Borja Echevarría, Nieman And Berkman Fellow, Managing Editor El País

Digital First: Change how you work to start engaging your audience

Some quick ideas to begin a conversation about the new environment of media

Print-centric culture must end

✤ The industrial production can’t shape how we gather the news

✤ Decline in print circulation

✤ Advertisement market broken

✤ Audiences moving to mobile

What do we mean by Digital First?✤ Moving the strategy beyond the Newspaper

✤ Changing the processes for journalists and the delivery of news

✤ More investment and effort towards digital

✤ Constant innovation at the center of the newsroom

✤ Same level of quality and standards as ever

And by engagement?

✤ Always consider the audience first

✤ Sincere conversation with your readers

✤ The stories don’t finish when you publish them

✤ Take the news where the readers are

✤ Spend as much time as you can with them

Tips for going Digital First

✤ Change the newsroom organization

✤ Start earlier, reschedule meetings

✤ New ways of producing a different newspaper

✤ Praise the work that is done online and exclusive online content

✤ More transparency with metrics

✤ Promote the culture of experimentation: failure is an option

Tips for a better engagement✤ Say goodbye to the ‘The Voice of God’

✤ Answer questions, respond to the critics (not to the trolls)

✤ Address the audience’s needs

✤ Build individual brands, and promote them through the big brand

✤ Engage your audience in the process. Be as transparent as you can

✤ Engaging is not about self-promotion

✤ Help the audience driving them to good stories (even to competitors)