 12 p.m. (...) And it wasn't just my thing, it was the way physical newspapers worked at that time. Almost all the newspapers closed very late to catch the latest news at the last moment, which was very valuable in the paper. Because of course, between arriving at the kiosk with the 10 p.m. football game or arriving without it, there were many copies for sale (....).
Here we have three shifts. Weekend, morning and afternoon. We have managed to reduce the closing time a lot by changing the meeting times. Before, newspapers started very late and ended very late. What we do now is: the first meeting is at half past nine and the opening meeting is at half past four. And it is important that it is at half past four and not at six o'clock in the afternoon as it used to be because many times at that time there are changes that force the editors to rethink their approach, to write new topics or to do a different story.
When we finished, Escolar proudly showed us the newsroom, posed in front of it for a picture and kindly said goodbye. A week after our interview, Spanish politics got all messed up for a fraud case revealed by Escolar's newsroom and I still regret not asking him who he had lunch with that day.
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