Janine Warner at her Los Angeles home.

—SembraMedia was officially launched in 2015. This morning, you explained that one of the reasons you started this organization was the experience you gained while teaching online courses for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas. You said that you were inspired to see that many of your former students were starting their own news organizations. Are there other reasons that led you to launch SembraMedia?
In many ways I started to work on SembraMedia twenty years ago, without knowing it. My first startup was a bilingual newspaper in Northern California that I launched in 1992. Without knowing anything about business, I had a sincere desire to help inform the community of Spanish-speaking immigrants in Northern California. At the time, there were many news sources in English, but very few places to find news in Spanish. Many people talk about the digital divide, but what motivates me is the “information divide,” which is so much older and so much deeper. The thing that inspires me most, that is really at the heart of SembraMedia, is the realization I had that by growing up as a native speaker of English, I had access to a tremendous variety of sources of information. But many Spanish-speakers have never had access to local news and other vital information.

—It may be hard to identify a secret formula for success. But based on your experience teaching and traveling, as well as the research you are doing at SembraMedia, what is working among entrepreneurial journalism entrepreneurs?
I often start speeches with the message: “If you stay until the end of my presentation, I will tell you the secret of success.” And then when I get to the very end, the secret is a slogan I borrowed from Nike: “Just do it.” In Spanish: Hazlo ya. What I’ve learned from working with so many journalists is that often the biggest obstacle is that we’re too perfectionistic. We think we have to get everything exactly right before we launch a project, so we end up spending weeks, months, even years, experimenting in the dark, on our own, without ever testing our work out on an audience and seeing how they react, and studying the results to learn what else they want and need.

» If you’re an entrepreneur, waiting until everything is perfect is a problem. That’s why I talk about the ideas from “The Lean Startup,” and why I recommend that you start with a “Minimum Viable Product.” You need to develop just enough of your idea in some digital form so you can start to test it, to see if anyone is interested, and to start building a loyal audience that helps you decide what else to do.

» I have a million ideas about what we can do at SembraMedia, but instead of trying to do them all at once, I started putting our initial ideas online. We launched the website while I was still embarrassed by it, because we didn’t have anything to publish at first. We started with just the idea; then we started doing research, and only then did we start building a directory of media sites. When we began, we only had 10 sites in the directory. Then we had 20. Then we had 30. Now we have more than 550. We just celebrated our first anniversary, and I finally took the words “beta version” off the site. I’m finally starting to feel like it looks okay.

—A follow up question: What are the excuses you hear most often from journalists who are avoiding starting their own media project?
The main one is: “I don’t have enough money. I need a bunch of money for this.” I think in many cases — and there’s a lot of evidence of this — if you get too much money at the beginning with a startup, it can actually be bad for you. That may sound crazy, but it’s true. When you start with very limited resources, you’re forced to be very creative, you’re forced to figure out how to do as much as you can with as little as possible.

» The challenge then is, how do you get from the “minimum viable product” you need to get started, to making enough money so that you can publish over the long term? And that’s why I talk so much about all the different ways you can make money, because if there is any “recipe for success,” it’s finding as many creative ways to support media projects as possible. Some people start with crowdfunding campaigns; others start with grants from foundations. Those are not bad ways to start, but in the long term, you need to think about more sustainable sources of income, like donations from readers, sponsorships, events, digital products, and so many more.

—In journalism, a business model is something very slippery. We don’t get a clear idea of what it is. It looks like a holy grail. Most of the time the question is, “what is the business model for journalism?” But I think that you can provide better questions regarding business models for entrepreneurs.
Let me give you a short sequence that I put a lot of journalists through that helps them understand business models and what’s really the business model of journalism. I start by asking: “What’s the business model of Uber?”

» People say “Oh … well … rides.” Ok. “But does Uber own cars?” No. “Does it owns buses?” No. “What does Uber really do?”

» It connects people who have cars with people who need rides. Great. In that context, what’s the real business model of a newspaper? Is it producing news? Well, that’s what they do. But the business model, the way they make money, is really about connecting readers with advertisers. It’s helping people who want customers get customers.

» I have a lot of friends who have started very political news organizations online, and that’s a very hot area. People who are frustrated with the limitations in traditional media start their own sites that are very political and then they tell me “I don’t want any advertisers because I don’t want any political ads.” Fine, I say. Don’t accept political ads. “Really?” Sure. But you could still accept other ads. Because remember, you’re not selling your content to advertisers. You’re selling your audience.

—You said that people actually pay for news and you mentioned the case of eldiario.es in Spain. Why do you think the idea that people won’t pay for online news has become such accepted wisdom?
In Venezuela, people don’t trust the traditional media because most of it is owned in one way or another by the government. In Mexico, a lot of people don’t trust traditional media because the government pays so much in advertising to support them. But what is happening on the other side of that spectrum with these new digital media projects is absolutely fascinating, and quite the opposite.

» It’s turning out that there are a lot of readers who very loyal to independent media sites and are quite happy to donate money to them. Eldiario.es is one of the most successful with this model; half of their revenue comes from individual donations of about 5 euros a month. Some people pay more than that. And that’s another secret: they’re not charging a subscription. They’re rewarding you for paying to become a member. Some people think that digital media entrepreneurs are only creating little tiny operations with no money, but ElDiario.es making three million euros a year, and half of that money comes from donations from readers.

—Also you mentioned the case of El Faro from El Salvador as a digital pioneer in Latin America. And one of the reasons to launch some ventures in those years was «this is cheaper than print.» Is that still the same reason to launch something now?
It’s a little different. In 1998 in El Salvador, there was one major daily newspaper, which was relatively conservative, particularly compared to the rest of that country. El Faro wanted to do something different, and they didn’t have the money to pay for a print edition. So they started as “digital natives,” and that makes them one of the oldest in the region. But today, what’s really transformative in the world, as well as in my own career, is that never in the history of journalism has it been so easy to start your own digital media site. Historically, you had to pay millions of dollars for a printing press or a television station or a radio station.

» That meant that prior to the mid 1990s only a very few people in society had the resources to even think about being a major publisher. Today, with WordPress.com for free, anybody can start a blog. What I’ve found is in each of the countries we’re studying, the economic realities are different, but across the board it’s cheaper, it’s easier, and in some places it’s actually safer, to start a digital media site than work in traditional media.

—Why is it safer?
Well, you can be further away from things. In Cuba, one of the things we’re studying is the number of sites that are run and hosted on the island compared with those that are hosted and run off the island. There are a couple of digital media sites that cover Cuban news, and they have correspondents in Cuba. The sites don’t always publish the names of the journalists, and the administration, the business, is run outside the country. That can make it safer.

» In Ecuador there’s a really unusual system of laws — well, unusual in comparison to other countries I’ve studied — in that there are a number of things that you can’t do in traditional media that you can do online. Because of the way the laws were written, and because some people defended the laws of freedom of information on Internet, you can write things online that you can’t print in a newspaper. You can be more critical of the government. You can write stories about economics in a different way. They’re legally permitted to do more online than in print, and in that sense, again I would say it’s safer, because journalists have gotten arrested in Ecuador for what they’ve written in traditional media.

—You have traveled to more than 40 countries doing workshops with reporters and entrepreneurs. Can you establish a common denominator for the challenges or the questions that people have when they reach you?
I’ve been to every Spanish-speaking country so far, except Cuba and Uruguay. But I’ve also been to Asia, to Europe, to Africa, to other parts of the world, and I think the thing that’s most impressed me, is that we all have more in common than we have differences. There are a growing number of journalists who are frustrated by the constraints of traditional media and want to start their own thing. They have questions like “How do I make money doing this?” That’s the number one question.

» As far as follow-up questions, the more sophisticated entrepreneurs ask about how to use crowdfunding to get started. Definitely, they’re interested in how best to get donations from readers. And in the long term: digital products, digital content you can create for partners, and throwing events turns out to be a nice way to supplement your income. There’s a long list of things that different digital media sites are doing.

» But for the most part, this idea of diversified revenue, of having at least two or three different sources — if not four sources of revenue — this is what gives you the independence to do the kind of journalism that makes most journalists want to do this in the first place.

—What is happening in the U.S. with the Latino news organizations? Because in the directory you have a few of them. The most famous probably is Radio Ambulante. What is the situation there?
First of all, the traditional media in Spanish in the U.S. is so strong and so dominant. If you look at television in the U.S., there are hundreds of channels and a very diversified marketplace. Univision dominates the marketplace; something like 80 percent of Spanish speakers in the U.S. watch Univision. And then the other three networks share the other 20 percent. That is a huge piece to compete with.

» So we start with an environment where there’s just some very strong media in Spanish in the U.S., and I think that makes it harder. Next, you find that there is a real complexity in the U.S. Spanish-speaking media in terms of bilingualism. More and more people are moving into English and younger people speak English, so they don’t need Spanish content as much.

—Some people say journalists are not creative, that we don’t have an entrepreneurial state of mind. What would be your advice for j-schools in order to create a more vibrant atmosphere among students and professors?
Journalism schools in general treat the students as isolated, self-centered entities. You do your homework and he does his homework and she does her homework and you get graded individually. When you look at digital media, and particularly entrepreneurial digital media, it’s all about teamwork. It’s all about figuring how to share responsibility, how to share decisions, how to share a task, how to specialize in different ways. This is a very, very different model than most of us learned in school.

» The first thing I would say, is that if you’re already looking ahead to how do we encourage entrepreneurship: think about how you can encourage teamwork.

» The business of journalism is something we should have always taught. I wish I had learned more about that in school. I learned journalism and law, which helped me a lot, and I learned lots of basic reporting skills, but nobody ever told me anything about business in journalism school. Even if you want to work for traditional media, you’re much better off if you understand something about the business model.

» I don’t think any journalist in any media entity should be completely ignorant about the business model. I understand why there’s a wall down the middle between the business and the journalism side. It’s about protecting the ethics in journalism. But I really think journalists are stronger and news organizations are stronger, when the journalists have some say and some involvement with the business side of the organization.

