elDiario.es is a news media website in Spanish founded in November 2012. It is edited by Diario de Prensa Digital, S. L, along with a monographic paper magazine called Cuadernos published every three months. Its editorial line has been defined as "turned to the left", oriented towards a young audience with an academic background. This editorial line coincides with that of its founder and director, Ignacio Escolar, founder and former director of Público.
A fundamental part of elDiario.es’ investors are their readers. Mainly, the financing of the medium resides in two pillars; its readers, with monthly subscriptions of €8 per month (there are currently more than 61,000 members), and Diario de Prensa Digital S.L, made up mostly of people who work at the newspaper.
However, its group of shareholders is made up of names such as Enric Lloveras, Daniel Bilbao, Montserrat G. Román, David Martínez, Félix Martínez, Alex García and Pablo Ascariz. Behind elDiario.es there isn’t any big company or bank.
elDiario.es is, in addition to being an information medium, a meeting place for civil society and other publications. As an example of these projects we have Carne Cruda or Alternativas Económicas and blogs of think tanks, NGOs, social groups...
They consist of local editions in autonomous communities which are, in most cases, cooperatives, foundations or companies that differ from elDiario.es, which they coordinate with to offer content.
The own media admits having a transparent and shared editorial. They describe it as the purpose to look out for the power and the sustainable progress of society. They say they defend human rights, equality and a better democracy, however, their intention is to keep these values to a fundamental one in journalism, the respect for the truth.
When we investigate the opinion other media have on elDiario.es, they talk about a left sided editorial line, some media describe it as an “editorial line directed to an objective left sided public, young people and literate population”
The start and evolution
elDiario.es was started by a small group of journalists, led by its current director, Ignacio Escolar. In its ten years of life, elDiario.es has established itself among the most influential and widely read media in Spain, competing with the best known Spanish media such as El País and El Mundo.
"We are still growing, we are still debt-free, we are still hiring more journalists and improving the working conditions of our newsroom," the media workers claimed in 2017. They added that these were proof that independent journalism is also sustainable, and that there are ways of doing things. "elDiario.es is a solid project”.
And so the figures show. At the beginning of 2017, elDiario.es had a total of 20,150 members. The following year, in 2018, they had 10% more, almost 22,300 members. This implies a more than remarkable increase over the years.
As for the basic salary of the editors of elDiario.es, it has been increasing over the years. In 2013 they received a gross salary of 1,057 euros, while in 2018 it rose to 1,891 euros. This implies a 78.90% increase in the basic salary of editors in just five years. 20 of the journalists who continue to work atDiario.es today, started out as interns, so little by little they have been creating the medium with their work.
In 2018 they decided to make a change in the media, thus launching an equality plan, stating that feminism is one of the values that this media defended and that it should therefore be implicit in their media.
The audience is something that has also increased from the creation of the medium to the present day. In 2017 it increased to 51.9%. In this year, the medium was among the most widely read media in Spain, a ranking that is still maintained today, as we will explain below.
As for social networks, elDiario.es bet since the launch of the networks to start spreading its news and sharing content. In 2018 it already had more than 22,000 users on Telegram. The data to date are staggering, which will be commented below.
Editorial line
It's evident that the media has an editorial policy. However, more and more often the ideology and the political orientation is disguised as if it was information, harming the informed when it comes to distinguishing the facts, since one does not know when the information obtained is about a real or a subjective story.
The political orientation of a media is distinguished between right or left bias, being appreciated in facts related to politics, economy, society, health, education, etc.
The editorial line of this medium tends to the left. Above all, it deals with issues to uncover on the right, but it is not going to avoid talking about dirty rags about el PSOE and Podemos.
The media follows a progressive attitude, as its director does, who won the IX Progressive Women's Prize. Based on this attitude, the management of eldiario.es has implemented in 2018 an equality plan, among other reasons "because feminism is one of the values that we defend, both in public and in private".
