Not only has the digital world removed the borders between local and global communication, affording meaning to the already established “glocal” concept, but it has also blurred the boundaries between journalistic and corporate content, revitalising what has traditionally been known in legacy media as “service journalism.” This chapter supposes a continuation of the thought-provoking line of research begun three years ago on journalistic communication and new media, turning to the deconstruction process as a disruptive method to analyze processes, strategies, and trends. If, then, from the perspective of methodology, the focus of attention turns to the structure of the news itself, attending to how new media reactivate the known 5W, and how the conventional news item dies on paper and is ‘resuscitated', transformed into the digital medium, and to how we place ourselves before a transmedia news structure that changes from inverted pyramid to the Rubik's Cube, we now go one step further and put the spotlight on the processes of content building in the digital realm themselves.
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Where is journalism’s dark side now? Not only has the digital world removed the borders between local and global communication, affording meaning to the already established “glocal” concept, but it has also blurred the boundaries between journalistic and corporate content, revitalizing what has traditionally been known in legacy media as “service journalism”. In response to the interactivity, hypertextuality and multimediality imposed by the new digital communication environments, with a growing multiscreen access and ever more intensive personalization, content production is evolving in online media towards a situation of journalistic pragmatism with a shared objective: responding to the interests and needs of audiences in an increasingly precise and complete way.
In reality, it involves nothing more than recovering the primordial meaning of journalism: being useful, connecting with readers wherever they are, convincing them that what they are dealing with is a product - tangible or digital - that has value and rigor. Traditional journalism but with new rules in which two extrinsic factors converge when selecting, prioritizing and prescribing content: on the one hand, what happens on social networks as a means to measure the concerns and interests of citizens, and on the other, the need to create content that responds to the operating dynamics of search engine algorithms, preferably Google, since they act as a connection between the media and readers.
Due to these two conditioning factors, there is a blurring of the lines between journalism and corporate communication: what becomes important is not so much who is producing the content, whether paid or not, but that it be relevant and timely, filling a gap and a need for information.
“Which shops open on bank holidays?”; “What are Granada’s best restaurants?”; “Essential Zara dresses this autumn”; “Five tricks for making the best mojito at home” ... Dark side no longer; today, it is the media who take the lead to produce branded, sponsored and corporate content because there are readers willing to consume it. In this regard, there is already an evolution underway in journalistic communication, ranging from the way to write headlines, focus information and appeal to the reader, to the construction process itself.
It is at this point we can turn to the Rubik's Cube as a metaphor for liquid, flowing and interconnected activation of a whole process in which it is the readers, with their clamor for information, who are starting to put the cube into operation and determine the chain of content that will ultimately be produced.
Content for different audiences, moments and contexts, to be distributed through multiple formats and screens, incorporating all of the characteristics and possibilities brought about by digital language. Content placed in the digital ecosystem capable of ‘flying solo’, with global reach, even breaking traditional molds in the physical and temporal realm of media with audiences.
Using these reflections as a starting premise, this article supposes a continuation of the thought-provoking line of research begun three years ago on journalistic communication and new media, turning to the deconstruction process as a disruptive method to analyze processes, strategies and trends. If, then, from the perspective of methodology, the focus of attention turns to the structure of the news itself, attending to how new media reactivate the known 5W, and how the conventional news item dies on paper and is ‘resuscitated’, transformed into the digital medium, and to how we place ourselves before a transmedia news structure that changes from inverted pyramid to the Rubik’s Cube (Trillo-Domínguez & Alberich-Pascual, 2017), we now go one step further and put the spotlight on the processes of content building in the digital realm themselves.
Journalistic communication or corporate communication? Information or advertorial? Information, publicity or opinion? Journalism as a public service or for the spurious interests of the media to obtain a return in the form of profit and audience share? Key to answering these questions will be the fieldwork carried out heading the newspaper Granada Hoy –as part of the founding team in 2003 and leading the operation since 2003-; executive and management experience in Grupo Joly in the Subdirectorate for Digital Transformation; and, in JolyLAB, the media innovation laboratory set up by the company as a space for research both in matters relating to contributions, critical debate and work proposals as in those relating to the implementation thereof in the nine newspapers and, especially, in Diario de Sevilla as a reference publication.