—You said you started SembraMedia 20 years ago. Have you felt that your ethical boundaries have moved to a different place from where they were in the beginning? Especially because of this wall you mentioned between financial and editorial side.
Let me clarify. I would say that 20 years ago — when I started my first entrepreneurial project and failed — is when I sort of started preparing for SembraMedia, which is based on my goal to to help other people not make those mistakes, and recognizing that there are lots of well-intentioned journalists who don’t understand business because that was my story, too.

» But in terms of ethics, no. I like to say I am a journalist first and I will defend the quality and the ethical integrity of the content to my death. That is the most important thing. As soon as you lose the respect of your readers because they don’t think you’re ethical, you don’t have anything to sell anyway. That has never changed.

» What’s changed for me, is coming to understand that smart journalists can also be smart business people, and that when you understand the business side, you actually can set things up to be more ethical, not less.

» This gets to the heart of what we teach at SembraMedia, which is the importance of diversified revenue streams. The more and different sources of revenue you have, the more independence you have. That’s one of the reasons that I like individual donations so much, because no one person has too much power.

—What is the next step for SembraMedia?
Our first year was really focused on a big research project and creating our online directory, which we’re still working on. Now we’re trying to turn that into a community. We are going to start having events. In Argentina in December, we partnered with Google to host a physical event at Google’s office in Buenos Aires to bring together a bunch of digital journalists. We hope to replicate that in Mexico, Chile and other places as well.

» The next thing we’re excited about is building a school. The number one request we’ve gotten so far as we’ve done this research is: training, training, training.

» How do I do it? How do I make money? How do I build a brand? How do I manage a team? How do I do the accounting? All those things.

» We are creating an online school that’s going to be open 24/7 and has many more classes in many more topics. It’s designed to try and address the increasingly complex questions that we are getting, and provide the best, and most up-to-date answers as we can. And we’re creating those classes in a very journalistic way.

» Then there’s this idea I have and I’m still working on – so I can’t promise that we’re going to do this. But we’re exploring what could happen if we were to get five hundred or a thousand sites that are in a directory to work together to purchase things. It’s a very common thing for associations, this shared purchasing power. If we can go to a big web hosting company like Amazon or one of the others, and negotiate a better price for 500 websites than anyone could get individually, I think that would be a good role for us.

» And not just with web hosting – we want to help journalists with better protection against DDoS attacks. Can we set that up technical support that is stronger together than any single entrepreneur could get on their own? Can we get other technical tools that people are trying to use in journalism, some of them prohibitively expensive? Maybe if we all joined together to buy them, we could make them more affordable.

COORDINATES

Janine Warner’s website
Janine Warner on Twitter
SembraMedia: website | Twitter | Facebook | Medium

Editor’s note: This interview was transcribed using speech recognition software. Since the result was somewhat flat, some responses have been revised and rewritten to reflect a more «human» tone.

Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Photo: Patricio Contreras.

—I want to go a few years back. Can you describe your journalistic mindset when you started working at The Guardian?
I’d already been a print journalist, business journalist, for 10 years. And most of that was with The Observer newspaper which was a Sunday paper that The Guardian bought. I was already a business journalist covering mainly media and advertising but increasingly technology. So from about 1992 or 1993 a lot of my job was really about trying to understand from a business perspective, a journalistic perspective, what was happening with converging technology.

» In 2000 Alan Rusbridger was my distant boss. He was the editor in chief of the whole organization but he was not my direct boss. We had a conversation about what the right strategy should be for The Guardian on the web. I really wanted to start a media site because I felt that I couldn’t read the stories that I wanted to read. I mentioned this to Alan, who is very decisive. And he said “Well, you should come and do that.” By that time I was actually business editor of The Observer and people thought it was a slightly crazy move, because if you have that kind of job with a department of journalist on a newspaper, the idea you would give up to go and start something online was at that time still quite a big career risk.

» I was still relatively young. I thought hard about making the transition. This was a time when people were starting and doing things for the first time on the web. So I really wanted to pursue that, which is what I did. So my mindset was “This is going to be really significant, is going to change everything about journalism.” I am a media writer and commentator and business journalist and it felt to me like there couldn’t be a better move to really be doing that job, particularly in a news organization where the leadership—which is really Alan Rusbridger—wanted to make a successful transition.

—I want to quote you from a post on The Guardian, dated September 5th 2000, when the media website at The Guardian was launched. You wrote: «The problem with the internet is controlling the tidal wave of possibilities.» But for a long time reporters, editors, news organizations, saw this more like a problem than an opportunity. Do you think that?
Yes, definitely. And I think it’s lucky that in 2000 I was perhaps ignorant of some of the bigger problems because otherwise I wouldn’t ever have done it. But journalists are curious and intelligent people. I think they knew that it would be a threat to the status quo. That’s never a comfortable position to be in. And I think that The Guardian was unusual in that. People were skeptical about the Internet but nobody was actively trying to stop it. I had colleagues who were in other news organizations doing similar job to mine who had a much harder time. But in general there was great support for what we did among colleagues in the newsroom.

» And my first few weeks I gradually said less and less and less in meetings and listened more, because it occurred to me that particularly the technologists and the journalists and the editors—didn’t matter how old they were—they just had a grasp of really what web technologies meant for journalism, which was in a way more profound than I had. Even though I’d been sort of studying it and writing about, until you are actually doing it it’s very hard to really appreciate what the dynamics are. We had probably at the time some of the best technologists and developers in the world who dealt with the content and format. And listening to them and hearing their vision of what we could be on the web was incredible exciting. Sometimes we encountered other journalists who would say «We know what you should be doing.» My job became as editor to make sure those people did not get in the way when they were wrong.

—In 2010 you moved from The Guardian to Columbia. I am quoting you again from a Wired article: «I am boundlessly optimistic about journalism. I really believe that this is the dawning of our new golden age.» What made you take the decision to move from newsroom to classroom? Everything was going on at The Guardian.
Yes. Ten years is a long time working in that environment. Don’t forget we’ve had some real game changers. I took over as editor in chief so I moved very quickly from being setting up the media website to actually bringing overall control on the whole network. Nine months after that we had 9/11 which changed everything. It absolutely changed everything for us because it gave us a global audience and it gave us a story which redefined how the world wanted to engage with the news.

» People stay in jobs way too long. I thought very consciously about having done it for 10 years. And I started thinking about what my journalistic life was like then as opposed to in 2000. I spent a lot of time in meetings, advising and talking to senior colleagues. I was working now within an environment where getting things done was getting slower and slower and slower. I don’t think The Guardian was different. And also I was aware that I had stopped learning things.

» Just coincidentally, Sig Gissler, who ran the Pulitzer Prize, had rung me. We were friends and we spoke before how online journalism should be recognized by the Pulitzer. And he rang me up and said, «Look, we have this new thing in Columbia. I don’t suppose you’re interested.» And I said, «Well, actually I might be. I don’t know. I feel like I need some change.» I felt we didn’t have it within journalism to make the next set of transitions. The convergences with the world and the open web was getting closer and closer and closer and the engineers are really in charge. And we didn’t really know enough.

» So the opportunity to go in, first of all, work with the new science and train journalists with dual degree. Secondly, the opportunity to actually pass some time to think about this. The third thing was really being in New York. For a long time New York had pretty much been on the fringes. Like everything was happening in Silicon Valley, the media institutions in New York were actually really slow to change, with one or two exceptions. And suddenly in about 2008, 2009, you started to put people doing really interesting things in journalistics startups and it felt like everything, for a short period, was happening right there. It was a collision of factors.

—According to an article by the Nieman Lab, in 2011 you explained three goals of the Tow Center: «experimentation and research in the field; bringing the results of that experimentation back into the classroom; and creating a stronger digital presence for Columbia j-school.» This was five years ago. How do you evaluate those goals today?
I think the transformation of Columbia as a journalism school has been a really tremendous thing to be part of. And I don’t think anybody thought that we would necessarily succeed so quickly and completely. There’s still a lot of work to do. It’s like newspapers, it’s a legacy organization. It has deep roots in very traditional methods of journalism. It’s a long form writing school. I’m not a data journalist. I knew the value of and advocated very strongly. But we didn’t teach any pure computation or data courses, not one. And now I think we have introduced well over 20.

» I don’t want to take credit for that because I shouldn’t. But the Tow Center was definitely part of that. And we’ve had the measures at being able to experiment and find research. We’ve looked at sensor journalism, virtual reality journalism. And we’ve looked at chat apps and user generated content and eyewitness media. And I’m proud of how our research team thought about things ahead of them actually happening.

» We’ve built tools on measuring impact, we’ve done award winning actual combining experimental journalism with ProPublica and with PBS Frontline that runs a sort of virtual reality documentary which won a Peabody award, which is amazing. We’ve done a good job in finding the right subjects and bringing them back into the classroom. For us then the next phase is how do we grow and what are we looking at as our next set.

—You co-authored one of the most cited works to explain the panorama of digital news: «Post-industrial Journalism» with Clay Shirky and Chris Henderson. One of the core beliefs of the report was «journalism matters». After what happened with the U.S. Presidential Election, the question is: to whom?
It matters to everybody. And I think we lose sight of this. When you don’t have journalism, things fall apart. It is a central part of how intelligence and information and options reach the broad public. For years I used to be asked the same question by an engineer at Google. Every time he would say: «Remind me again. We’re going into a world where there is all the data. And there is all the tools. And there are people. And when you have all that data and the tools and the people, why do you need journalism? What does that layer do?» And he wasn’t saying it to be offensive. As an engineer he was genuinely interested.

» That particular engineer has stopped asking that and actually was sending me lots of links over the weekend about fake news and about what can we do about this, what’s the right conversation to have. How should journalists be working with Google, with Facebook.

» And journalism is not perfect and it has been pretty bad in the past. But the good journalism has always made a difference. And the good journalism continues to make a difference. I think that whilst there’s a real civic crisis and there’s a commercial crisis, there is not a creative crisis. I see better journalism now than I have seen ever in my career. If you talk to the deans or the sort of experienced journalist I work with at Columbia, nobody thinks we’ve left a golden age behind. You have an Oscar winning movie. You had the amazing work colleagues at The Guardian and the Washington Post did with Edward Snowden. You have organizations like Wikileaks who have said «Well, we’re radical on transparency.» Wikileaks has demonstrated really interesting lesson that journalists need to learn from. But it also demonstrates what happens if you adopt a kind of partisan agenda or you’re not fully accountable.

