Young people are the elusive audience many news outlets are vying for. They are moving away from traditional news brands and towards news influencers producing podcasts and short-form video. A new generation of news startups in Southern Europe is trying to change this, with a more informal tone and a focus on explainers and online formats.
Italian news publisher Chora Media is focusing on podcasts but also on social media content through Will Media, a startup it bought in 2022. French news influencer Hugo Travers, known online as Hugo Décrypte, has millions of followers on YouTube and TikTok, with an average audience age of 27, Hugo’s own age. Spanish sports news site Relevo has been publishing ground-breaking scoops with a focus on women and Gen-Z audiences.
Now, a new Spanish outlet has entered the chat. Its name is Watif, and it began publishing in October as a news brand focused on Substack-based newsletters and video podcasts. It was founded by Emilio Doménech, a popular journalist and newsletter writer in Spain with over 150,000 followers on X. As Domenéch wrote in an end-of-year post in December, Watif’s goal is to engage young Spaniards who have lost their attention span amid constant competition between algorithms, push notifications and all kinds of apps.
Named after the English phrase “What if?” spelt in a Spanish manner, this new outlet aims for a sparser publication schedule than most news organisations, with two newsletters and one video-podcast episode per week, focusing on one “big story” on Tuesday and opinion and culture on Friday.
I spoke to Watif cofounder Mar Manrique, a young journalist who has published her own newsletter about journalism and media since 2021 and who’s been involved in the new project from the ideation phase in December 2023. We spoke about how Watif aims to be different from other media outlets in Spain and how it plans to appeal to young people.
But there’s another reason. When we started talking about this project, I had my own job and he had his. We were always talking about it on WhatsApp, coming up with ideas. And one day, he was on the train, I was coming back home from the gym, and we were talking about the focus that we wanted to have and the topics that we could cover. We were talking about [US journalist] Cleo Abram. She used to be in the Vox video team, and she is now a YouTuber who covers the future of technology with an optimistic spin. We wanted to do something similar to her.
Abram sometimes frames her videos like: “What if this happens?” So we were ping-ponging ideas with the “What if?” like, “What if Netflix starts doing something with artificial intelligence in their series?” We wanted to start all our coverage with that “What if” framing. It’s something that came up in one WhatsApp conversation among a million. It was very organic.
We were also inspired by 404 Media. They are just a team of four as we are, and they also cover technology. It’s very niche, but we saw their articles and we found them interesting. We were also inspired by the fact they could survive with a subscription base. In Spain, it’s not as common to have that kind of solid subscription base. But El Orden Mundial has 5,000 paid subscribers if I’m not mistaken, and that’s really good. They’ve been working for around eight years, so it’s not that long to be achieving that number.
The user perspective is very super helpful, not only in the coverage of the topics, but also in choosing the formats: video and podcasts are something that the young audiences like, and they are our target audience. Newsletters are a new format and we understand that young people in their 20s maybe don’t read them. But we try to cover all the bases. People are developing new consumer habits.
That was the third event that we held, and it’s great to see the same faces coming back, so they like what we are doing. Emilio, with his previous project, had a discord channel where people were chatting about elections and political events that happened in the United States. There was also a layer of gamification. If you were interacting a lot, you could be like the “President of the United States” on the channel. People were very eager to talk there. We wanted to use that online experience and move it to real life.
We also have a WhatsApp community for our Watif paid subscribers. It’s not just a broadcast channel. Our audience can message us back. We can talk about the events that we are hosting. One time Emilio was trying a panettone he bought, and he was like, “This is delicious.” So it can be informative, you can comment something like, “I’m super surprised about what happened today.” And then we can also establish more personal relationships.
Bosco Bárcena is the content director and Marina Enrich, who works part-time, leads our strategy on social media. Sometimes, though, official titles are too much for a four-person team. It’s really small, so everyone does everything. We also have an external collaborator, Carles Planas Bou. He comes from El Periódico and covers technology. And then we have Olga Llorente, our student intern. We work remotely: Emilio and Marina are in Madrid, Bosco is in Pamplona, and I’m in Barcelona. So we are always messaging each other.
People are tired of the political news cycle in Spain. It’s non-stop. It’s four big things a day. It’s crazy. And that’s something that doesn’t benefit news consumption. People are overwhelmed.
We are in a very uncertain moment. No one knows what is going to happen, but we have to make decisions, and it’s hard. So having this new outlet that covers the future, and we try to do it in a positive way, is something that we thought was necessary and that we didn’t see in the Spanish media landscape. For me, it’s really important to also emphasise that we are young people and that we are covering things that matter to us as well.
Social media is gaining traction. We see the number of followers growing every week, and several clips have gone viral. In January we will reevaluate our strategy and see if we are okay with what we are doing. We are in the mindset of trying things, seeing how they work, and then recalculating if this is the correct path, or if we should change it.
I would talk to this person about the variety of topics that we cover. The most important thing is that we try to understand them. If I’m pitching to a young audience, it’s because I’m also a young person who knows what they are consuming and what they’re worried about. The essence is something we share with them: the uncertainty, the problems that we all are facing. Marina and I are 26, Emilio is 34. Bosco is 36. Olga is 21.
We have three tiers. The first one is free: you can receive our newsletters but don’t have any extra benefits and you have to pay for the entire amount for the events. For the second tier, which is €6 a month or €60 per year, you get a discount and prioritised entry for our live events, access to our WhatsApp community and the chance to participate in El Club, which are online events with Emilio and a guest speaker. With the third tier, which is €120 per year, you have free access to our live events, as well as regular meetings with the team and a yearly gift.
The focus of all those benefits is on the community and not on the content because people are overwhelmed. They don’t want more content, so it didn’t make sense. We understand the community is something a bit more private, something exclusive, and we want to keep it that way.
We also understand that we have to diversify our income streams. We started with a financial investment. We raised a round, like a startup. We are also trying to collaborate with brands aligned with our values. For example, we are recording our video podcast in a Spanish sustainable restaurant, where all the dishes are sustainable. They liked our message about the future, so they allowed us to record there. And we plan to start consulting, and try to organise other events with brands.
This conversation was originally published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Marina Adami works at the Reuters Institute as a digital journalist.