“Today information must seek the reader”, Molinos says. Distribution is key, and so it is stay up to date.
This reportage is part of a special international edition promoted by JPN with the help of three FEJS Journalism students who visited Porto in the first week of May.
With the seventh place in World Press Freedom Index, Portugal has a strong, diverse media landscape with wide social awareness, according to Reporters without Borders. This almost sounds like a journalistic promised land, especially for those European countries that struggle with democracy or identity media. Unfortunately, now journalism faces even more threats and challenges like vast technology changes that reporters have to adapt to. So, is the grass in Portugal actually greener?
In recent years, media had to undergo lots of changes due to technological development and move the news spread to internet. In Portugal, that shift started in the awake of the 21st century. Based in Porto, “Jornal de Notícias”, which is also one of the oldest newspapers in Portugal, was the first national newspapers to appear online in this country. Manuel Molinos, director of digital content, who tries to sustain this 136-year-long legacy online, underlines the fundamental change our lives have suffered and how that affects the news.
“Today you fall in love on Tinder, watch movies on Netflix, order food on Uber, listen to music on Spotify. Therefore, there is a service logic in content, not just information. Netflix is content, Spotify is content… what’s their secret? It’s the way they distribute it, and the information has to take this step, it’s how it’s distributed too”, he said.
Molinos was hired to boost the online traffic. The paper has started to “look seriously to the digital in 2008”, he remembers. His main concern is quality of the content they produce and how it affects the traffic on site. He supervised people responsible for the new design and the aim was to make it as convenient as it can get, with possibly most intuitive interface, which makes the content easy to read and retain users.
“I worry about whether people scroll more vertically or horizontally, these are almost physical details that affect consumption. For me, it’s easier to scroll vertically, and this influences consumption. The phone today is an appendage on your arm”, he adds in an interview with JPN.
Despite having a very high score in World Press Freedom Index, Portugal can still face tough issues regarding the state of journalism. The economic group to which “JN” belongs, Global Media, has endured a major crisis in recent months which proved that even vastly developing media, that are popular and eagerly read, can still face financial troubles and lack job spaces for journalists.
In JN dust settled for now and they are back at focusing on bringing fresh news, most importantly – in its digital version.
Obviously online journalism means adjusting the traditional one as we know it and squeezing the most out of every covered topic. Reportedly, in “Jornal de Notícias” reporters had an easier time switching, because the change was done gradually, Molinos says. They adapted to the situation where a particular subject is not only printed, but also recorded, photographed or turned into a TikTok. For Manuel Molinos it’s also very important to maintain a multidisciplinary approach and stay up to date with every trend and technologies that can be used in journalism. They see the content as a whole and then during the process they verify which medium suits particular subject best.
“For example, we had the Queima das Fitas parade. Twenty years ago, we knew it was going to be reportage and photographs for the paper. Not today: I want to stream this procession, I want to have it on social networks… what changes is the way you distribute the content. When we are planning we already know that a certain report has several versions, there is the possibility of having audio, infographics, video…”, Molinos told JPN.
Now, they have the rule of “digital first”, he says, which means that it is known from the beginning that each subject will be covered online; the printed version might come later, but usually brief and shortened. There is nothing that would be featured exclusively in paper. Even computer version is getting less attention now: the phone interface of the JN website is being designed with more care, as most of users scroll news on their mobiles more often. As Molinos mentioned, for him computer died.
“Today information must seek the reader. In the past, we looked for information, waited for 8 am to watch the news, waited for the radio news to listen to an interview, went to the newsstand to buy the newspaper… that ended a long time ago. And information, when it is relevant, has to impose itself on the reader.”
… which usually means working on algorithms. However, Molinos aim is not to make information too disruptive, that makes another prominent rule at JN. And it seems to pay off – as they mention in their article, according to netAudience Ranking they are most read news site with the score of 2,369,469 readers, which is 27.6% of the total. Above them, there are only 2 TV channels that includes also entertainment content.
The common struggle across the world, not only in the journalistic field, is the rapidly developing artificial intelligence. Many worry that it would take away jobs and, in journalistic field, pose a threat to media literacy. As a head of digital content, Manuel Molinos needs to have a strategy around AI as well as with TikTok, Instagram stories or new trends popping up every day. In our conversation he quoted Marshall McLuhan with words “the medium is the message” – even though the message remains the same, the radio outcome is different than the one in television.
“This is a completely personal opinion and not on behalf of the newspaper, but I think there is something that can be done with Artificial Intelligence in information. When you do a search on Google it is not a level of Artificial Intelligence, but the results are presented to you depending on your consumption history. And therefore, [in media] Artificial Intelligence can never be a producer of native content, but it can help distribute it better and select it better.”
Every way of adapting AI to journalistic work that won’t harm media literacy is on demand nowadays. Molinos sees it as a tool and he captured the essence of what approach can be taken in a non-harmful direction: “Producing content and creating news, never. Help distribute it, select it, let it be a tool that can help… I don’t see any harm”, he concluded.
Even though Portugal is facing economic troubles, that according to Reuters Digital News Report from 2023 also has an influence on journalistic field, the situation is still far better than in other European countries.
According to the same report, trust towards most of the news in Portugal equals the score of 58% and in Poland for example it´s 42%. This and other indicators place Poland whole 40 places lower in World Press Freedom Index.
As much as financial issues aren´t to be overseen, Portuguese at least have high social awareness and journalists aren´t restricted by the government, which it took place in Poland for past few years, as we read in the Reporters Without Borders country files. People use news media much more often and seem to rely on what they see there, unlike polish audience, according to Reuters’ report.
However, as we read further, Portuguese aren’t very much eager to pay for the news, which doesn’t help to solve financial troubles on the market.
Edited by Filipa Silva
