When Ana Blanco faced other TVE professionals on February 24, 2022 in a live show lasting several hours to explain the keys to the war that was then beginning in Ukraine, she didn’t just do it for the viewers of La 1. The show Das Special , which averaged between 400,000 and 900,000 viewers and reached several millions in its traditional broadcast, doubled its reach thanks to the YouTube channel RTVE Noticias, where the same live signal received 2.3 million views.
YouTube is like a big information center that people visit because they know they can find everything in one place. Because of this, almost all major television channels in the world, despite having their own screen and website, already have a specialized information channel on the video platform. BBC has it, including one in Spanish; also Euronews and Tagesschau, the news flagship of the German ARD. The one from the Spanish public broadcaster came much later than all the others, in March 2020, but in less than three years it has caught up in numbers. During this time, RTVE Noticias has accumulated 1.47 million subscribers and 953 million reproductions. In the last 12 months, the number of viewers has increased by 141%, and the time viewers spend on his channel has increased by a similar proportion, the public body calculates.
There are viewers who spend hours following the live signal showing the eruption of the La Palma volcano, simply watching the lava fall without the narration of a journalist, something that could not happen on a commercial channel. Others prefer to call up an excerpt from the daily events of La hora de La 1 at any time: the à la carte offer is no longer just changing the way of consuming entertainment and culture, but also the information content.
Estefanía de Antonio, in charge of the RTVE Noticias channel, explains that its installation was “a pending problem for RTVE that did not materialize due to a lack of resources. The closure of La 2 Noticias has allowed some of its collaborators to support this launch,” he commented at the editorial office of the digital information team in Torrespaña in early January. It is no coincidence that March 2020 was the date when this service was launched. It coincided with the arrival of lockdown and the official start of the coronavirus crisis. “The pandemic has shown us that there is an opportunity. With everyone locked away, the consumption of information was brutal and unlike what is normally offered on television,” comments De Antonio. Its creation went hand in hand with the consolidation of a data journalism team, “also driven by users’ growing need to understand the international figures of the coronavirus”. And the same happened with the review “necessary after the spread of fake news related to the virus and which increased its relevance by the appearance of images falsely attributed to the war in Ukraine”. Teams of editors, video editors, audio (podcast) and social media experts are part of RTVE’s Digital Informative Content Area, which is led by De Antonio and of which YouTube is just another of his extensions.
This video channel is not limited to posting excerpts from the various RTVE information spaces that are broadcast linearly, although it feeds on it. Ideas for your own reports are piling up on the newsroom bulletin boards, which can be used to advance your own editorial strategy through the work of your own experts or by working with the correspondents and informants of the public institution. And it also creates more than a dozen of its own explanation formats designed to count today with codes closer to those of the internet age.
Manuel Diéguez, responsible for the realization of this digital space, points out that when creating native online videos, the narrative proposal is very different from that of the newscast. “Rather than starting with a header, we try to make it an eye-catching image because we know that with web content, you need to grab the user’s attention in the first third of the video. If you don’t get it, he goes to something else,” he says. The language also changes greatly compared to a traditional news broadcast; both the one seen on billboards and the one uttered by journalists. “It needs to be narrower, less formal; the person seeing it has to feel like you’re telling them specifically,” he explains.
“RTVE is a reference medium for major news events, and 2022 has seen many of them, from the war in Ukraine to the death of Queen Elizabeth II,” De Antonio explains the big growth of this platform over the past year. Only 25.2% of users are from Spain. The vast majority of the audience is from abroad. The other two countries most associated with their content are the United States (14.6%) and Mexico (13.5%). It is an audience that is looking for more international, scientific and ecological news, they emphasize from the public broadcaster, and this has made the afternoon hours in Madrid just as intense from an informative point of view for this new generation newsroom. . One of their bets for this year 2023 is to develop more of their own formats keeping this region in mind.
The YouTube Channel Manager recognizes that the ability to offer a live signal of the great news coverage seen by La 1 or the public body’s 24-hour channel is a major asset in attracting users to the video platform to trick into . It is a symbiosis between linear and digital television that RTVE wins with. Another example of how this channel is enabling the chain to multiply its reach was the live broadcast of the special on the death of Queen Elizabeth II last September. “More viewers watched it on YouTube than on regular TV. A lot of people weren’t home at 7 p.m. to pick up the remote control and turn on the TV, so they followed La 1’s program on their cell phones,” the journalist recalls.
Other social networks
But this exponential growth isn’t just coming through this channel. The digital team has discovered the potential of other social networks in recent years. For example, many TikTok users followed the Christmas lottery live for hours from the RTVE Noticias account, which has 345,000 followers. Viewers were many more: 630,000 people, joining the more than 800,000 who followed him through his YouTube channel, says De Antonio. While it may seem like it’s just a social network for teens and dancers, “there’s a community on TikTok that’s very addicted to live information that shouldn’t be lost sight of.”
“Another major advantage we have, besides using RTVE resources, is that its journalists are often typists. Fran Sevilla, a historical correspondent for Radio Nacional, at the age of over 60, through RTVE Noticias TikTok, became an unexpected writer in the war in Ukraine, which breaks down all the stereotypes we hold of this social network,” says the person in charge Informative Digital content area of the public institution.
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