The director and founder of the media, Ignacio Escobar oriented the media as progressive and republican as he doesn’t hide his view. Above being the director of elDiario, he collaborates with TV channels such as La Sexta, being the political analyst of the programme “Al Rojo Vivo”.
Besides, he has had an extensive journalistic career, since in addition to online media and TV, he has also worked on the radio, in chains such as “La Ser”; characteristic again for its tendency to the left.
The following table of ideological preference by medium calculated on the basis of 850,000 votes collected in 39 surveys corresponding to 34 different media accompanies each medium with an index number that indicates the orientation of the voters towards positions on the left or positions on the right. In some cases, the media have two surveys, one launched on Twitter and another on the website of the media.
As we can see, on elDiario.es de most voted ones are the left wing parties, PSOE and Podemos.
The media quoted: "When the editorial line transgresses the truth in a grotesque way, it loses all legitimacy until it becomes one of the great problems of our democracy". It considers itself as objective and transparent; However, nowadays it is very difficult to achieve objectivity with all certainty. Therefore, elDiario.es defends freedom of information but tends to position itself.
Thus, as a fundamental part of our financing depends on the readers: the members of eldiario.es pay to defend the independence of this medium, so that no one can threaten us and so that our news has a real impact. They don't pay to read the information, they pay for the information to spread.
Since most of the readers are from the left, the information that will be disseminated will be more beneficial for this political branch.
Noteworthy, more than 70% of the business belongs to people who work on the diary. Thus, the publications will be based on their intereses. As the workers of the media are “kind” of owners, they decided to adapt it according to their pleasures. By this way, in 2018, they took advantage of the new position borned in Spain: chief genre editor, choosing Ana Requena for covering this place. She proposed herself to promote information on equality, gender and feminism following the model of The New York Times. She fit quite well in the new position due to her attitude, which coincided with the diary’s ideology.
At the head of the management of the company that publishes elDiario.es is José Sanclemente. The economist and journalist, is among other things, an expert in the media, who also founded the newspaper ADN. This newspaper belongs to the “El Planeta group”. This group is popular mostly among left wing voters. Unlike the newspaper ADN, behind elDiario.es there is no large business group, no political favor, no subsidy or any debt to the bank. This doesn’t mean that there’s no political orientation, because on the contrary, what we can see is that everything is connected and everything leads us to determine the left vision.
Shareholders
This online media has not as important shareholders as bigger media, however, they have enough for keeping publishing. What is more, they are the fourth most visited online news platform in Spain.
The 70% of the shareholders are the own editors, who gave not only their work, but also their money from the first day, in order to carry this project on.
The founders of elDiario.es wanted to be “owners of their own editorial, in order to assure the editorial line to be independent and for avoiding it to respond to hidden interests”. Their idea is that most of the classic media editorials are sided to the ideology their main shareholders have. ElDiario.es admits to be loyal to their own ideas.
However, this media gets most of their income from the monthly subscriptions, which, as we are going to see in the next point, have been hugely growing since the online platform began.
The main investor is the director of the media, Ignacio Escolar, about whom we are going to talk later in this article.
Annual Accounts
Even though this media has been recently created, their monetary account is quite high for only 10 years in the public sphere.
In 2017, their accounts raised to 295,748€, of the ones, 198,498 were reinvested in the proper media, receiving 97,250€ for the working people inside the platform. In 2018, elDiario.es paid 1,891€ to their workers.
However, this past 2020, the pandemic year, this online media suffered so much the consequences of the disaster, and not only regarding the human lack in the studios, but also the cuts the government made within the press sector, and the loss of advertisers wanting to be published in the media because of the lack of ganance due to the pandemic.
During this year, the media subsisted thanks to the investment their subscriptions monthly made. These subscriptions, about which we will also talk later, grew enormously in 2020, from a little more than 35k people, to almost 58k subscribers. The most important thing about this data is that, these are not new subscribers, but the older ones plus the new readers. This means that the media has really faithful followers.
