“In internet it's not the big that eat the small, it's the fast that eat the slow”

We are finishing the consolidation process both in a business sense and as a journalistic project with immediate short-term objectives: a published style guide, but we are still elaborating other tools, such as a corrections section... a whole series of things related to further promotion of quality journalism in Vilaweb. In a business sense we are in the midst of a consolidation process; we've acquired a new building in order to begin a new editorial process, which we believe will be a truly different editorial process and a first attempt at the elaboration of a medium belonging strictly to internet, with characteristics of flexibility and capacities very different from those of usual editorial processes, and we anticipate that this coming summer we will move in... We find ourselves in a time of extensive internal consolidation, but looking to the future... We have defined ourselves as a part of the media. In the period of the .coms we struggled greatly to define ourselves as a newspaper, not as a .com. At present the media, on the one hand, has to reinforce its credibility and, on the other, offer products in all formats, including paper. In our case, we have to consolidate our presence on internet, make a strong commitment to IPTV, not web TV but true IPTV, and one day or another take the step of publishing the newspaper in paper format. This would close the cycle. There are various aspects. We began to produce TV in February 2006 and for a year we were producing video without giving it the formal structure of a TV channel. At that time there weren't so many people producing online TV and YouTube had just begun. The formal presentation took place in January 2007, almost a year ago now. More than IPTV, I would describe it as a la carte TV. I have no doubt that in the very near future a la carte TV on the internet will become the most important revolution that the media has ever experienced, and TV as we now know it will essentially disappear. In this light, a situation will be created that somehow, though with greater consequences, resembles the context of 1996, when it all began. There will be an explosion of ideas, concepts and projects and it is very important to already have a project in the works and persist in what you do. For us, it is basic to be in a strategic position; what would be serious is not to be there. When IPTV becomes more powerful it will be important for the body of readers of Vilaweb to know that they have a TV channel. In discussions about internet, we often get lost in the wrapping without getting to the contents. I believe that what is important is not producing IPTV but rather quality TV. We are strongly committed to this. There are many people making videos and so forth, but we have a team of professionals devoted to making videos and we try to offer quality TV on a regular basis. Herein lies the key, we are not just another TV, IP or otherwise. One thing that I've learned over these past years is that the success of a product is not based on the medium in question but on its quality. Three people working day and night to produce IPTV is a very big business commitment for us. The success of Catalan on the web is not disputed by anybody these days. And even less so now that the .cat domain is up and running; nobody argues the fact. It wasn't at all clear back in 1995 that Catalan would become such a success story. At that time the vast majority of businesses, and even the Catalan government, were committed to Spanish, with ideas about how to go about conquering Latin America and other such frankly surprising things. It was more a question of the persistence and impetus of the net itself than the failure of the Latin American strategies that tipped the scales, this, added to the painstaking and quiet work of a large number of people, during many years. Now it has exploded and everyone is saying how Catalan is an internet success story, but this hasn't just happened; some very serious work has gone into this behind the scenes. This is very positive for two reasons. First, because it points out that in all probability the problem we have with Catalan is not so much one of demand as one of supply. If Catalan is successful on the internet, why isn't it in terms of video games? Simply, because videogames are not on offer in Catalan. Likewise, why isn't there a satellite channel or Imagenio (an IPTV-based service)? It must be their fault, but not because of a lack of consumers, something that ends up taking us into the political realm and the reasons why things are done or not. I think that the success of Catalan on the internet highlights anti-Catalan attitudes in other areas. It highlights the fact that in other fields, businesses do not behave normally with respect to Catalan. The success of Catalan on the internet sends a very positive message. While there are those who try to make us believe –and take advantage of the fact– that Catalan is the language of the authorities and that it is imposed upon us from the government, in the case of internet the success of Catalan is associated with innovation, civil society, the will to progress and, therefore, sends a positive message regarding the future of Catalan that is very healthy and good, one of the most important ones that has been sent over the last ten years. In the process of normalisation following Franco's regime there is surely a first brick in the construction of autonomy, that being the school system and TV3 (the Catalan television station), and now, at a more difficult time, a new pillar has come into being that fits this new era: internet. For us, this is never a dichotomy. For quite some time now we have been joking about how we are a glocal media or, to put it more seriously, that we are a global medium with a local focus. We are interested in what occurs in Burma, but seen through our eyes, not those of the United States or China. We reject extreme localism, which contributes nothing, being excessive and focused on just one subject, blind to reality. In a globalised world this does nothing to help the reader to understand what is happening. We similarly reject that type of cosmopolitanism that is normally nothing other than blindly following what is done in Madrid or New York. One position is just as absurd as the other. During these thirteen years we have tried to express all these things in the newspaper. In the beginning, the local editions were important because the discourse that was circulating at the time was that internet had to be something exclusively global in nature while we were insisting that it was a tool of proximity, and over time we have been proven right. Nowadays, we are perhaps more worried about a certain tendency of the Catalan internet to be too preoccupied with the country itself and for this reason we have been reinforcing the global focus. We are convinced that there is a happy medium, that this glocality is possible. We must take part in the global world, because the contrary is absurd, but seeking our own vision, because ignoring this would be equally absurd. In the world of internet it isn't true that the big fish eats the small one. The fast fish is the one that eats the slow one, but not necessarily the big one that eats the small one. There is quite a bit of proof of this, such as the entire process of the Catalan internet. Here in Barcelona there have been large companies that have spent fortunes on operations that were supposed to be hugely successful in the world of internet but that failed spectacularly. I believe that in the new society that we live in, flexibility, reacting quickly and so forth is more important than the financial monster. And here our tactic of moving faster than others has been demonstrated. When we began to produce IPTV, YouTube did not yet exist. As soon as YouTube became a phenomenon, we uploaded all of our videos there. The typical discussion with our colleagues at TV3 is that they get angry because people go to YouTube instead of to 3 a la carte. We put our videos on YouTube, E-mule and in podcasts; this doesn't worry us, on the contrary: this is normal; it's where the people are. To have the ability to adapt and react quickly to what is occurring is the key to success in this world we are living in; it's not a question of being the biggest. This, along with the persistence of being clear about the fact that you have a project and that you know that you're not going to reach all your goals tomorrow and that you have to work on it day after day. Thirteen years mean many days for me. At times, Vilaweb has done a lot of harm because there are people who think they can do the same thing overnight. In reality, Internet is slow, in this sense you can't rush, and people are in too much of a hurry.