When I started this blog I keyed into the column on the right the addresses of a few favourite websites. Among them was that of the Spanish daily El País. It was then elpais.es; now it is elpais.com. The change is an acknowledgment that the site is getting 30 per cent of its hits from an audience outside Spain — mainly in the United States, Great Britain and Latin America.
There have been other changes, too. The site has been redesigned, video and audio has been expanded, and there is more opportunity for users not only to ask questions and join in discussions but to contribute stories. As the newspaper’s management put it in a statement, “One of the main goals was to put a new spin on the traditional concept of news, as a means of bringing down the barriers that separate written media from their readers.”
Readers of the print version of El País were told of these changes in an article on November 19, but they have heard little about them since. At a time when other media groups — including my own — are topping and tailing every page of the paper with links to the website, El País has almost no links at all.
In Thursday’s paper, for example, after the tiny “www.elpais.com” at the top right of page 1, there was no mention of the site until page 14, and then only in general advice to readers that an expanded selection of letters could be found online. The facing page’s “Digital Forum”, featuring emailed letters on a topic of the day, ran to only six paragraphs. The only link to anything substantial on that day’s site (a feature about video games) was buried at the bottom of the paper’s back page.
While the buzzword in other media organisations is “convergence”, El País seems to prefer “divergence”. In some respects, it seems that all that paper and website share is their title.
I’m a huge admirer of the newspaper. It’s serious and substantial, written in Spanish of a rigour that suits someone learning the language. But (at least during the week, when it comes without supplements) it’s not what you would call colourful, either literally or metaphorically. It has colour photographs on front and back only; inside it’s black and white, with a preponderance of pictures of dull grey men in dark grey suits, and, in its opinion pages, tends to more grey and to line drawings.
The website has long been racier, and the redesign has made it more so. Among the changes are greater prominence for sport (which the paper relegates to inside pages), and the addition of blogs not only on books, football, basketball and rock music but on sex. The last is written by Eva Roy, who is described as a journalist specialising in adult films. Ms Roy, as you can see from her picture byline, is far from grey.