Thanks to these subscriptions, their surplus was for over two million euros, the subscriptions’ income raised from 2,1 million euros in 2019, to 4,5 million in 2020, more than a 50% extra.
Keeping the annual accounts, we are talking now about the contracts the media engaged this year, 2020, in which the huge majority of the enterprises needed to fire some of their workers in order to maintain the activity.
In the case of elDiario.es, more editors were hired thanks to the subscriptions we were talking about before. However, they needed to reduce, a little, the salary, which they admit to have raised again.
The media has been publishing the salary of their employees since the year they began with the project. In 2021, the workers’ income was 24.030€ a year, 11.346€ extra than in 2013, their second year, when the annual salary was 12.684€.
Audience of elDiario.es
As we have mentioned before, this last year, elDiario.es has been positioned as the fourth media in which the readers remain more time, the fourth chosen online media by the public interested in news and journalistic media.
In January, 2022, the own medium published an article which title was “more than 770,000 people reads elDiario.es each day” This information was given by the GfK, the new reference measurer for digital audience.
Regarding daily visitors, elDiario.es is positioned in the 8th place when talking about all the most important media in Spain.
And only, between the 1st and 15th of January, 2022, elDiario.es was the fourth media in which people spent more time, with more than 4,000 million minutes, only in those 15 days.
Regarding how they get their audience, the own media assure that “we do not resort to the usual tricks of the trade, nor buy traffic on Facebook. We don't buy traffic on Facebook. We don't produce junk news at the pace set by Google searches. Nor do we buy audiences by adding third-party websites to the server, in order to artificially fatten our readership."
The media defines itself as “a media that defends transparency and they apply it to ourselves. We defend stable employment and that is why we apply it ourselves. We believe in another way of doing things and that is why we have been building a communicative media, for more than 5 years, which is actually independent, coherent and without mortgages. Thanks to this economic freedom given by the support of our editors, we are also achieving an editorial freedom that allows us to show what a journalism that owes nothing to anyone is good for.
Journalistic innovations
Innovation is necessary for media development. Innovation is not only a technological change, but can also be a development of ideas, processes or resources already existing in the media.
In 2014, the GIVOC group carried out a research investigation to measure the innovation index of journalistic initiatives. The results of this research revealed that among the most innovative initiatives that year was elDiario.es.
Journalistic innovation takes place in four areas: products and formats, distribution, media organization, and marketing.
Many journalists agree that the membership system of elDiario.es has been one of the most important commercial innovations so far. Although most of its revenue comes from advertising, thanks to the membership system it achieves a great deal of editorial independence. No one contributes as much as the partners as a whole.
Innovations are necessary for the media to expand, consolidate and grow as a medium in all its aspects. It is necessary to be able to exploit initiatives that allow for innovation in any area of the journalistic world.
Social media activity
elDiario.es’s social media accounts have more than 1.3M followers on Twitter and 201K on Instagram. The reason they have so many followers is that they publish attractive and interesting headlines, along with the link and some audiovisual content that supports their statements.
Their space on the social outlook allows people to express their opinions on their news by quoting tweets, publishing comments or liking posts. They’ve taken advantage of the Twitter tools in order to create a public space. So, anyone can have an opinion only by having access to their media outlets. Although this suffers the consequences of every single person having space (even harmful ones, eventually), it serves as an important aspect of the community.
Regarding the audiovisuals, they’ve made their Instagram account an attractive precedent to the actual news web, with sober and elegant designs with an introduction to the news.
Undoubtedly, TikTok has become a revolutionary tool to spread information. This way, elDiario.es uploads videos and interviews which have reached more than 8M views, and almost 1M likes in their profile.
Polemics with elDiario.es
eldiario.es is a progressive left-leaning newspaper that does not avoid speaking/criticizing parties of that ideology. But the determination of this ideological thinking was not so clear in its beginnings, when it was founded. Or at least there were doubts between the readers and the newspaper, leading to several controversies.
