Collaboration delivers data tech answers to local Spanish media questions
How Heraldo de Aragón is relying on collaboration with other local players using technology developed in-house to help connect and support local media outlets. By Marta Caro and Jacqui Park
The 127-year-old Heraldo do Aragón, based in Zaragoza in Spain’s north-east, is leading a collaborative network of regional media outlets across Spain to help all of them sustain their relevance in the highly competitive digital landscape
The technological collaboration grew out of an initial bet on an advertising-oriented model. Their first project as a network was a content recommendation engine, followed up by the introduction of local and regional advertising across all outlets. This led to the creation of a single sign-on (SSO) called LoVer (Local and Vertical), the foundation for a programmatic advertising system and paywall aimed at reducing costs and sharing experiences to sustain their journalism.
“By having people signed in on the same platform, we were able to easily segment users without depending on cookies, which will disappear in 2022”, Madrid said. In January 2020, they launched a new joint venture called Alayans, the culmination of the LoVer project”, Miguel Madrid, Heraldo’s chief digital officer, told the International Press Institute (IPI).
“For the past four or five years, we have been working on strengthening the technological side. We believe that the real value of our local media outlets is not volume, but loyal readers. We started to build a big data platform to collect information and generate tailored content to monetize our proposal.” This robust technological infrastructure has helped them weather the worst effects of the coronavirus pandemic, reaching out to a wider audience.
Alayans is made up of 20 local newspapers. They share users, registrations strategies, content production — including multimedia content — and advertising management.
“What the platform does is segmentation and user analysis. We share technology, staff, and other resources, and we also do benchmarking. If an email has worked for Heraldo, I share that experience with a local media outlet from Salamanca because we believe it may work there, too”, Madrid said.
Impact on Journalism
But how does this platform impact on journalism? “From a content point of view, and always referring to Heraldo.es, we use the data to guide our newsrooms in their day-to-day. We have changed how we present our data to our editors.”
“Instead of volume, we focus on the content that is most interesting to the loyal readers of their sections. That generates a virtuous circle that allows us to identify what local content is the strongest. Considering that around 85 percent of our traffic is local, what works for us is anything close to our readers.”
This strategy has increased the time readers spend on the website and, most importantly, the number of times they return for more content. “Something beautiful that is happening now is that data is helping us reinforce local journalism and interconnect a growing number of local and regional media.”
Newsletters are also a valuable tool. “Readers like them because they use a specific journalistic language and a different headline. We are generating different areas of interest”, Madrid explained. Heraldo.es is currently sending 12 newsletters on Covid-19, tourism, and gastronomy, among other topics. We have an average opening rate of 45 to 50 percent, which is high for a newsletter. I think that is because they are written by journalists.”
Surveys are their favourite tool to communicate with readers and to make relevant content through newsletters. “We have about 4,000 users who systematically answer these surveys and suggest improvements. They also allow us to know where we are doing well and where we are doing badly.”
The future
The masthead already dominates its distribution area. In 2007, the company founded Hiberus, a technological company specializing in digital transformation to tackle the challenges posed by the digital disruption. In 2016, Heraldo de Aragón created Henneo, Spain’s seventh largest communication group, which currently runs Heraldo de Aragón, Diario del Altoaragón, Radio Huesca, the free daily newspaper 20 Minutos, the monthly film magazine Cinemania, and La Información, a digital newspaper focusing on business and economic current affairs.
The masthead’s digital edition, Heraldo.es, caters mostly to readers of local and regional news — about 70 percent of the website traffic — but the paper’s aim is to offer a complete news product, including national news and an analysis of its regional impact. “What sets us apart is our focus on local and regional news, but there has always been, and will be, space for everything else”, Madrid said.
Heraldo.es has launched a hybrid paywall, with some articles under the freemium model (6 to 8 stories per day) and a metered model with 10 stories a month free), . Their current revenue mix is 45 percent advertising and 55 per cent subscriptions (including paper sales), but as advertising demands national scale and local advertising shifts to tech platforms, they are looking at strengthening reader revenues. They have 500,000 regular readers, with about 110,00 visiting more than 15 times a month. They expect to build 25.000 subscribers in a three year period.
“This technology allows us to choose any paywall model that we want. We think it’s important to combine metered paywalls and paid content and go freemium. At any rate, a paywall is an intelligent tool associated to our users and their interests, and our system helps us to differentiate and create a customized paywall for each user.
“The idea is to use big data to find out what content readers are loyal to and put that content behind a paywall. The subscription model is closely linked to content, and we believe that what we do is valuable and that it should be paid for. On the other hand, we also want to be relevant in our community, so we are now thinking in terms of different audiences, of sections and subsections. We know the kind of content those audiences are interested in; we know how to create that content and how to deliver it.”
Heraldo.es has also employed other strategies to monetize its news products. They recently won the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award given by the newspaper El País for a series focusing on depopulation in rural areas in Aragón. “We gathered it all together in book format and sent a newsletter to people who had read this content. We have sold 600 copies so far, all that we printed.”
Heraldo.es runs the HClub, which includes subscription bundles, promotions, and a shop selling a wide range of products, from books to custom jewellery, all of them linked to Heraldo de Aragón.
During the pandemic, the newspaper took part in a furlough scheme, hampering its efforts to cover all the news. However, the paper’s loyal readership — readers who visit the page over 20 times a month — have almost doubled since the outbreak of the pandemic, going from 250,000 to 450,000. “That confirms that readers come to local and regional media outlets for relevant information”, Madrid concluded.
Marta Caro is an IPI contributor based in Spain.
Jacqui Park is head of network strategy and innovation for IPI and a senior fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney.
This story is part of the IPI global network report: Around the corner, around the world: How local news media around the world are rethinking everything
