In Ancient Rome, citizens who wished to discover the latest news about the Empire went to the Forum to consult the "Acta Diurna". This first newspaper in history was prepared on stone or metal to prevent anyone from altering its content. The news published could have happened days or months beforehand, particularly if it came from far-off lands. Today it is the news itself which moves towards us at any time and in any place, almost immediately, regardless of where it has taken place. And it is no longer written in stone – instead, readers can expand, comment, dispute or freely exchange it.
The technological revolution which separates the Roman "diurnarii" from our modern journalists has not occurred gradually, but rather in great leaps increasingly less spread out over time. To illustrate this idea, if the last two thousand years were represented by a single day, the printing press would not have been invented until six o'clock in the afternoon; radio broadcasting, after eleven o'clock at night; half an hour later, Internet; and hardly two minutes after that, "smartphones" and social networks. How can a profession adjust to this rate of change without losing its defining features?
In such a scenario, it might seem that journalists are condemned to living in fear of the next technological revolution and how this will affect their work and the future of their profession in general. However, the same technology which threatens the very essence of journalism may help maintain it, filtering out the complexity of these advances and placing them at the service of the newspaper. This is the approach which has placed Protecmedia in the technological vanguard for more than thirty years, producing software that allows content to be generated from a single interface and published in multiple channels. This is what we call editorial convergence.
In line with this approach, we have created ITER Web CMS, aproduct that focuses on the publication of editorial content in the web which will allow journalists to use the growing advantages of this medium in an integrated manner with their current system of production without having to worry about any underlying technical issues. Thus, aspects such as the web page design, consulting the number of visits and comments or the integration of social networks are now within the journalist's reach. As the name ITER suggests, our aim is to take another step on the road towards editorial convergence and to defend, thanks to the latest technological innovations, the essence of journalism.
