“If you have a strong brand that people trust, and you don’t incorporate new perspectives, you will lose money and someone else will take that space,” Martha Ortiz Gómez from El Colombiano told WAN IFRA at the annual World News Media Congress, last week.

Building strong relationships between internal news organisations is not enough anymore – editors need to introduce more technology experts, like engineers and mathematicians, into their newsrooms to adapt to the evolving digital landscape. For Ortiz, the manpower is there – on a recent trip to London, she noted that she saw “a lot of great people working very hard” – but new influences should be welcomed to introduce original concepts for future publication.

“When facing the modern-day challenges of journalism, we should seek out new projects and new strategies, open our minds, and always be transparent – tell your audience what you’re doing,” said Ortiz.

Growth will depend on a change in the traditional newsroom mentality – by creating a more open and diverse structure, as well as facilitating the proper education of upcoming journalists, in which Ortiz broached, “Are we giving [university students] the tools to succeed?”, editors can develop a newsroom that is prepared, if not enthusiastic about the inevitable changes in media.

One of El Colombiano’s main initiatives is a strategy laboratory called ECOLab, which acts as “a think tank to promote innovation” within the newsroom. Ortiz wants to create a methodolgy of problem solving so that companies can effectively seek out creative alternatives to the many technological and digital roadblocks a senior editor will. According to Ortiz, successful problem solving “is like a circle, because there are changes happening constantly, and we need to be ready to change with it.”