The media face a UX problem — not in terms of user experience but rather in user expectations.

New generations consume content differently. They want the information to be fast, concrete, and without mistakes. SEO practices, clickbait, and many other practices that keep the media business afloat often go against our audience’s expectations.

We must meet these expectations at an informative level and generate a user experience that differentiates our site from the rest of the media landscape.

To put it in context, consider this data:

• 50% of Gen Z in the United States use social media daily to consume news, while only 13% visit news Web sites, according to Deloitte.
• In the United States, a quarter of adults under 30 consume news only from TikTok and prefer to get it from celebrities or influencers rather than media or journalists, according to Pew Research Center.
• 62% of video consumption in news is on social networks and third-party apps, according to Reuters Institute.
• In Argentina, interest in news dropped from 77% in 2017 to 43% in 2023, according to Reuters Institute.

La Nación’s social media logic

We believe we need to start creating a new format for journalistic articles; agile, shorter, dynamic. Stories that go straight to the point.

During the FIFA World Cup 2022, we conducted the first test of bringing TikTok logic to our site. We created Manija Mundial, a site with quotes, videos, data, and memes about Argentina’s national team.

Our mission was to bring news to a non-news format. We thought that a TikTok-style swipe UX for this content was the “secret ingredient” this new product needed to be consumed by audiences that La Nación doesn’t usually reach. This project was sponsored by Puma and gained more than five times the pageviews of an average article.

We decided to use the same logic to cover Argentina’s 2023 elections, using a new format similar to TikTok. We created more than 1,000 posts with quotes, videos, short explainers, and news related only to the elections.

A better experience for our users

We have been working to generate new experiences in articles. Visiting an article on La Nación should not be the same as viewing any other news site.

We know the landscape is constantly changing, from a focus on SEO articles to generative AI to subscriptions. Trends are changing faster than ever. Therefore, our goal is to keep the users already on our site longer and try to capture a generation that does not consume news.

The opinions of famous columnists are one of La Nación's main assets. That’s why we decided to include them in as many articles as possible. 

We created “opinion boxes” that are embeddable boxes with quotes from our columnists on current topics. This way, we can incorporate the opinion of a star journalist into the body of a breaking news story.

In addition to this initiative, we built an internal tool to create “helpful boxes.” The idea is to provide contextual information to the article, whether it’s about Taylor Swift’s visit to Argentina or changes in Argentine economic policy.

We also want to use the benefits of GenAI to improve our articles and provide added value to the user. Considering the technology is constantly evolving and the most important thing for us is journalistic rigour, we created an add-on in our publishing system that generates summaries of three points with the main concepts of the article that our editors can edit.

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