The Airship Narrative

The main analogy used to present the strategy to stakeholders was an airship. Airships gain lift from a gas that is less dense than the surrounding air. Larger airships require more lifting gas, while smaller ones need less and can move faster.

EBC was a large airship running low on lifting gas. Since adding more gas wasn’t an option, the logical solution was to reduce the airship’s size. We achieved this by cutting the operational costs of creating and maintaining content across 14 different websites, consolidating everything into a single product: news.

The news you publish—when viewed in aggregate and over time—is also a product. It exists in various forms, whether as a physical object (like a newspaper) or a digital service (such as a website or app), which is sold or distributed to a target audience.

Conceptually, this shift requires a leap for those in traditional reporting and editing roles. We are accustomed to buying “products” in stores or online. In the tech world, apps and services are naturally referred to as “products.” That framing makes sense. However, news has not traditionally been viewed this way. It’s time to change that mindset.

In this project, we needed to serve two distinct types of users who visit the site daily: journalists from other media companies seeking updated government information (20% of our visitors), and the general population (the remaining 80%), who access our news primarily through Google search results or social media sharing.

The audience didn’t need to be built from scratch. In 2018 and 2019, Google Analytics already showed that we had nearly 20 million unique visitors per year. However, Brazil’s news ecosystem was highly competitive, with many successful rivals. At the time, the volume of content produced couldn’t be increased due to significant budget cuts, as federal funds were slashed by nearly half. This made it impossible to hire additional journalists.

John likes to call himself an old-school journalist. His colleagues’ opinions of him range from "old-fashioned" to "outdated," and John is aware of these perceptions. He works at a newspaper, where he reuses and edits news from Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agência Brasil every day. Although he’s accustomed to this workflow, he hopes it can be improved to save him time on a daily basis.

Marie is a content creator who enjoys making Instagram stories and sharing them with her growing audience. At the same time, she likes to stay up to date with the latest news. She accesses major news websites but prefers reading news directly from the source—that’s why Agência Brasil plays a significant role as a domain authority for keywords like "news" and "government."