On April 27, 2013, a few months after the newspaper was founded, an article written by Ignacio Conde Ruiz, an economist, was published that was not well received by readers. The headline of the article was the following: "How is it possible to collect so little with the highest marginal rates in Europe?
It is worth mentioning that when eldiario.es was created, it was established as an objective to maintain and promote the values of original journalism as well as to give voice and opportunities to opinions and points of view that were not so prominent in the mainstream media at the time.
Another important thing to mention is that there was the option to become a member: the only requirement was to pay a monthly fee of 5 euros. In this way they were assured to have access to various news and articles a few hours before the rest.
Therefore, readers, interpreting the article as neoliberal, it was only a matter of time before the criticism came. Many members even threatened to unsubscribe if no one gave an explanation and articles like this one continued to be published.
Some of the most used arguments were, and I quote, that "they wanted to read progressive opinions that usually do not have space in the mainstream media", which we had previously mentioned as one of the objectives of the newspaper.
In the face of all the discontent and criticism, Ignacio Escolar, director at the time and who still holds his position, came out publicly to clarify several issues. Ignacio assured that the main intention of the medium was to have ideological independence, creating a medium with free opinion articles and its diverse ideas and points of view.
Another argument he used was that it is very difficult to fit in with everyone's thinking since, in fact, not even he who was the director of the media did not like all the opinion articles that were published. For him, this freedom of opinion prevailed over the sectarianism of many newspapers.
Data summary and analysis
According to the data provided we can begin to analyze the digital transformation of journalism, focusing, of course, on the selected media: El Diario.
The Annual Report of the Reuters Institute of the University of Oxford conducted an expert analysis reinforced by a survey of 75,000 information consumers in 24 European countries, plus a dozen more in the Americas and Asia, to show the level of credibility of each media outlet type. The graph is shown below:
A distinctive feature of the Spanish news landscape is that the new Spanish digital media have more news credibility than the written press or television, according to the assessment of the respondents. However, television, both public and print, is one of the worst rated in Europe.
Among the digital native media, one of the most trusted, and ,for instance, used by readers, is El Mundo, followed by El Confidencial and well above other digital publications. eldiario.es, which appears in fifth place in the overall ranking of all types of media, a fairly good position. Here we can see the positioning of digital media in the years 2017- 2018, which is when the surveys were conducted
One of the most differential elements that exist in Spain, and mark a lot of difference with other countries, is the emergence of pay models. 11% of citizens in Spain pay for some type of online media. It represents a small increase compared to the same report of 2017 and Spain appears as the country where there is more room for growth for the sector: it is the country where there are more people (28% of respondents) who express willingness to support with their money to an informative media.
The study highlights the success of the elDiario.es model, with more than 30,000 members at the time the report was closed. "Users contribute their money periodically and get some advantages such as browsing the web without advertising or participating in events".
Payment that strengthens editorial independence based on readers and reduces advertising dependence. The Dila philosophy behind elDiario.es's membership recruitment, which is not based on a commercial exchange between the reader and a client called a newspaper, but is woven from the social complicity between a project and the citizens it wants to serve.
Due to the credibility of the media and the involvement of citizens in supporting the media, Spaniards spend approximately 15 minutes and 54 seconds browsing the website of el Diario.es (study carried out over a period of 15 days).
For all these reasons, once these data have been analyzed, we could explain the reason for the increase in audience between 2017 and 2018, which, obviously, benefits the outlet under analysis.
As we have proven with the realization of our own websites, the use of social networks, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter... makes our publications have a much greater impact than they would have without the use of these platforms. In addition to the data analyzed above, the increase in audience may also be due to these uses of social networks. First of all, we will look at the platforms where Eldiario.es has made its mark. We can see here the annual evolution from 2019 to 2020 because of the use of these social networks.
The journal has platforms from Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter to its own website, whose link is provided in all its accounts on the various platforms. The number of followers the media has is high, however, the one that really stands out is Twitter, which has approximately 1,353,198 followers.