—In the past weeks we have seen tons and tons written about who’s to blame for the results of the election: fake news, echo chambers, filter bubbles, if it was Facebook responsibility, media responsibility. Is the news industry traumatized by the outcome of the election?
The answer to that is a part of it, definitely. Because we now have an authoritarian President with a Chief of Staff who came from a very aggressive right wing hyper partisan website —Breitbart— which doesn’t care much about the truth; is quite happy to publish things which are misleading and wrong, to create a kind of an ideology and an excitement. On one level, the trauma —which is not really about our personal beliefs or how we voted or whatever— it’s kind of legitimate because press freedom is now potentially under threat in America, which is not something that we ever thought would be the case. As as a presidential candidate Donald Trump called out certain media outlets and banned on certain journalists. He has already started to go places without the pool of reporters. He doesn’t seem to respect the idea that you need a link between the presidency and the press. I think the trauma is kind of correct. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

» And I think that it gives us a purpose as any changing regime does. You always have this around an election and now it’s sort of more extreme. To get so many things wrong was a real shock to press as well. We’ve been talking about fake news in a viral context for two years. We highlighted this at a Tow Center report over two years ago with Craig Silverman who’s on the reporting on it now for Buzzfeed. We supported the work that got him onto that track. All of these things play a part. There was failure of the platforms to promote the right information. But there were also just people who was sick of the status quo, who wanted things to change and to see things in a very different way.

—Some people say news organizations should not work with Facebook. Jeff Jarvis says «No, we should work with them.» Is there a middle ground, a balance?
We’ve been talking about this for over two years now. I did a speech in Oxford called «Silicon Valley in journalism: make up or break up?» which was a slightly silly title but it was the point at which I could see that those frictions and that sort of relationship was just going to get closer and closer. There is this question about how do you react to that as a field. Is exactly as you say, it’s a balance. When we wrote «Post-Industrial Journalism» we hit a moment where we weren’t trying to tell people what to do or to predict the future. We were just trying to take a snapshot of what we thought was going on. And I think it was sort of cited and successful because we looked at the unbundling of journalism on an institutional, individual and an ecosystem basis. But I think there are certain things that we didn’t see coming. Whilst we did say that the advertising model is wrecked by the Internet —which is right— we didn’t quite see Facebook with such a dominance. And we always saw a mixed ecosystem of platforms.

» Most media companies now are trying to decide how do they allocate resources to this. How do they negotiate for the best deals. How do they choose which platforms to work with and how much to work with them. And there is a real dearth of information. We know that the platforms have the ability to really pick winners in the news ecosystem. And we’ve seen great disparities between rich and powerful news companies like The Washington Post, The New York Times. [They] inevitably get better access than small local companies.

» The platforms have to be part of the answer. Mark Zuckerberg saying «We are a technology company» over and over again is grounded in a real sense of self preservation and he doesn’t want to take on the responsibility as being the world’s editor. They are the people with all the money. They are also participating in helping our field do good work to make their field work better as well.

—There is an upcoming book, «Journalism After Snowden», and you interviewed him on December 2015. Can you give us a hint about the book?
Actually «Journalism After Snowden» was the name we gave to a track of research that we did at the Tow Center over two years. And we thought we would use the attention that was given to the NSA cables and the story to asked deeper questions about how journalists work within and with a sort of surveillance state that we had just been made aware of. The book it’s got chapters from people like Jonathan Zittrain and Ethan Zuckerman, Susan Crawford, Clay Shirky, Steve Coll—our dean—Jill Abramson, Alan Rusbridger.

» What we’ve tried to do was all the work that we did over those two years: talking about the legal aspects, talking about the actual story itself, talking about what it meant for national security reporting, what it means for that relationship between technology and journalism. It’s a framing of a lot of the same issues that we’re looking at now, which is what happens when journalism is vulnerable to losing its independence. Whether it’s financial independence or it’s technical independence or it’s political independence. And how should we protect ourselves legally. How should we think about it practically.

» I’m shocked by how relevant some of this or most of it still is. I’m really hopeful that journalism schools, mass communications students, working journalists as well and maybe the general public will find things in there that helps them think through some of the existential challenges to their work or how they think about the free press right now.

—Can you describe your actual mindset and if it’s too distant or close to the initial one you describe at the beginning of this interview?
There are things which I think have happened which concerned me more now. Concentration of power in tech companies is one of them. We sort of knew the world was changing. We couldn’t have anticipated that there would be a small number of companies that would really dominate in the way that they have. Or we wouldn’t necessarily have anticipated that they would effectively become the publishing infrastructure industry. I would not have predicted it would happen so quickly.

» I feel that we have absolutely the ability to reinvent. The disappearance of advertising is a new challenge. Not just to journalism but actually also to the whole of civic society to make decisions about how much they actually value journalism. And whether or not we can make that case in the current climate I think is a real test of the kind of value and strengths of our work. I was never found to the idea of implementing a paywall at The Guardian for all sorts of reasons. But that was a time when building a paywall really meant cutting your work from the public and I’m very impressed by how news organizations have negotiated and been very inventive about introducing different models and methods for people to participate or pay for their journalism. That’s a reason to be optimistic on the business side.

» We can’t ever stop thinking about what our role now is in an environment which is never going to stop changing. And I think more people like me and you can help give other journalist the frameworks to think about what that means for them and how they do their work, which I think is now got to be collaborative rather than competitive. In the next phase we will see journalism redefining itself as this very important but not majority kind of activity within the information ecosystem. I’m not willing to give up yet on the idea this is actually really worthwhile sort of practical, financial and intellectual fight for a free press. And I think it’s arrived on America’s doorstep.

George Conard.

—Can you explain what a DDoS attack is and does to a website?
DDoS stands for distributed denial service. A DDoS attacks means that someone who doesn’t want the content on a website to be read sends so much traffic towards that website that no one else can get inside. It’s like creating a traffic jam. It’s the simplest analogy.

—DDoS attack have existed since the beginning of internet?
I am totally not a historian of internet security. I’ve been working in this area since the late 80s and I think that the general idea is that DDoS attack have been around for very long. What we are seeing, though, is a massive explosion in the frequency and the scale of the attacks over the last few years. In Brazil we’ve seen over 200 percent year over year increases. There are roughly 125,000 DDoS attacks every day. Its getting to be a bigger and bigger problem, and the size and scale of the attacks are getting bigger as well. The attackers have more resources.

—What makes this kind of attacks different from, say, just cracking a website and destroying everything?
A couple of things. It’s obviously a different technical approach. Trying to actually crack and penetrate a server usually involves different vectors, it often involves social engineering to try to get someone’s passwords. And once you are on it you can do different things. Obviously if you actually had enter the server you can turn it off, make it inaccessible. It is easier for someone who is not particularly technical to go out on the internet and buy a DDoS attack. One can go on to the internet and buy an attack for as little as five dollars. The cheapest I’ve seen is $4,99.

—There is a market for this kind of attacks.
Absolutely. There are people out there who have services that will be called networks stressors or something like that, and you can go and pay for the attack.

—What is the role that Project Shield is going to play with this kind of attacks?
Our goal with Shield is to eliminate DDoS as a form of censorship. We have seen these attacks particularly directed at journalists and human rights websites publishing information some people might not want. Project Shield is a tool or a service to defend those news sites from DDoS attacks. We use our own defenses to shield those sites from an attack. Ultimately, though, our goal is to get to the point where every news publisher, every journalist in the world is protected from DDoS attacks, so these attacks are no longer relevant as censorship.

—What differentiates Project Shield from other services like Project Galileo from Cloudflare?
I know Galileo but I can’t speak on behalf of Cloudflare on the details of the service. I understand that they have a slightly different process where they receive sponsorship from organizations, things like that. But I think it’s great what they are offering. The more of us that are working to offer solutions to organizations who need support and who are vulnerable to these attacks, the better. I would encourage any site to look at both of them, understand what the features say and which one is going to work better for their situation.

—What type of data is Project Shield going to store?
The starting point to talk about that is to understand how DDoS protections runs. There are three different ways you can protect yourself from DDoS attacks. One, is that you can write code and try to do it yourself; if you are a big organization, you’ve got really talented network security engineers, you can try to do that. For most organizations that’s not really an option. Two, is you can buy network security hardware. And for most organizations that leaves the third, which is a cloud based service like Cloudflare or Project Shield. The way that all of these services work is that traffic towards the website first comes through the provider providing the DDoS mitigation service. That necessarily means that you see all the traffic, because otherwise there is no way to defend against attacks. And you have to see the headers for the request and things like that, in order to determine what is a legitimate traffic. Project Shield works that way as well. We have traffic logs. We commit to not store that for ever and we only use it for very specific purposes, which are 1) to actually defending against DDoS attacks, 2) to improve our defenses and more generally 3) to improve the product as a whole.

—You are now in Mexico where Project Shield is going to be launched. But SIP gathers big players in the news industry in Latin America. How are you planning to reach smaller players?
Shield is currently protecting everything from an individual investigative journalist, just one person, all the way up to number one news site in European countries, for example. It’s really for a wide range of people. We work to establish partnerships to reach all of those types of organizations. So we do things like this, talk to the press and try to help others to amplify the story we are trying to tell. Particularly because we are working to protect journalism. We promote it on other websites. I spend a lot of time out of the office —I am based in New York— but I’ve been… I kind of lost track of the number of countries this year. Talk to gatherings of journalists. I was at Hacks/Hackers, the Media Party in Buenos Aires a month and a half ago. I am going to Media Party Africa next week in Cape Town.

—We can see the web as a human body and the DDoS attacks as viruses. If we use antibiotics, viruses may grow stronger. What happens when we have full protection for DDoS attacks? What is coming next?
There are two pieces on that. I am not sure if the biological analogy quite holds. But you are right that there are a lot of different factors of attack. And as technology evolves and as people gets smarter then they come up with creative new ways. I would think about this in two tracks. One is that people are going to continue to try to make DDoS attacks stronger, more powerful, harder to block. We will continue using our great engineering to defending us. Beyond that though is just not only DDoS attacks. You talked about cracking a server. I talked to journalists who were very concerned about how can they secure their communications with their sources and protect themselves, even physically. There is a larger conversation we need to be having about digital security across the journalism space. It starts with individuals in a lot of cases. I don’t think that threats are ever going to go away. I would love to be wrong about that. But i think that we can jump much further by building awareness of all these threats. There are good tools out there that will help protect people.

