A friend of mine told me that MSM won't adopt blogs in Spain.
They won't feel the need of blogs and won't allocate extra budget for niche media, he said.
Well, he was wrong.
Spanish MSM first offered RSS feeds during 2004, and a bunch of them understood the power of blogs and began to use them heavily during 2005.
El Mundo offers 6 permanent blogs written by columnists of the newspaper, and also has offered special blogs for great events such as the death of Pope John Paul II.
20 Minutos is organising a blog contest with a number of categories. This free newspaper was the first to offer readers the opportunity to comment all its contents and had RSS feeds.
Qué! is a free newspaper that dedicates one full page to blog content created in blogs by their own CMS.
The example of blogs and MSM that I like most is Informativos Telecinco. Tele 5 is a private TV channel that actually hired one Spanish A-list blogger (Ignacio Escolar) and asked one of his journalists that also is a blogger (Iñigo Sáenz de Ugarte) to run its new internet project.
Now they are offering news in a "traditional" internet site and have blogs about different topics... and they keep posting in their own blogs!
There are another examples in both national and regional newspapers that have blogs or even offer their own CMS and I can tell that this is only the beginning of the adoption of blogs by MSM in Spain.
Regarding the topic that MSM may look bloggers as a threat, I can say that the main reason for the quick adoption of blogs by MSM was because they actually felt blogs were threating them because:
- They were not part of the conversation
- They were loosing awareness among influencers
- They were loosing influence
- They were not maximizing their contents' profitability
And also, the most important Spanish newspaper had its own "Elpaisgate".
El País launch a email campaign to promote the online version of the newspaper with this ad:
(Translation: Lots of things could happen in just one day... like September 11th terrorist attack that change NY skyline).
The reaction for such a bad taste ad was immediate in the Spanish blogosphere and the pressure of dozens of bloggers forced El País to ask for apologies in the front page of the newspaper.
Also, the role of blogs after the Madrid terrorist attack was fundamental, as they were platforms of opinion and political activism that result in the victory of the PSOE.
Regarding the topic of bloggers making money out of their blogs, I can say that in Spain there is one blog publisher (Weblogs SL) that is on the right track to make its blogs profitable with 1 million+ page views a month and with advertising agreements with Nokia, Dell, etc. As far as I know, some other blog publishers will be launched in the future.
But I also want to point out that there are several blog companies in Spain: CMS, blog consultancy, blog development, design, agregators, etc.
Spanish blogosphere is a fast moving and pride community, that looks MSM direct to the eye and demand transparency not just to them but to institutions and political parties.