The multiplatform project SOS Animales Argentinos helped Argentina’s La Nación better understand its audience and which formats work best for different types of content.

The award-winning project told the stories of four endangered animal species in Argentina through mini-documentaries, a children’s app, digital articles, and the print edition, leveraging platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and the newspaper’s Web site.

“Our goal is to create stories that we package for different platforms and then measure the results,” Editor Nicolás Cassese said at the recent INMA Latin-American Conference. “We use these kinds of projects to test formats. We invest a lot of time, money, and newsroom resources to act as a kind of idea lab. We build ambitious versions of what works and try to incorporate them into our daily workflow.”

A laboratory for understanding audience-preferred formats

For the production of SOS Animales Argentinos, a team of four traveled across different regions of Argentina to film four episodes, each focused on a puma, a whale, an otter, and a jaguar, said Matías Boela, the news company’s audiovisual strategy coordinator.

“What really defined this project is that we aimed for it to teach something and to create an emotional impact,” he said. “We placed video at the center, and our role on the video team was both in the field, doing very specific coverage, and traveling extensively.”

The most efficient use of resources came from keeping the production team small during filming, and then expanding to a team of 18 back in the newsroom to adapt the recorded content for different platforms, Cassese said.

“We found that children aged 8, 9, and 10 are fascinated by nature and animals, so we tried to create content for them,” Cassese said. “We had the adult version, the documentary, articles in the paper, but as a centenary newspaper, it’s hard for us to capture kids’ interest. So we made an effort to develop apps that included short videos highlighting the characteristics of each animal.”

The SOS Animales Argentinos project was built around five key principles:

• A multiplatform approach.

• Engaging narrative structure.

• Wild and natural settings.

• Lightweight, low-cost production team.

• A dedicated children’s platform.

Results from SOS Animales Argentinos

A significant portion of the project’s audience came through connected TVs, via smart TV apps, revealing a preference among viewers for consuming long-form journalism on that platform, Boela said.

The series garnered 600,000 views on YouTube and over 1,000 subscribers to the channel. On average, about 50% of viewers watched the videos through to the end.

“Some episodes performed better than others,” Boela said. “Seven percent of viewers clicked through from the homepage — a relatively high rate.”

The children’s app performed poorly, drawing just 10,000 visits, with an average session time of one hour and 10 minutes, Cassese said.

“When we took a step back to analyse it, we realized we had boxed ourselves into the format,” Cassese said. “All of us who have young kids want to keep them away from phones. We had envisioned a platform with a lot of educational content, but it depended on using a smartphone, and handing a phone to an 8- or 9-year-old isn’t ideal.”

Since the content has already been produced, they’re now considering showcasing it in print, similar to the illustrated educational posters that schoolchildren used to buy years ago. This idea emerged after conversations with school principals.

New creative initiatives to showcase content

The newsroom recently launched La Nación Flashback, a project that uses the paper’s extensive photo archive to produce on-this-day features.

The team is also experimenting with automated voice narration using the authors’ own voices, podcast production, and a section called “A Fondo”, where reporters from different desks collaborate to publish six in-depth stories each week, Cassese said.

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