—If you can give some words to Latin American reporters or small news organizations that are not aware of these threats. What would you tell them?
The threats to journalism and to free press throughout Latin America are growing. It’s not just in the digital spirit. It’s in the physical spaces. We see that. And DDoS is something that is very easy to use to stop you from publishing the great stories that you are researching and writing. And second, it’s actually quite easy to get protected from it, whether is from Project Shield or from something else. My message is usually: Don’t wait until your readers need you the most and you find out that you’ve just been wiped down under an attack. Going back to the biological analogy, get inoculated now so when your readers really need you, you are available for them.

Photo by Patricio Contreras.

—On a recent photo on your Instagram you wrote: “Good reporting never changes, regardless of the Facebook algorithm.” But the truth is that organizations have introduced practices to target the algorithm, not only the good reporting. Is there a balance in this equation?
Let me take a step back. Initially as journalists we ignored Facebook. Then we realized why Facebook is publishing our stuff. So we hated Facebook. But then we realized Facebook was driving traffic to our sites. So we loved Facebook. Journalism and social media is almost like a bad relationship. One day you are fighting, one day you are in love. The bad thing about that is that social media is very powerful and our platform is created by someone else, which takes a lot of the power out of the journalist hands. It always blows my mind that a journalist did not invent Instagram. Why did a photojournalist not invent Instagram? I post that question a lot and people will say «Well, it’s too expensive.» No. It was a bunch of guys sitting in a room that said «we want to share photos.»

—Apps are being created every day.
Every day, by sixteen years old. It wasn’t because it was so hard. It was because we never thought about ourselves as the ones that distribute. We never thought about that part of the equation. What I think it has to happen in the future is that we have to start not just being the platform users but really the platforms developers. And that’s a really important thing. We need to be able to control our own destiny by creating these platforms ourselves.

—And do you see people in the U.S. doing that or having that kind of discussions?
They are, especially on the money end. The other part is we want to do this great journalism but we also have to pay for it. For example, one of the biggest successes of last two years is Vice News. And their success was not so much that they played out to Facebook. They just did their own content. When they started doing Vice Videos, they were getting 13, 14, 15 year old boys to watch news about Africa. That was never done before, at least in the States. The question was «How did they pay for?» None of their journalism makes money. The way that they make money is that Vice has developed this brand of cool. They are such a cool company—the owner is cool, young people want to be a part of Vice—that advertisers actually pay them to be cool. Vice has a whole advertising agency that makes all their money. What we also have to consider is just not the platforms but the business models and not just relying on our journalism to pay for the journalism. Advertising will not pay the bills. We have to make a way that we can sell something else, have value somewhere else, but also have a commitment to journalism. Newspapers that go for the little head, the funny stories, the paid kind of editorial, the silly news, the sexy stories, all that kind of stuff, they lose authenticity with their audience and overtime the audience is gonna go away.

—They are going to figure it out.
Yeah, audiences are smart.

—And journalists don’t tend to think that.
Hahaha. Maybe you fooled them today, maybe tomorrow, but a year from now they are going to be reading something else.

—There is no question that the media landscape changed. How was your professional adaptation to this environment?
I just posted something on Facebook and I said «You know what? Congratulations to the full time video journalists. I just don’t know how you do it.» And I posted: 50 percent of my income is through teaching, 45 percent comes from doing videos for NGOs, and 5 percent from straight journalism. If I had to live on video journalism, I’d be starving. Documentaries projects are very expensive. I had to figure another way to live my life but also be able to fund those. That’s what I did. I teach a lot, I work on nontraditional videos, and I do journalism. You are already seeing a lot of organizations do this. Every news organizations has some kind of branded or sponsored content. Atlantic Media Group, they have a brand new division; all they do is storytelling for brands. That side is making way more money than the news side. Right now what you are seeing is that what would have been sinful about ten years ago, it’s just a fact of life. Ten years ago no journalist in their right mind would have done something for a brand, right? The New York Times does this. You guys have Netflix here, right? Do you watch «Orange is the New Black»?

—The New York Times made a long form story of native advertising…
About female convicts. I worked on a huge series with the Times called «Thirty Six Hours,» it’s a travel series completely founded by Google and Google Maps. They’ve done that. A lot of venerable organizations have realized «Listen, we need to pay the bills. Because if we can pay to keep the lights on, then we are gonna actually do important journalism.» The mindset has changed, people are accepting on that.

—You have been teaching at Columbia since 2002. What happens in academia where ethics and editorial guidelines are so important? This landscape is moving boundaries.
I think you can change your operations and still be ethical. The problem with education now is things change so quickly. Before the semester ends, the industry is gone to something else. I don’t think ethics ever becomes a problem. Now, there is still a problem where we have to deal with issues like Facebook and social media. We’ve added some courses, some—to be honest—very unsuccessful. Because by the time we taught them, it was already old.

—A few steps behind.
Academia is much slower than the real world.

—Is that the biggest challenge for j-schools now?
Here is the real, honest problems. One, having the right faculty. A lot of j-schools have faculty that are really great journalists but they worked in a different era, so they don’t even have a hands-on experience dealing with «How do I react to someone who gets into a Twitter war with me.» Cause they never had to do that. Or, «How can I possibly file five stories a day?» You can fix that problem by having good adjuncts, not full time faculty but the ones that work in the field. Related to that, academia moves pretty slowly. If I want to teach a class in the fall, I have to propose that class a year before to get approval. In a year, as you know, a lot happens. In my reporting class I make my students to Instagram every day, not what they are eating but what they see in the beat, almost as if they were photojournalists. I make them do three posts a day and it’s terrible for them. They hate it.

—They don’t have the habit?
They don’t have the habit and they are complaining by three posts a day.

—What happens at the end of the semester? Do they get more used to do this?
That is the hope. I tell them, «I am not doing this for my health. I don’t want to look at your photos. I am doing this so you can get use to working fast, working every day, publishing multiple times a day.” Most people, students who go to Columbia, would love to write a magazine article every two months. I’m like, «That job does not exist.» A part of this is retraining the students to be realistic about how the world works as well.

—In 2015 you published your textbook, a guide for storytelling with tips and advices for multimedia journalists. What is the value of that in a moment when the immediate consumption is the norm?
It kind of drives you through but also focuses on just the fundamentals. It is a book about reporting and telling. And I think that’s important right now because I always tell students when they come into Columbia… they pay a lot of money to go to Columbia. I think it’s something like US $100,000, between tuition and living in New York for a year. Can you imagine? When you go into a newsroom there’s not going to be an experienced editor to say «You did this wrong and this is why you did it wrong.” Right now in 2016 tuition is ridiculous. And you can print this, Columbia needs to do something about it. I don’t care if they get mad that I say this. We need to find ways so that we don’t create a system where only rich kids can be journalists. We need to create a system where all kids can be trained to do journalism. But the main thing about that is that right now I feel like I have even a greater duty because when they leave it may be the last time, for a long time, that someone tells them exactly what’s right and wrong about their pieces.

—And that is maybe the reason for why you turned your Tumblr page into this kind of endless tutorial on audiovisual technique and equipment, not only for your students but for everybody who can access that.
Absolutely right. I wish I had more time. That’s exactly my goal. I have a bit of experience and I really love inexpensive things. I think the biggest harm to journalism is only allowing rich people to do it. Part of my mission is as much as I can to give free information on the net. Columbia already pays me a salary. Some of my colleagues say «You know, you should charge for your blog.» First of all, who would pay for it? And secondly, that’s not my goal. If I can help some kid out there or 10 people or 20 people, then I think I’m doing a little bit more to make sure that more diverse voices get to participate in journalism.

—On Tumblr you call yourself «An original multimedia gangsta.» What do you mean by that?
That’s a joke. It started a long time ago. It comes from hip hop, old hip hop, original gangsta, «they’re so tough and mean.» And journalists are not tough and mean. It was just a joke, a plan that «I’ll never be a tough guy or a rapper. But at least I am this.»

—But people may think that you are a video storyteller gangsta.
Hahaha, I don’t know about that. I think that with this business you can’t take yourself too seriously. You know it’s important to kind of have that sense of humor certainly because our industry is so in flux. It’s hard to make a living at it. And the only thing that keeps you going is the fact that it’s a really cool profession. Journalism is really cool. And the fact you meet really cool people and you’re proud and you’re doing a job that can have great impact. And if you don’t take yourself too seriously through the rough times, the jokes can get you through.

—There is a lack of a sense of humor in the news industry.
There is.

—Is because of the crisis or is just in our DNA?
Is in our DNA. It’s really important that we get out of that because you’re absolutely right. Journalists are not funny. But you know what really sells online? Humor. People love humor. One of the things we need to understand is that our role is just not to inform but also to entertain because when the Facebook feed comes through, it’s a news story, maybe a stupid video, something your mom posted and then maybe a news story and so on. I think we need to elevate our ability to entertain. And I don’t mean be silly, I don’t mean be stupid or crass or overly sexualized. We can have a sense of humor. We can present our stories in a way that are just as compelling as someone not doing journalism because if we don’t then we’ve lost all those people. I think humor is a great way to connect especially on line. And I think it’s in our DNA. But we can change. We can recruit new people, we can accept new ideas.

—Can you point the most common mistakes that news organizations make when dealing with video?
I think our biggest straints is that we follow the platform. And we follow the success on the platform as opposed to say «This is what I want to say and which platform can I say it in?» We kind of do the cart before the horse. You know those AJ+ videos with the big lettering and no audio? They’re very successful now and the reason that they have big lettering is because Facebook does silent autoplay. So we followed the platform. Is that the best way to tell that? Just because it’s a popular platform doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do what’s popular on that platform because you do something else. There’s some people who make potato chips and there’s gourmet chefs. They’re both food but you want them at different occasions. That’s one big mistake with digital. The second is in terms of our rhythms. Trying to figure out what the human will like in storytelling. There is formulas as storytelling writing. You write your story with your lead, your nut graph. The words are yours and the same thing with video: there’s an opening shot and an interview. But the way we edit it is ours so that level of humanity in the storytelling can never be replicated with artificial intelligence, at least not in 2016. You cannot trick good storytelling through algorithms. That’s a big mistake.

