The medium is the message and the substance is the form

ARA readers are sensitive and proactive not only in the content of the newspaper, but also in the content and the bulk: in the anatomy of journalism, perhaps sometimes also "the deepest is the skin", as Paul Valéry wrote, and Vázquez Montalbán and Albert Guinovart made a tango about. Valéry, the poet who beatified the form, made incursions into journalism, and for Vázquez Montalbán it is enough to say that the core of his great opera it is journalism.

Marshall McLuhan, one of the intellectual leaders of journalism, made the aphorism, almost a commandment, "the medium is the message", which we can transliterate –soi-disant– in “the substance is the form”; even more so in today’s world, which sees, clicks or flashes more than it reads. I do not want to be limited to recommending to those interested in this interaction the book of someone I consider an anthropological mirror of our profession, the luminous essay Look, listen, read, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, even though it looks like a jeans brand.

The subscriber Xavier Vilaseca sent me a detailed email with images about "the shortcomings or design problems that, in my opinion," he explains, "are suffered by some parts of the newspaper's web version." I reproduce three of the four points, since the last one, referring to sponsored content, will be dealt with in another monographic article, as deserves a topic that affects the Code of Ethics that prescribes differentiating information from advertising.

"1 - White space between news: I think there is too much white space between each news block, which gives a feeling of emptiness. The space should be filled, either with text or with an image.

2 - Comments on news: the side-by-side scrolling where you have to open tabs and sub-tabs to read the full comments and the entire conversation is very impractical. And then you have to go back to return to the main thread.

3 - MOST POPULAR, MOST VIEWED and MOST COMMENTED: at the end of each news item is this blog, and since an advertising blog has been placed on the right, the first blog is now narrower and, therefore, the news headlines do not fit in their entirety, but end in ellipses, and this is not useful from this point of view.

Ricard Marfà, head of design for ARA's digital products, responds to the comments of the subscriber, thanking him for his views, especially in the field of design, which "is not an exact science and in this sense you can always find nuances and different reactions to the same aspect." Based on this wonderful space of iconic freethinkers, their proposals collect the opinions of editors and readers through surveys, interviews or other similar models. From all this, they establish their visual proposal and subject it to evaluation with "user tests and real usage metrics from readers."

The head of digital product design concludes that "this formula is essential to have a solid base with which to justify decisions," but that, naturally, "the digital product is dynamic and mutable due to the very nature of the medium and the continuous and exponential changes in the habits of digital consumers."""Therefore, any of our proposals are susceptible to being modified, refocused or even eliminated," he added.

Subscriber Pep Roca reminds me that he finds it difficult to understand the distribution of news in the large mishmash of the Current Affairs section, where we fit in topics from the State, Catalonia and the world, and from a very wide range that he examines in the February 11 edition: it goes from politics to society or to the shdie, or the electric car close to the DANA. Corollary: "I don't understand why they don't distribute the large current affairs section like most of the reference newspapers do (e.g., The Vanguard, The Country or the NYT): international politics; national (and Països Catalans?) and state politics; company or similar (The Vanguard and The Country); business, economy and work".

Ignacio Aragay, deputy director of ARA, explains the situation pointed out by subscriber Roca: "The coronavirus pandemic shook us. During those months we decided to make a nearly monographic newspaper. The gap between economy and society, but also between politics and international affairs, is blurred.

On the other hand, due to the reduction in the number of pages on paper – all newspapers have been slimming down – space has been more limited for some time. If we add to this the fact that on some days there was no news relevant to all sections and the topics had to be forced, we made a virtue out of necessity with the idea of offering the reader a better summary and a better hierarchy of topics. A concentrated, short but high-quality newspaper: everything is essential. And where current affairs rule, so that the most relevant goes to the beginning, regardless of the hard section. That is why during the week we group everything in Current Affairs.

On the other hand, at weekends the paper is thicker and all sections cover in-depth topics, which still makes sense to maintain the division into sections, to which on Sundays we add the dossier, with an even more extensive topic."

Finally, Joaquim Simon advocates for letters from readers and does so by involving both form and content, beautifully in the genre he advocates. "I think it's great," he says, "that we have a column of tweets, but the opinion of the reader in general has disappeared, when often we were given opinions and feelings from people who do not have journalism as a profession but who often would like to express problems or opinions that may also be common to other citizens."

The head of Opinion, Toni Güell, explains it thus: "Reader participation is one of the areas in which we have clearly noticed the phenomenon of digital migration. In recent years, the arrival of letters has been drastically decreasing and readers have begun to express their concerns through news comments and social media. This is why the publication of letters has ended up being limited to weekends."

The Reader's Ombudsman concludes that, in terms of graphics, it is necessary to study the issues raised by subscriber Vilaseca in terms of optimising reading, not purely ornamental. Subscriber Roca, by highlighting the diversity of topics and places in the Current Affairs section, reveals a confusion in relation to standards, which, however, in the few pages that any newspaper has during the week, and as the deputy director points out, the practical thing is to manage it thermodynamically as a productive entropic chaos. But it is clear that a generous pagination like that of the weekends allows for canonical sections, which are effectively the most denotative order.

In the case of the letters defended by the reader Simon, I encourage the ARA to maintain the letters to the editor as a protected species, as all species in danger of extinction that link grammar and syntax against semiotics should be protected. short digital ones that are already replacing words with emoticons, and if humanity returns to the monkey, as the scholastic philosopher Hug Banyeres ironically proclaims, verbal language returns to hieroglyphics. Long live "the grammatical category of experience," as the other philosopher who had the name of a brand of jeans wrote.

The Reader's Ombudsman pays attention to doubts, suggestions, criticisms and complaints about the contents of the newspaper in its digital and paper editions, and ensures that the treatment of information is in accordance with the codes of ethics.

By Contact the Reader's Ombudsman You can send an email to eldefensor@ara.cat or record a message of no more than one minute to the WhatsApp number 653784787. In all cases, identification with name, surname and ID number is required.