This is because on Twitter (https://twitter.com/eldiarioes) there is a wide variety of actions that can be performed by users, such as commenting on tweets, opening threads to talk to other followers of the account, interacting with tweets, replying to them... a dynamic way that helps outlets to make a greater impact, as Lucía has mentioned before.
The interactivity of this newspaper goes even further than what we have discussed so far and allows readers to create a personalized reading experience on the newspaper's platform. To do this, readers must register quickly and easily with the newspaper so that, once they have done so, they can personalize their reading experience, being able to view and select the news they have read or wish to read in elDiario.es.
The newspaper extends this interactivity to another important aspect, which is to allow readers to choose which are the most relevant bulletins among those published by the newsroom and that is why, although they cannot choose exactly the front page of the edition, they can see their interests reflected through a section on one of the sides of the web page where they can see which are the most read news items by readers in real time. This section undergoes frequent updates depending on which news is the most read. In addition, registered users will be able to select the newsletters they want to receive in their email in order to enjoy reading them.
El Diario defines itself as a transparency outlet, meaning that economic freedom given by the support of our editors, achieving an editorial freedom that allows us to show what a journalism that owes nothing to anyone is good for, as Maria mentioned above. We have been able to see which are the main sources of traffic to elDiarioes in 2017. Traffic sources are the ways by which users land on a Web site. There are several types of sources such as search one, which is the traffic coming from search engines; dark traffic (they arrive to the website directly instead of through another channel, such as a publication in social networks); social sources, email… A graph has been made for better understanding.
As can be seen, most of the users who come to the elDiarioes website come from social media(32.4%), throughout the links provided, publications, tiktoks, tweets… basically through a simple click.
New technologies have brought about a brutal change in terms of content and its impact. It is to be expected that with the passage of time this will become more and more important, and we must constantly analyze the data in order to be able to follow the path of this outlet.
Talk with Juan Luís Sánchez and and intern at elDiario.es
Knowing, analyzing and discovering what all the data can show us is really important and interesting. However, it is always possible to go further. In our case, we had the privilege of talking with a freelance intern that has written for elDiario.es and even more exciting, to the assistant director of it, Juan Luis Sánchez. With them we close the whole process of analysis about elDiario.es.
It was interesting to have the opportunity of talking with someone that is high in the structure because it helped us to better understand certain aspects of the news media of elDiario.es, its editorial line and values, its strategies, etc. When asked about the slogan which follows the name, “periodismo a pesar de todo”, Juanlu says it “summarizes the spirit of elDiario.es foundation and development”. “Still making good journalism in a context where the main media is financed by banks and has political controls in the background, that they have that extreme power, is what defines us”. Juanlu seems very proud of their independence in that aspect and remarks “the greatness of the people that contribute to making this a reality day by day, our subscribers”.
“The greatness of the people that contribute to making this a reality day by day, our subscribers”
Regarding the innovation process, Juanlu is very proud of the project he heads: the newsletter “Al día” first and then the “Un tema al día” podcast. Both are successful initiatives "to inform ourselves a little bit every day about what is going on around us, which is very important". “Making the podcasts every day is something that I have discovered I like a lot, although it needs a little extra effort”, he says.
Regarding the little talk with the intern, whose identity cannot be discovered, we discovered some anecdotes of working for elDiario.es. “I felt I had a great responsibility working there. Making interesting articles and searching for big info is what the subscribers deserve as contributors, that was my incentive to give my best when I was with them”. “The need to be the first in political exclusives was a bit overwhelming sometimes, I saw mates really tense about that”. "However, I was impressed by the sense of teamwork and unity among everyone, which was further strengthened by the pandemic. In the end, I think that is one of the keys to the success of elDiario.es", she concludes.
I was impressed by the sense of teamwork and unity among everyone, which was further strengthened by the pandemic. In the end, I think that is one of the keys to the success of elDiario.es
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