—And who is doing great stuff with video right now?
Right now there’s tons of great videos. The guys with Vice are doing great video. I have some problems with their stuff. Maybe the fact checking could be a little stronger but they’re engaging an audience who’s never been interested in news. BuzzFeed in terms of long form it has been really good. I used to hate them, I used to think they were a joke with just cat videos. But they’ve got all those resources and covering the politics really well in America. Vox has been doing really well. They do a lot of explainer videos. That uses the medium really well. Vox is not trying to do AJ+ videos. Vox explains the world. I think that’s always been their motto.

—Do you think that everybody, big and small news organizations, should be focusing on video? Or your advice would be to focus on what you can do best?
I think after being lost at sea for many years, journalism can see some lights. You have to really start thinking about your technology. How you use what’s out there but also to develop new technology that you can own. You cannot let Mark Zuckerberg be your editor as you saw in that recent controversy. You have to understand that video is really expensive and that you have to make it fit what your viewers want as opposed to copying a leader in terms of video. Video distributions is real cheap. The internet is real cheap. Making it is still very expensive.

Photo by Patricio Contreras.

—You’re here in Chile to talk about the future of news. And I wanted to ask you about the roles of the actors in these landscape. So first what do you think is the role of reporters in building this future or imagining this future.
The role of a journalist is just what I posted: to report. Our job is to gather information and distilled it and present it in a way that is meaningful for our audience. That has always been the case. We don’t write for ourselves. We write for the public. We might enjoy writing or we might enjoy making videos but more importantly: will the videos do something for the audience? Now, presenting it in a way that’s meaningful is the tricky part of 2016. Is it meaningful on Twitter? Is it meaningful on Snapchat? Is that meaningful on YouTube? We need some new people in the building to help us out.

—And the role of professors and j-schools?
That’s a great one. I’m biased but I think that for the first time in a long time, if ever, we can help lead the industry. As newspapers are struggling with making money and layoffs, academia doesn’t have the same pressures. No matter how bad journalism gets, I’m still a professor. I’m not going to get laid off. We should be the ones that say «Hey, guess what? We just did research on this. Don’t do that. Here New York Times, here’s free advice.» And we’ve actually done that. A lot of the reports that have come out of the Tow Center, that’s all they do. They spend millions of dollars each year doing these analytical reports. There was a report on the layout of offices.

—By Nikki Usher.
That’s right! Emily Bell is a good friend of mine and I am like «That totally makes sense.» Our role is to take a lead and do a lot of the R&D because news orgs don’t have the money right now and they could use our expertise. Because if you don’t exist we can’t exist. If journalism dies there’s no journalism school. But I think we need to have that kind of symbiotic relationship.

—And finally the role of students, undergraduate or graduate students.
I think sadly the cost of education in America is so high that excludes a lot of people. But in an ideal world if we can get the tuition down I think if you’re interested in journalism you need to be a student of it because that layer of editing that I mentioned is gone. In the past you didn’t have to go to journalism school to become a journalist. Even today you don’t have to. But to really have those fundamentals, students actually need to get trained properly before you start making mistakes. And there’s no one there to catch you.

—Last thing: What is the one piece of equipment you need to carry always, wherever you go?
Your smartphone. This is the best, you just record this interview. You can take photos. The thing that differentiates it from any camera that you buy in the world is this is connected to the Internet. You can report and share whatever you see immediately. So you can have a US $3,000 Leica camera. I will take this [the smartphone] over that, any day.

Nikolaos Nanas

BUILDING INTEREST PROFILES

» My PhD research focused on Biologically Inspired AI and in particular the application of Artificial Immune Systems for Adaptive Information Filtering. The latter is the field concerned with the problem of information overload on the web and is trying to tackle it by building interest profiles for each individual user, capable of distilling relevant from non relevant information. This is a complex computational task because people have multiple and evolving interests. In my research I argued that approaches like Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and in general, any approach that is essentially based on vector representations of a user’s interests is not well suited to the dynamic and multidimensional nature of the problem.

USING THE THEORY OF AUTOPOIESIS

» I proposed an alternative computational solution, inspired by how the inner workings of the biologically immune systems are explained by the theory of Autopoiesis. The immune system has the ability to discriminate between the host organism’s own molecules and any external pathogen or virus. This is called self—non-self discrimination and is essential for the organism’s survival. When the discrimination fails the immune system attacks the organism’s own molecules causing autoimmune diseases. The theory of Autopoiesis has been developed by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in their effort to provide a common characterization of the organization of living systems. According to the theory, the immune system is a network of interacting antibodies that constantly self-organises to define and preserve the organism’s identity, in what is called «self assertion”. As long as the immune system can maintain “self”, even while the organism developing within an ever changing environment, anything else can be discriminated as “non-self”.

A NEW MODEL: NOOTROPIA

» I developed a model, which I called “Nootropia” (Greek word for: «An Individual’s or a group’s particular way of thinking, someone’s characteristics of intellect and perception”). Instead of a network of antibodies, it uses a self-organising network of weighted features (keywords, tags, etc.) to represent and constantly adapt to someone’s multiple and changing interests, his ever developing «info-self”. The network is neither predefined nor fixed. It can both learn and forget. This immune inspired approach has two significant advantages: a) it can capture someone’s multiple interests by including thousand of features without suffering the curse of dimensionality, which is characteristic of the vector space mode and b) it can continuously learn without getting stack in local optima and without becoming saturated. In practice, this means that we can capture an individual’s or a group’s complex and dynamic interests with a single, autonomous computational structure, that can even run on the client’s machine for efficiency and scalability. Comparative experiments have demonstrated that the network structure, with its links measuring correlations between features, can be 50% more accurate that the popular vector-space representation. It avoids synonymity and polysemy issues and can identify silent features that capture aspects of what makes something interesting that even he could not possibly express. It “realized” for example that I like “murals” and more generally “street art” although I did not even know the word “murals” in English and if someone was to ask me what type of art you like I would never think of answering “street art”. The same happened when it discovered that I like surrealism in photography. Identifying my favorite sport team is basic.

FROM ACADEMIA TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

» The crisis has seriously influenced the Greek Universities and Research Institutes. Job openings and funding have become obsolete. It made taking the risk of entrepreneurship easier. Personally, I got to the point where I felt that I could no longer contribute academically. I have published several papers demonstrating the computational and practical advantages of Nootropia, but they ended up just adding another line in my CV. I have also failed to attract research funding from the EU. I wanted to apply Nootropia to the world. We have developed and tested various research prototypes with my team at the Institute of Research and Technology of Thessaly (IRETETH) and in 2009 we had already developed possibly the first Personalized News Aggregator in the world, but it was just a guinea pig, miles away from a usable and valuable product. In 2010 I have visited New York and had some intriguing discussions with prominent web entrepreneurs, who reacted very positively and encouraging to my demos. This trip prompted me to turn Nootropia into a real world application. Back then, I did not even know what a startup was. I was still an academic. I just wanted to contribute to the web and I did not care about making money.

BYE BYE NEWS AGGREGATOR, HELLO INTELLIGENT PUBLISHING PLATFORM

» It took me a year to find the right partners. We started developing Noowit’s Personalized News Aggregator in September 2011 with Christos Spiliopoulos and Thanos Theodoridis (who later left the team). The first private beta version was ready in May 2012 and the first public beta version was released in 1st of July 2013. Several versions and additional features followed (including the ability to publish your own online magazine) and Noowit attracted international interest, being considered by many a competitor to the well established Flipboard. By May 2015 however, having failed to attract a critical mass of users and funding and after realizing that the domain of News Aggregators is generally failing we have decided to change research direction. In June 2015 we have won the “Best Personalization Service” prize at the Digital Media Awards and this gave us the opportunity to directly speak with publishers and identify their needs. We decided to stop the further development of our Personalized News Aggregator and turn all our energy towards the development of an intelligent publishing platform. The new platform and our official pivot was announced last Easter. Noowit has become the “printing house” of the future for publishing intelligent/personalized newspapers and magazines online. Today we have already signed our first contracts and we our proud for our first four publications. The latest is OZONWeb and if you ask me, this is the first online magazine ever, the way it should be.

THE RELATION BETWEEN IMMUNE SYSTEMS AND WEB DESIGN

» Nootropia, lies at the core of everything Noowit does. Every article is evaluated according to the interests of each individual. The result is a relevance score which allows us to choose the most interesting articles and also, to appropriately present them to the reader. We have developed an intelligent layout engine to produce newspapers and magazines that adapt to the reader’s interests, the content’s volume and characteristics and of course the device being used. Each section’s layout is hierarchical. Articles relevant to the reader appear first and large and the least relevant articles follow smaller and smaller. So even if and edition’s content is common for all readers (e.g., if it explicitly selected by the editor and not distilled by our algorithms), the way it appears to each individual is different, to reflect his interests and help him identify the most relevant content. Our statistics show that this way of making the relevant content stand out does work. Readers are more likely to click, share and provide feedback to the recommended content.

» Web users become more and more saturated by the available information glut. Web giant has found a way to make it easier to find what you are looking for (Google), or to find popular-recommended content (Facebook). It is an essential part of their success. Personalization becomes more and more essential and an integral part of the web experience, even when it is subtle. It does not only make it easier and fast to browse through content, it creates engagement, which is essential in today’s competitive web. When I read The Daily or The Tag news about my team will appear first and large and those about our competitors last and small. It makes me fell good, as if the publication itself is supporting my team. Of course the opposite happens to the reader’s supporting the opponents. I know what is happening in the background, but they do not. They are just left with the nice feeling this is a newspaper or magazine that knows them and respects them.

