Let me introduce you my family. They don’t know anything about digital publishing, and no a clue how have changed the way brands communicate. So this post pursues to make it understandable for them.

Let’s see the case of our national Newspaper, “El Tiempo” and its transition to www.eltiempo.com.

My father has a subscription to El Tiempo, so he receives the newspaper every Sunday on the mailbox. He wakes up earlier that morning, around 7am, usually to pick it up and bring some fresh bread from the bakery. My mom is preparing breakfast and my brothers and me, watching TV in bed, lazies. When my father comes back, he turns on the radio and starts reading the whole paper. That’s the traditional Sunday morning at my house.

It would be completely different if my father would be sitting in front of the computer in the study room; he would be missing all the action, turning the page and folding the sections, after are read. Or just hiding behind it and moving down the newspaper to see what is happening in the living room. For him, having the real paper is more enjoyable than reading the screen of the computer.

But that differs by generation. Let’s go back in time to see its history.

El Tiempo has 100 years, is a non-tabloid daily with national distribution. As of 2004, it had the highest circulation in Colombia with an average weekday circulation of 314,000, rising to 453,000 for the Sunday edition. After longtime rival El Espectador was reduced to a weekly publication following an internal financial crisis in 2001, El Tiempo enjoyed monopoly status in Colombian media as the only daily that circulated nationally, because most smaller dailies have limited distribution outside their own regions.

On Sundays there are special sections. During around 3 years it published every Sunday a special section with a weekly selection of articles from The New York Times, translated to Spanish and using the same pictures.

From 2002 they started to publish the news online. But still has a vast majority of customers that are still loyal to the paper.  I think its advantage is the variety. Both media offer you several options to get important and useful information with high quality. So if you want the encyclopedia brochures and special edition of magazines you have to get the real paper. But if you want to navigate the site you will find sections from Archive news to What to do Today; and multimedia will give you another idea of the news.

I think while I can see the news from London on my computer, my father keeps reading his newspaper in the lounge. Still 2 generations reading  “El Tiempo”. I am just wondering what type of newspaper my nephew will read.