Borja Echevarría, deputy managing editor of El Pais (photo courtesy of Echevarria's Twitter)
I was 15 minutes late to my meeting to interview Borja Echevarría de la Gándara, deputy managing editor of El Pais, Spain’s largest daily newspaper. Lucky for me, I found a smiling Borja sitting on one of the Media Lab’s plush couches. After a brief round of hellos, we started chatting and our conversation almost immediately went to newspapers when I asked Borja, currently a Neiman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation, about his research on the structural evolution of newsrooms and the effects of disruptive innovation on news business models.
Like so many news reporters, Borja started his career working the night desk at El Mundo in 1995. But unlike so many within our industry, this Bilbao-born former law student turned journalist quickly switched his attention toward the then emerging field of online news. A promotion from breaking news to society coverage to editor led to mixed emotions regarding his place in the newsroom. “I didn’t like being an editor so young,” said Borja.
Perhaps it was his age or perhaps it was just where the industry was headed but at some point in his career, Borja became fascinated by integrating online and print media and eventually left his post as online managing editor at El Mundo to help establish Soitu.es, a critically acclaimed online news startup. Co-founded with reporters and engineers from the newspaper, the experience transformed Borja’s approach to news. “I don’t like to think about things just online and in print, it’s not so much about platform—it’s about content.”
It also turns out that markets and the economy matter, too. Offering a fresh perspective in a sea of traditional Spanish media, Soitu.es won awards from the Society for News Design and the Online News Association. But innovation and accolades didn’t keep the news site from falling to the realities of the financial crisis. Two months shy of its second anniversary, BBVA, the site’s main financial investor, backed out and the site folded.
Like any startup founder worth his weight in salt, Borja was already onto cultivating his next journalist iteration before the dust had settled at Soitu.es. In 2010 he joined Spain’s largest daily as deputy managing editor bringing with him lessons from his experiences in traditional and experimental newsrooms: “If you try to change things just from online, you have to change the entire newsroom.”
And change the newsroom he has. Coming back to a daily newspaper hasn’t altered Borja’s embrace of cross-platform journalism. Along with a set of fresh ideas, Borja also brought his IT team from Soitu.es to El Pais. “If there’s any chance of survival…I think we need to combine tech, content and business,” Borja said of the future of the industry.
Of course, change does not happen over night. One of his first moves as head of El Pais was to change the morning news meeting time an hour earlier from 11 a.m. to 9 a.m. Borja knows that peak online traffic occurs in the morning and an earlier start time might make sense but the editor was sure to caution that change doesn’t happen overnight. “If I started my meetings at 8 a.m. my head would get cut off,” he joked.