AN ALGORITHM THAT IS «LANGUAGE AGNOSTIC»

» All known personalization engines out there are heavily based on constructing ontologies or concept hierarchies to capture the essence of a topic. The process of building and applying this type of structure heavily involves Natural Language Specific techniques which are language specific. It is not accidental all well established personalization engines like Zite (acquired by Flipboard), Gravity.com and others only work for English. In contrast, Nootropia is fully statistical. The only component required to apply it to a language is its stemmer for reducing words to their root (and even that could be avoided). Such stemmers are readily available off-the-shelf for almost every language. We already support ten of the most popular languages (including Spanish of course) and we can easily ad any other language. In fact, Nootropia is not only language agnostic, it is also domain independent. It could be applied to any type of information, as long as there are features describing its content or usage.

» One of the main arguments of my research has been that ontology driven approaches are not well suited to web personalization, due to their centralized, monolithic and non-dynamic nature. A common ontology or concept hierarchy can not express the different ways people conceptualize the world. It is characteristic that these approaches suffer by issues of polysemy. Try adding the topic “python” to Flipboard/Zite. It will aggregate articles about both python the snake and python the programming language. Nootropia builds a separate concept network for each individual reader and captures the specific term correlations that make something interesting to this particular reader. It can learn that it is python the programming language that he is interested in and even recognize the specifics aspects of python programming he is currently into (e.g., python programming for machine learning).

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLIED TO WEB DESIGN

» One of our main goals with Noowit’s new publishing platform is to combine Artificial Intelligence, with innovative design and cutting edge technology to successfully transfer the effectiveness of print media online. When you open a newspaper or magazine you flip through its pages from beginning to end. You have selected this particular newspaper/magazine because you trust it, you enjoy its content and you like it for its typography, imagery and layout. You find interesting articles, but also serendipitous. Articles which are not necessarily directly related to your interests, but are still appropriately chosen and edited to compose a package of information. As you flip through this package you are exposed to full page ads without being obstructed and without having to change your flipping behavior.

» Online, newspapers and magazines suffered something similar to the music album. They broke into individual articles, which are disseminated and consumed individually via social media. Portals are by no means a counterpart to print media. They have no beginning or end. There goal was to lure the visitor in via SEO and then keep him in, within a maze of categories, subcategories and tags. Their Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is pageviews and average time on site. But this not what is happening any longer. Seventy percent of their visitors come from social media. They click on an article’s post, visit its page, read it and leave.

» One of our greatest lessons from our first Personalized News Aggregator was that the web will never move on to the era of the “page”. It will remain in the era of the “papyrus”, cause scrolling is simply the most fluent way to consume content online. The success of Facebook and Twitter, where millions consume terabytes of information, is a solid, indisputable proof. Noowit’s Personalized News Aggregator was possibly the first web app with paginated content and it took a lot of ingenious engineering to be achieved. It proved wrong and not user friendly. The new publishing platform takes a completely different stance. Newspapers and magazines become a papyrus with a beginning and an end that the reader “flips” through them by naturally scrolling on any device. They have a cover and a back page and in between a series of sections. Various algorithms are responsible, not only for the aforementioned personalized layouts, but also for aligning images and text to produce a result that is clearly reminiscent of a traditional newspaper/magazine only without pages. Visitors coming from social media are exposed to the full issue and not individual articles. The goal is no longer to keep the visitor in long enough to produce pageviews. The KPI is completely different. As long as a reader has browsed the full newspaper/magazine from beginning to the end its goal has been achieved. It can be checked in the bin. In the process the reader is exposed to a number of full page ads without being obstructed, like in a traditional print newspaper or magazine. Our readers find this new type of online ads pleasant and their Click Through Rates (CTRs) are over 4% when the corresponding CTR of the average banner is 0,06%. Noowit’s goal is to publish online newspapers and magazines the way they should be. With both the smarts and the looks.

SOME FUTUROLOGY ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

» When people hear about Artificial Intelligence, the first thing that comes in their mind is humanoid robots with natural language skills and pseudo-feelings or at least a character of some sort. Artificial Intelligence is already here. From small bots to larger more complex AI infrastructure they are involved in the way content is produced, disseminated, analyzed, presented… Each of these AI entities individually have nothing to do with the intelligent robots people imagine. Individually, they can be as dumb as an ant, but collectively play a catalytic role in how we interact with information on the web. They are an integral part of web’s evolution and of its global effect on our lives. They are and become more and more part of the equation that defines human life on earth.

» If I focus on media in particular I will have once more to use an excerpt from Steven Johnson’s book EMERGENCE: «Amazingly, this process has come full circle. Hundreds of thousands—if not millions— of years ago, our brains developed a feedback mechanism that enabled them to construct theories of other minds. Today, we are beginning to create software applications that are capable of developing a theory of our minds. All those fluid, self-organizing programs tracking our tastes and interests, and measuring them against the behavior of larger populations, these programs are the beginning of a progression that will, in a matter of years, lead to a world where we regularly interact with media that seems to know us in some fundamental way. Software will recognize our habits, anticipate our needs, adapt to our changing moods. The first generation of emergent software displayed a captivatingly organic quality; they seemed more like life-forms than the sterile instruction sets and command lines of early code. The next generation will take that organic feel one step further: the new software will use the tools of self-organization to build models of our own mental states. These programs won’t be self-aware, and they won’t pass any Turing tests, but they will make the media experience we’ve grown accustomed to seem autistic in comparison. They will be mind readers.”

» With Noowit we want to contribute towards this direction. To turn mass media into smart, personalized media. Media Made Smart!

Michael Rezendes. Photo by Pablo Baeza Contreras.

Michael Rezendes says it is impossible to calculate how many interviews he has given in the last year. While promoting Spotlight, the film inspired by the Boston Globe investigation that uncovered sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in that city, Rezendes and some of his partners—Sacha Pfeiffer, Walter Robinson— had to endure marathonic sessions of up to twenty daily interviews.

«I consider it both justice in a way, because I spent so much of my life interviewing people so now the tables are turned and people interview me,» he says.

The word «marathonic» is usual for him. In addition to winning two Pulitzer Prizes—one with the Spotlight Team (2003), another with all the staff of the Boston Globe (2014)— as well as working since 1989 in the main newspaper of that city, and having studied film writing, besides being a fan of the work of Denis Johnson and Jim Harrison, and besides of his strong believe that his journalism can change the world, Rezendes is also a marathon runner. And not just an occasional one.

He estimates he has run thirteen marathons: eight in Boston, two in New York, and one in Chicago, Washington and Las Vegas. He belongs to a local team of runners, the L Street Running Club. He used to wear Asics running shoes, now he prefers Brooks. «I think because I am small there were not a lot of other sports I could play. But I found that running I enjoyed it, I like the endurance aspect of it and it was a sport where I could compete,” he says.

On April 15, 2013 Rezendes had run 25.5 miles of the Boston Marathon. He was the runner number 25903. He was six blocks away from the finish line when two bombs exploded, killing three people and wounding more than 260. He did not hear the blasts but the police was detouring the race and he realized that something was wrong. Without hesitation, Rezendes abandoned the race and began to report the attack. It would be the beginning of a busy day.

—How can someone report a terrorist attack for an entire day after running 25 miles? How was that day for you?
I don’t understand it either, haha. And I thought to myself, ‘I must not have been running hard enough if I still had all that leftover energy, maybe I should have been running faster.’ But truthfully I think is the adrenaline, it’s a very powerful drug we have inside of ourselves. To me there was no question that I had to immediately start covering the bombing and go to work.

Later, the Newseum in Washington D.C. organized an exhibition of FBI related objects, and they asked to the Boston Globe staff, especially to the reporting-runners of that day, if someone wanted to donate something. Rezendes gave his bib number, his shorts, his running shoes and the first notes he made that day on a flyer.

Museum pieces that are no longer on display, but remain as «hidden treasures» donated by a journalist who during the past 27 years—with a few comes and goes—has dedicated his life to the Boston Globe, the investigative journalism and his surrounding community.

THE BIGGEST LOCAL NEWSPAPER

—Do you remember your first day at the Boston Globe?
It was a crazy day because there was a pregnant woman who was murdered that day. There was a manhunt going on for the killer, so the whole newsroom was kind of in a state of chaos. I honestly cannot remember what my first story was.

—Can you describe the atmosphere at the Boston Globe?
The newsroom it’s a great place because there is always something happening, there is always people to talk to, there is always something going on. It feels like a very interesting and busy place.

—That’s good for the job, isn’t it?
Yeah, there is always a new day in the newsroom and that’s the great thing about the newspaper. It’s always a new day, maybe you can do a better job today.

—During the Excellence in Journalism Prize ceremony you mentioned the crisis in the news industry, the crisis of the business model. Do you sense that at the Boston Globe?
I think if you walk into our newsroom, you wouldn’t get an immediate sense that there is any anxiety about that. It’s a really hard working dedicated newsroom. But I am sure that in the back of everyone’s mind people are worried about it because we had many cuts and we had layoffs at the Globe and I think we are going to have more. And everybody understands that. So I think there is anxiety about it but if you walk into the Globe newsroom at first you wouldn’t sense it because people would be working very hard on their stories. But if you hang around for a few days and talk to people you’d pick it up.

—You have said that Boston is the «biggest small town in America». What that does mean for the newspaper?
It means the newspaper has a lot of impact because everybody knows what the Boston Globe is doing. So, you can really have a lot of impact, even though is not one of the biggest papers in America we have a significant impact on our geographical area.

—It’s like the «biggest local newspaper» in America?
Maybe, that’s a good way to put it.

—How does that affect your kind of reporting?
What I meant when I said it was the «biggest small town in America» is that everybody knows everybody else in a way. Even if you don’t know someone, you probably know someone who knows that person. You ever heard the term «six degrees of separation»? In Boston is more like two or three.

METHOD AND WRITING

—Where do you find your stories?
Usually people call me. I get a lot of tips. I got ideas of my own and sometimes editors suggest stories. There is a lot of different ways I get stories. At this point at my career, a lot of people call me with story ideas all the time. Most of them are not very good ideas, quite honestly, but occasionally someone calls with some very important information that becomes a story.

—How do you feel when someone calls you? Do you feel you are helpful for the community?
Sure, I think my journalism is very helpful to the community, all the time.

