As AI continues to develop rapidly, most industries are urgently trying to keep up with the evolving situation and the capabilities and risks presented by the new technology. El Nacional’s TSE challenge was to seize this opportunity. Building on its business publication, the Barcelona-based publisher launched an editorial product and a community for managers and entrepreneurs to decode the impact of AI.
El Nacional is a leading digital news publisher based in Barcelona, Spain. Founded in 2016, the company’s team of more than 100 news professionals covers political, social and economic news in Catalonia, publishing content in both Catalan and Spanish, as well as selected articles in English. For their TSE challenge, the El Nacional team leveraged ON ECONOMIA, the company’s business media brand that focuses on the Catalan economy and business environment.
by Clara Soteras, Head of ON-IA project and SEO and Product Manager
For nine months, El Nacional has worked on a new editorial project aimed at creating a niche audience. This was the first time the strategy and digital business team of Grup Les Notícies de Catalunya, El Nactional’s owner, consciously worked to expand its coverage beyond general audience interests such as political, economic, social, cultural and sports news, with a special focus on everything that happens in Catalonia.
In addition, as part of the Table Stakes Europe programme, a cross-functional team of product, business, SEO, commercial and editorial professionals set out to go beyond reaching this audience and create a community.
This double challenge has allowed the company to discover and implement three new monetisation channels that had not been explored before: membership or subscription, events and training. Albert Terradas, CEO of Grup Les Notícies de Catalunya, pointed out that “ON-IA has also meant innovating when it comes to devising new products with business potential for an unknown audience” and adds that “it has opened doors to propose similar projects in the future, establishing the bases for action and coordination of the departments.”
ON-IA has become the new vertical of the financial newspaper ON ECONOMIA (the business brand of El Nacional), offering current information and quality content from AI experts and specialists, designed for managers, business people and entrepreneurs. The project was launched in October 2024, after months of work with many professionals and departments involved, as well as several tests of the product, content, experts and technical implementations.
A weekly newsletter hits its stride
The launch of the new brand included a weekly newsletter, which is sent every Sunday afternoon, taking into account the target of the project.
Getting newsletter subscriptions has been the main initial KPI of the project, along with other SMART goals necessary to achieve the objectives that were established for the challenge.
In just one week since the launch, the weekly newsletter acquired 460 subscribers, with an open rate of over 70 percent in the first two mailings. In addition, another metric that leads us to believe that the product is being well received is the newsletter’s CTR, reaching a 41 percent unique click-through rate.
These are the metrics and the quantitative results, but the biggest change that participation in Table Stakes Europe has brought us has been the application of a new methodology in the development and management of projects for the team.
With the support of the TSE coach, Pepe Cerezo, a digital media strategy consultant, as well as TSE architect, Douglas K. Smith, the El Nacional team have been able to streamline the project’s processes, while creating a new product designed for a new audience.
This method has allowed us to take into account all the variables necessary for the development of an editorial product, focusing on the needs of this new audience as well as on the resources and opportunities for monetisation and income generated by this new business, focused on strengthening the feeling of membership and community.
An editorial board guiding the product
From the birth of the initial idea to the launch of ON-IA, the project underwent a significant evolution that involved drawing up new profiles and roles in the editorial staff and overcoming various obstacles. Internal management with the different teams involved has been one challenge, as has the creation of an editorial board with experts in artificial intelligence.
One of the main goals for the project was to stand out from what was being offered by other media that also produce content focused on AI or business newsletters. To this end, the company created an editorial board made up of five leading figures who meet every month. This board defines the strategic lines of content because these professionals know the latest news in the sector and the trends of interest to the business audience.
One of the thematic sections we wanted to highlight was how the regulation of the AI Act affects companies, as well as its implications for the Spanish framework. Another interesting point of view is ethics, gender bias and algorithms, as well as education and governance related to this new area that is already being deployed in other countries.
That is why we have great experts such as Aleix Valls, CEO and founder of Liquid Lab, Esther Checa, global director of Innovation at t2ó ONE Group, Belén Arribas, lawyer specialising in digital law, AI advisor and president of ENATIC and IFCLA, Ariadna Font Llitjós, co-founder and CEO of Alinia.ai and PhD in natural language processing, and Esteve Almirall, professor and professor of innovation and AI at ESADE. With editorial coordination by the ON ECONOMIA team, they set the content guidelines and share their perspective on the generative AI to come.
All of this is presented each week in a newsletter with many different formats of content produced by those professionals. This newsletter is devised as the base of operations to distribute the information but also to engage and create a community. In each newsletter readers can find a new podcast with the protagonist of the week (character or company), as well as current news articles, case studies, audiovisual interviews with success stories or examples of the use of AI in Spanish companies or demonstrations of AI tools. Other topics that can be discovered are webinars and training video clips on the use of Microsoft’s Copilot or LinkedIn.
The product is constantly evolving, and we are working to make part of it premium. Some of the obstacles have been technological, because we had not developed internally the possibility of reserving specific articles for subscribers, and in the last quarter of the year we will work on this so that it will be a reality in early 2025.
Events for the AI community
The TSE programme has helped the team to set a new challenge with business opportunities but always with an audience in mind. One of our audiences was also our own newsroom because we had to sell the product to them and encourage them to trust it.
During the process we have gone from nine people to almost 30, incorporating more profiles from the editorial side, such as journalists and video editors, with Xavier Alegret, director of ON ECONOMIA, Jofre Llombart, audiovisual business director, and Daniel Clement, commercial director, while the strategy team continued to devise the working framework and the reader’s journey.
Oriol Poveda, El Nacional’s Director of Business and Digital Strategy, points out that participation in Table Stakes “has allowed us to break away from our day-today thinking and get out of our comfort zone, as well as putting different teams at the same table who do not usually work together to create something new.” This is precisely one of the main lessons from TSE, since without journalists, this editorial product would not be viable.
After working with them and other colleagues, we were able to build a great event to present ON-IA with more than 130 managers and business people in attendance. Previously, we had tested the idea of events and training, advised by our TSE coaches, by organising a one-morning paid seminar that attracted 50 people. We then saw that our idea of offering community-linked services also made sense and that there was a market for it. Another SMART goal was to get sponsors for these events, and the team is already working on organising a new event.
ON-IA has not only provided El Nacional and ON ECONOMIA with a new way of monetising the media, but has also laid the foundations for applying the same methodology to future projects of the company.