By Sabljak Juan Salvador, third-year journalism student at ETER.
The dynamics of content distribution on digital platforms foster constant change. That is why one of the main challenges in mass media is devising strategies and innovating in these areas. During the eleventh edition of Media Party, held on Thursday at the Konex Cultural Center, 15 speakers shared their experiences on the subject.
According to a report by the advertising agency Havas, Argentines spend an average of 9 hours and 38 minutes daily on the internet. With the emergence of new content creation and distribution environments come new challenges. How do we reach a specific audience? How do we avoid clickbait and fake news? How can we use Artificial Intelligence to our advantage? How do we give everyone a voice? In short, how do we adapt to these new platforms? The lightning talks aim to showcase solutions to the problems affecting the media ecosystem through the firsthand experience of its workers.
Jéssica Tamyres dos Santos, editor at Ponte Journalism, addressed the difficulty of reaching new audiences and how she and a small team of journalists used YouTube Shorts to boost reach among new users. “We recirculated interviews, cut out the most striking parts, and put together 60-second videos. From that, 81% of our audience came from Shorts—because Shorts don’t follow the same algorithm as YouTube; instead, they are pushed to anyone,” she shared during her presentation “Crossing the Bubbles.”
Agustín Gutiérrez, account lead at Nomadic, explained that “today, the drop in news traffic is on Google News. 6 out of 10 clicks come from Google Discover, which is only available on mobile phones.” According to Agustín, this presents an opportunity to think about potential topics for specific audiences and platforms. One possible strategy is adapting already written articles to meet Google Discover’s parameters.
The advance of artificial intelligence is undeniably a global trend. “What do we do with AI? Do we trust it? To what extent? I believe content is not king—the end user is. Let’s fearlessly use AI as tools to facilitate our work, but let’s not forget whom we serve,” stated Emiliano Arnáez, journalist and SEO specialist at Clarín.
Agustina Najas proposes a way to use these new tools to our advantage. Child Health Spotting is a database and visualization page tracking health indices and issues facing different states. “In this project, cases came up that made us think of context sentences to accompany the numbers, but doing it case by case was very complicated,” said Agustina Najas, development team lead at Sociopúblico. That’s why they developed a tool using ChatGPT to automatically generate these sentences based on data and a brief reference context. “The next step is developing technology so ChatGPT can read charts, add sources, and build a bot to answer questions,” she added.
Sebastián Hacher, a beBot designer, proposes creating chatbots to improve communication with audiences and address people’s needs. “We try to build characters with personalities that align with the audience’s mood. That’s how people end up celebrating the Chatbot’s birthday, or pregnant women send photos of their newborns when they’re born,” commented Sebastián Hacher.
The lack of news coverage outside the capital of Argentina becomes evident when looking at major national media outlets. To address this issue, the ETER journalism school worked to build a federal agenda alongside 80 remote students from various provinces.
“The goal was to tell local stories in different formats and styles—from print to audiovisual, and even a ‘choose your own adventure’ story about a colt from the interior,” said India Molina, director of ETER’s Distance Journalism program.
In short, this is just a small sample of the talent and creativity of media professionals in an increasingly fast-paced world.