—Do you have a method for your reporting or just the basic stuff: taking notes, calling sources, knocking on doors, the shoe-leather reporting?
When I have a good idea for a story or when someone suggest an idea that I think it could make a very good story, the first question I asked myself is ‘OK, it sounds like a great story. Can I get it?’ In other words, can I prove it? Are there documents available? Is there someone who’ll talk to me on the record? That’s my first consideration, to asses whether the story is gettable or not. In other words, is it worth my time? I don’t like to get into situations where I might spend three weeks doing research only to find out, well, it’s not really the story I thought it was. Or we are not going to be able to get it because the data doesn’t exist. The skill that I have is to assess whether a story is worthy of publication and then whether we can get it or I can get it. And I think that is the most important thing I do.

—At the end of the nineties you studied filmwriting at the American Film Institute. You wanted to move beyond journalism or you wanted to improve your storytelling skills?
I’m really a big fan of the movies and cinema. And I thought it would be interesting to write a screenplay that became a movie. I had artistic aspirations. Initially, when I was a student, I was an English major, I was not a Journalism major, and I thought I would be a novelist. So, I was always interested in the writing of fiction and poetry. Film is a similar art form, except that it’s visual and it’s a more powerful art form. I was interested in the form and exploring the idea of becoming a screenwriter.

—And how this filmwriting studies helped you in your journalism?
When you are writing a long story with a lot of complicated information, it helps to use narrative writing techniques. In other words, if you are just going to pile a lot of information in front of the reader, probably they are not going to get through it and not going to read it. It’s helpful to be able to craft a story that includes the information that you want to communicate and express it in a very powerful way. And I think the study of screenwriting is helpful because screenwriting is a very discipline form. Every movie is about two hours which means that every screenplay is about 120 pages. It’s like a news story: you have a fine universe in which to work, and you want to have dramatic highlights, cliffhangers, turning points. Those are the things that keep a movie alive. And it’s the same for a story. You want to have the dramatic moments, cliffhangers, turning points. Same principles apply.

—Would you recommend that to young reporters that want to become investigative journalists? Because right now everybody is talking about data journalism, visualization, the cross between tech and journalism.
I think that learning data analysis and data visualization today is very very important. The narrative storytelling techniques I am talking about I don’t think it should be the first priority for a journalism student. I think it’s a more advanced class, I would say. Maybe when the student is a senior or about to graduate can start exploring those techniques. Initially students have to learn the basics, just getting the facts, making sure everything is accurate, telling a shorter story in a way that’s readable, learning the inverted pyramid style, learning what a good lead is. There are a lot of things a journalism student should be learning before getting into a conversation about how best to do long form journalism.

PEOPLE REALLY DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT WE DO

—During your JSK fellowship, in 2009, your main interest was “the threat of secrecy in a democratic society”. Are leaks the solution to that threat or do you believe in an improvement at the institutional level?
Both. People leak information because it’s not public and they believe it should be public. Whistleblowers play a very important role in our society but they also point to the fact that there is a lot of information that’s secret that ought to be public.

—If you had to lead and put together an investigative unit like Spotlight, what would your main focus be? What kind or reporters would you look for?
I would look for reporters who have experience in various areas. I would probably want someone very experienced covering the courts, maybe someone very experienced covering politics, maybe someone very experienced covering crime. And I would also look for reporters who are not prima donnas, reporters who are able to subsumed their egos to work with the team. I don’t think everyone is well suited to work for a team. Takes a certain kind of individual, someone who is cooperative and likes to work cooperatively with other people. Many journalists by nature are loners and that’s not the kind of person that would work well on the team, even though that person might be very skilled, but it’s not the kind of person you would want on a team.

—Newspapers need strong teams.
A newspaper should have a mix of people and personality types. There is a time and place for the lone wolfs. It’s great to have an organization that’s big enough that can accommodate different kinds of people and different styles of reporting.

—How would you like to be remembered?
I would like to be remembered as a person who left the world better than he found it.

—Journalism is helping society do that right now?
Oh yeah. Without any doubt. We give voice to the voiceless, we help people in trouble, we correct systemic failure in society. Journalists do a great deal for the common good.

—And what would you say to the critics of news industry?
News organization are not perfect. And some are better than others. So I would try to respond specifically to the criticism. I think most people don’t understand how important journalism is and how valuable is. That’s one of the reasons I like this movie so much, it really shows in very dramatic fashion how important journalism is. Many people don’t appreciate that. It’s one reason I give a lot of interviews. I want people to understand that.

—Would you encourage other reporters to talk more about their jobs?
Yeah, I would. People really don’t understand what we do. I had a girlfriend once and she had this idea of my job. She thought I just sat around all day and tried to figure out where to put the commas in my stories, you know. She had no conception of reporting. She just thought I sat around all day with my feet up trying to, like, write the perfect sentence.

—What did you thought about that idea?
It just showed me how much of a disconnect there is between public perception and the reality. It was very funny.

IN ONE WORD

—This year the Pulitzer made a publication with pictures of past winners describing in one word how does it feel to win the Prize. In your case, which word would you choose for your Pulitzers?
Gratitude.

—To whom?
For instance, when we won the Pulitzer for the Catholic Church investigation, I would say gratitude towards the survivors for trusting us with their stories. That was the most important thing. And also is very gratifying to have such important work recognized and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this kind of work and grateful for the chance to work at the Boston Globe which has a lot of resources and will hire lawyers to defend me if I’m ever sued.

—And in the case of the bombings in 2013?
Gratitude works pretty well. Grateful for everyone’s hard work. Everyone in the newsroom worked incredibly hard. No one slept, virtually. People worked seven days a week under tremendous pressure. It was a very competitive story, there were news organizations from all over the world in Boston. And we wanted to be the best and we wanted to be first. And that’s very hard to do and there is a lot of pressure around that. I’m just grateful for the incredible work that my colleagues did.

—With the same idea. In one word, the state of investigative reporting in the United States.
I can’t say it in a word, haha. It’s impressive. I was a judge in an investigative reporting journalism contest this year, the Goldsmith Awards for Investigative Reporting. There were very very encouraging number of fantastic submissions. At the same time journalism is in crisis and everybody is struggling with less and less revenue. It’s a strange time. It’s both encouraging and discouraging.

—And your time here in Chile? In one word.
Beautiful.

Puroperiodismo is a word game with two meanings: «only journalism» and «pure journalism».

A DIGITAL PRESENCE

2015 was a year of experimentation and continuities in Puroperiodismo. To our regular content—interviews, current affairs and opinion—, we add more visual, graphics and animated products: we want to oscillate between good written content we already have and those visual and interactive boundaries that do justice to the ecosystem we inhabit. Our interview section mutated to the forms of manifest/testimony and our opinion columns were more interpretive and informative. We follow a golden rule: to cover what we know and to link to the rest.

We seek to consolidate us as a digital presence. Our website is a priority, yes, but so are our social networks—Facebook, Twitter and Instagram mainly—where we gather almost thirty thousand followers. As Constanza Sturm wrote on Medium, a journalist’s work is no longer confined to the publication of a unitary and indivisible content. Now we must think abouth the many opportunities to share what we do: gif, videos, infographics, quotes, etc. We must think that the future of news is not a single article but something more complex that is still looking its configuration (NYT Labs Alexis Lloyd proposed a name: particles instead of articles).

Speaking of Anglo-Saxon journalism, this 2015 we started timidly publishing content in English (this review was first published in Spanish). To live circumscribed by the limits of our language does not seem a useful option on the internet. We hope to expand our audience and make visible the journalism that is done in this corner of the world without forgetting the Latin American emphasis that identifies us in these seven years.

So, please check out our conversations with Rodrigo Cornejo about Chilean media and with Aimee Edmondson about data journalism.

ASSISTANTS

This year thirteen students from J-School at Alberto Hurtado University —ranging from third to fifth year—worked as assistants for the magazine, for one or two months: María Paz Ortiz, Gustavo Donat, Belén Vásquez, Catalina Martí, Pedro Kortmann, Fabiola Pinto, Raúl Marín, Joaquín Gallo, Magdalena Provis, Tamy Palma, Jaime Zúñiga, Francisca Burgos and Marcelo Salazar.

The formation of this diverse group of assistants helped us to expand our topics, include new voices and provide new perspectives—a “millenials” approach—about the work of journalists and media. We want to know their concerns as soon to be journos and as critical consumers of media. Our challenge is not to feed a dictatorship of the written article and delve, together with our students, in new languages and storytelling forms. We must aspire to think in what we cannot yet imagine, as Jeff Jarvis writes.

COLLABORATIONS

In 2015 we had exceptional external collaborators. Journalists, academics and media editors contributed with thoughtful, critical and informative texts. We are humble followers of David Carr, media critic of The New York Times who died on February 12, 2015, whose weekly column —The Media Equation—was an exquisite combination of information, analysis and good pen. To this we aimed… with humility.

This are the highlights of our collaborators:

• Colombian journalist and academic Óscar Durán Ibatá graciously gave us his text «The seam of writing», which we divided into six parts that cover topics such as reporting, analysis and research tools.
• Paula Molina, host of Cooperative radio and correspondent for BBC World, took the arrival of Mónica González to «Zero Tolerance» TV show as a starting point to talk about the presence of women in the media.
• Christian Leal, director of Biobío Chile, shared a double-entry: first, with a column on the shutdown of a couple of TV newscasts and later with the crisis of TVN—Chilean public broadcaster—and its complex future.
• Andrés Azócar, editor of Digital Media at Channel 13, wrote about what’s valuable in media and how paradigms can be changed to overcome the immediacy of numbers and sporadic volume.
• Sebastian Lehuedé, journalist and student of MSc Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, raised a number of questions about the digital future of TVN.
• Manuel Gárate, Ph.D. in History, provided a valuable text on the magazine Charlie Hebdo and its cartoons related to Pinochet and Chile, a few days after the terrorist attack that took the life of ten members of the outlet.
• Francisco Darmendrail summarized his undergraduate thesis on the first hundred days of Pope Francis in the press.
• Gianitsa Corral shared his thoughts after the murder of two students in Valparaíso, in May 2015, and the lack of thoroughness of some media coverage.
• Moreover, the Observatory Against Street Harassment (OCAC) provided a brief instructive for the media to address this problem.

As Gustavo would say, thank you so much for your support.

OUR WEB SITE

We closed 2015 with 68 original publications on the website. According to our Google Analytics, we had over 86,000 page views and 53,000 users. Each session of those users had an average duration of one minute and four seconds (in 2014 the average was 60 seconds). That is, by far, the number that matters most. We are a niche magazine and therefore we know that our audience is more specific and smaller. Still, we want this audience to stay with us, to read us, to accompany us. And hopefully for more than 64 seconds on average. In that sense, it is a good sign that one of our most read articles—about Charlie Hebdo and Pinochet—had an average of four minutes and 51 seconds of reading.

86 percent of our visitors are desktops users: only 8,701 visits came from mobile devices. And half of that is through Ipad or Iphone. That 14 percent mobile, however, is a big jump from the 6 percent we had in 2014. It is likely that this number will grow and we should prioritize it when we review our content strategy.

Two out of three visitors are from Chile. Then comes México (7.35%), Spain (4.81%), Argentina (4.78%) and Colombia (3.76%). An unexpected number: a thousand sessions came from Russia (Spasibo!) While our content is mainly local, some of our approaches—titles designed for a global audience, for example—have enabled us to diversify our audiences.

OUR NETWORKS

On Facebook we received 361 new followers and now we are 2,880. Twenty percent of our fans are 25 and 34 years old and mostly they live in Chile, but we also have visitors from México, Perú, Colombia and Argentina. We post 189 times on Facebook with an average daily reach of 382 people and an annual total of almost 140,000.

On Twitter we added 817 new followers. We tweeted 377 times and retweeted 276 messages, including references to our content and tweets related to journalism and media accounts. In total we had 602,588 impressions: this means that our messages were seen more than six hundred thousand times in the timeline of our followers and non followers.

And we are not tweeting only to bring visitors to our website. Our most widespread tweets of 2015 were precisely those that contained information and not links to an external source. During the attacks in Paris on November 13 we share the brief guide of breaking news of On the Media:

Recomendaciones a medios y periodistas durante eventos en vivo. #París # pic.twitter.com/dr9hOgYf8G

— Puroperiodismo (@puroperiodismo) November 13, 2015

And when we heard about the suicide of commentator Eduardo Bonvallet we publish excerpts from the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) for the media to report on these events:

«Deberán evitarse las descripciones detalladas del método usado y cómo lo obtuvo la víctima». Recomendaciones para medios. #bonvallet

— Puroperiodismo (@puroperiodismo) September 18, 2015

In both cases our goal was the same: to provide useful and immediate information for the coverage of breaking news.

OTHER PLATFORMS

We began our Medium with nine publications and 320 visits. In YouTube we uploaded eight videos, the same amount as in 2014; 493 minutes were played and the average reproduction was 47 seconds. We ignore our Instagram but we want to activate it: 12 pictures and 68 likes in the year, and we add 189 followers. Our Tumblr also was abandoned: 599 page views but with a lower bounce rate compared to the website (78 vs. 84 percent). And Google+? A wilderness: we have only 161 followers and 189 people came to our site through this network; even though we still have a naive love for Plus. Finally, our audio store on Ivoox: we uploaded 29 files between capsules, interviews and lectures, and we hit 440 downloads.

Editor’s note: This article is a translation of the interview we published on June 23. It is a slightly shorter version of the original content.

Photo: Patricio Contreras

FROM JOURNAL TO YORNAL

I have a fixation with the Wall Street Journal, with the American media. The name «Journal» was available to register at Inapi. I wanted to Chileanize all my references because the media system in Chile is absolutely sui generis, it is a hidden monopoly, a loose and powerful system of companies that are allies, that have the same owners. And it is extremely difficult for others not to play the game of the mainstream media. Putting the «Y» was to Chileanize, it was like saying «give it an identity that differentiates us,» far more than what can be a diary or a journal with the correct letters. The «Y» means disruption, so the people would ask us why we are writing «journal» that way. The significance of the “Y” is to bounce the paradigms in which the media ecosystem works in Chile. It is interrupting something.

MY BEDROOM IS MY NEWSROOM

I spent two days programming, looking for material, browsing and searching for things that called my attention. I know how to program since I was nine, ten years old, I learned by myself. I was equipped with my tools and I borrowed a server, I bought the domain and «here we go.» I did not stop because we published every day—I speak in plural but actually it was only me—seven or eight notes. I spent a lot of money on phone. I bought a desk, I bought a TV, I tune to CNN the entire day and it was my newsroom. I did not leave my room. Nobody was paying me; in fact, I was losing money, I lost the vacations I should have taken, I spent my unemployment insurance. Everything was invested in Yornal. Today I look back and I think it really paid off. There was a climax in which I said “Yornal is not over, this is not a hobby.”

HUNGER GAMES

Journalism is being detained. And freedom is what allows us to practice journalism. We are in a pretty big crisis in which we are not doing journalism. We are immersed in some kind of Hunger Games struggling to get more clicks, to have the best exclusives, to scoop all the time or to be concerned about which media is better. For me, as a journalist, the last thing I care about is what medium is the best. I’m interested in the media to fulfill its function as an act of justice. Do I need to be a media company? Yes, but the balance between the journalistic institution—or the editorial institution—and the newspaper publishing company must be nested in the editorial decisions you make.

THE MEDIA DO NOT CRITICIZE OTHER MEDIA

Very few people in the media industry will criticize the media industry. There is a kind of brotherhood, good breeding among journalists, they don’t attack each other because they are on the same lines, they live every day in the same places and they form friendships. Our first editorial article, when we criticize La Segunda [a Chilean newspaper], was a surprise because of that, because no other media had the decency to criticize other media with arguments. When we draw the issue of the resignation of Bachelet, we said «Ok, we fucked up» because we took a fact that we actually received and we made the mistake of validating a source that said it in public, Tomás Mosciatti. Added to that we made a harsh criticism, because Mosciatti spoke of «possible resignations», «maybe», «perhaps». Taking this opportunity we apologize. But everybody should keep an eye on something: the use of the conditional form in the media is a cancer. If you have no news today in your newspaper, you’re going to publish on conditional. The printing press is running, the TV channels are broadcasting, radio is on air all day. You must have content. What do you do? You write on conditional, so you do not say that is true, you do not say that is a lie and you comply with the act of publishing.

WHAT IT MEANS THAT YORNAL IS A «SAFE SPACE»

All my work in Todo mejora was to improve social networks as a safe place for teenagers who were being bullied, those who were being called fagot 26 times a day at school. I have no problem in publicize my agenda. It is my news organization and it is my agenda. Period. I have no further interests to add to my agenda, to cover LGTBQIA issues and to be close associations of sexual diversity, because it is an issue that I care and respect. Second, it’s a human rights issue. The safe space specifically means that at no time any child or teen, lesbian, gay, trans, intersex, queer, confused, is going to feel uncomfortable on our site because in our agenda is the affirmative therapy, an aspect of psychology being used a lot, especially in therapies with LGBT people, which is to affirm the being. I reaffirm my uniqueness, my personality, I’m unique in the best possible sense. I also lived this, I also had to go through that kind of therapy to affirm myself and to be confident enough to make a monster like Yornal.

ADVERTISING: ANGER AND FRUSTRATION

For one month we had Google advertising. We eliminated it because we made twenty dollars. Now we are going to sign an agreement with Gama bicycles. We prefer to make a deal with alternative companies which are ultimately the ones that will change the world. I would prefer to have blank spaces so my audience may read a column about measles vaccination rather than spaces filled with stupidities. The other day I was in a bad mood all day because I got to ADN Radio website and paf, an advertisement box appeared. And I clicked the cross and did not close. I felt anger, frustration, helplessness; I wanted to kill myself in three minutes because they had me seeing this advertise and I wanted to read the news. That will be a very distinguishing aspect of our business model.

AN IMPROVED RIGHT TO INFORMATION

We are thinking a business model with a solidary subscription. It is the most complex we have thought in our lives, and it is the most stupid too, but at the same time it’s the smartest thing we can get. I want the people to donate for others to read. I do not want to have an exclusive subscription where you have a premium access and others don’t. We want to make a pact, a physical contract, in which we commit to pay the bills, make a report of advocacy. How relevant were your twenty dollars? I don’t want to report «we spent it on office supplies». No. I want you to know what was the effect of the donation to Yornal. Through the subscription we will grant you a right, the most stupid right we have invented on earth, because in addition to paying you have the right to not influence on any of the things we do. It is an obligation? No, it’s a right. Because this right will keeps us independent, will keep our agenda free. The donors must know they are refusing a liberty but gaining another right. They are gaining an «improved right to information.» We are changing many paradigms, and part of that is changing the right to information.

JOURNALISTS TO CHANGE THE WORLD

I’m in a room of one meter by one meter with internet access and that’s enough for me to own an organization that surpased Pulso in  Twitter followers. My partner tells me «you’ll die in three months if you continue at this pace.» We need motivated journalists, journalists who understand that we’re trying to do other type journalism. We do not want old journalists and that is my dogma. We do not want to reach people who know it all and that will tell us what we need to do or to contaminate us with their thoughts based on that you must have more clicks. We are interested in people who want to change the world with us. Who may lose money, maybe, but would feel happy with what they will achieve. So far in terms of content we are satisfied, because we receive content. There are great people who have offered us columns and I have no problem to say «great, but I’ll edit». I will not receive anything or publish anything. The project for us has both social value that people come to offer help.

TERRITORIAL WORK

Part of the business model has to do with the territorial work we will begin to do this month [July 2015]. I can not give more details, because it’s part of the business model, the company, confidentiality… lol. We feel that the media are a little disconnected. They work with a sense of accomplishment, comparing if they are better than the other or not. They have a kind of claustrophobia and they go to the marches without the cone of the brand on the microphone, because they have to hide their corporate image or otherwise their journalist will take the risk. I do not care to go bankrupt after all the work done. I am pleased and happy with the work I’ve done because I have decided I am going to dedicate my life to this. I’m not losing any more, unless I die of a heart attack tomorrow. I will not lose anything more.