On first glace it’s clear that Pablo Vivanco has all the proper political bona fides to run TeleSur English.
Pablo was involved with student and Latino organizing activities in Canada. He volunteered for the Center for Spanish Speaking; and founded the Central American Students Association.
Pablo Vivanco has worked as the Public Relations officer for the Chilean Canadian Cultural Association – Salvador Allende, and chaired organizations such as Chile CAN Rise. In addition to his political work he has written many articles for BASICS Community News Service, the North American Congress on Latin America and LINKS – The International Journal of Socialist Renewal before becoming Director of TeleSUR English.
However as I’ll now demonstrate, these political and academic roles did not provide him the knowledge of the modern digital media ecology that’s necessary for one to be a successful Director of such an operation as TeleSUR English and he has not since grasped how to do this in his 4 years at TeleSUR English.
Starving The Target Audience
Pablo Vivanco has signed off on the production of thousands of articles that the vast majority of Americans typically avoid reading. Not because of the subject matter or perspective, but because of their reading level.
While TeleSUR English’s departing from industry standard by attempting to provide more context to the news event is laudable, their decision to ignore industry standards by publishing way above most American’s reading level is not. Simply put, it alienates potential readers.
Here’s a PDF with the Readability score of this Opinion article (Graded as a C-) entitled Why Bolivia Fights US Imperialism but Chile does Not.
Here’s a PDF with the Readability score of this Analysis article (graded as an E, lower than an F!) entitled Despite Win, Ecuador’s President in a Tough Spot After Referendum.
I combined the articles Venezuela: Maduro Invites All International Observers ‘Willing to Come’ to Oversee April Election and Venezuela to Seek ‘Other Markets’ if US Goes Ahead With Oil Embargo: Maduro into one to obtain their Readability Scores, and received similar scores indicating that they far above the average American’s preferred reading level.
Attention to this is incredibly important as it affects the likelihood of content being shared.
Search Engine Sabotage
As mentioned in my previous article, TeleSUR English: 4 Years of Corruption, Wasted Money and Lost Opportunities, poor UX and back end coding has a negative impact on SEO. This issue is so pervasive on the website, that it’s worth touching upon again in more detail.
These errors not only drive people away, but negatively effects search ranking, thus making it more difficult for those searching for context to come across the information on their website.
Whereas other major digital media operations like New York Times and the Washington Post have transitioned to more interactive storytelling approaches that uses R, Tableau, Excel and similar programs TeleSUR English stagnates by using the same broken javascript frames to merely link traditional photo with traditional text. Information is beautiful, but the way TeleSUR English presents it’s stories is often not.
The Importance of Knowing and Applying the New Media Paradigm
The biggest problems TeleSUR English struggles with is, it seems, a lack of knowledge of or adherence to new media best practices.
In the new media environment the essential driver for growth is building relationships.
In a highly congested digital media landscape, forming a lasting relationship means you can reach more people and influence more people for less money. It takes the form of onsite engagement, large email subscriber numbers, people positively referencing your work on other websites.
A cursory review of TeleSUR English’s Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as their on-site comments sections shows the barest of engagement, even in the places where one might expect it.
Onsite Example of a Failed Controversy Meant to Drive Engagement
In the article Why This Sanders Supporter is Boarding the Trump Train by Cassandra Fairbanks, for instance, there is none of the controversy in the form of comments that the article was likely projected to achieve.
Comparing the 6 comments here to the 2,685 found on this Breitbart article, on a roughly similar topic at around the same time, it’s clear that it didn’t achieve the desired effect of generating comments at all. What it shows is that TeleSUR English has a small audience that doesn’t care to engage even when content that should offend the target audience is posted.
Twitter Example of Failed Engagement
As it relates to information on Twitter’s engagement for this article, I decided against using an API to scrape, review, process and interpret the information about this due to the cost as it’s immediately evident that there’s a lack-of-meaningful engagement here as well.
Instead of what works, both accounts simply drown their readers in posts.
The motto of TeleSUR English seems to be quantity over quality.
Pablo Vivanco’s Fake Social Media Stats
At the 2016 Left Forum, Pablo Vivanco spoke about his experiences as the Director of TeleSUR English.
While the entirety of his presentation has not been made available (and if anyone happens to have it I would hope that the email it to me), I was able to discover an interesting quote from his presentation:
“Social media platforms are controlled by corporate media,” he [Pablo] said, “But these are the ways people consume information and news. To not participate is to cede space we shouldn’t cede.”
“When we launched there was a fair amount of resources put into buying views and likes on social media platforms,” Vivanco said ruefully. “But social media functions on algorithms. You need organic engagement and reach- using networks and working with others, building engagement.”
In a few public words Pablo Vivanco gave evidence as to why TeleSUR English should be penalized by algorithms designed to halt “fake news”.
Whether or not Facebook, Google and other such algorithms are designed to find and factor in such comments is honestly beyond me, but I do know that an event occurred which provides insight into just how many followers Pablo Vivanco purchased and how many of TeleSUR English’s followers are actually real. It was shocking to me as it was MUCH lower than what I’d projected initially.
How a Fake News Story that Fooled Newsweek Provides Insight into TeleSUR English’s Readership Numbers
After TeleSUR English’s page went down for 21 hours on January 21st, Carlos Ballesteros, a contributing author to Newsweek, wrote an article entitled Latin American News Outlet’s Facebook Page Mysteriously Disappears for 24 Hours.
At a time where Facebook censorship is a hot-button issue, no other media outlets picked up the story. If this sounds surprising, it’s less so after the story becomes clearer.
For one, shortly after publication, a correction was made to correct the prior claim that Facebook censored them. The reality being that this was just speculation on the part of Pablo Vivanco.
Secondarily, a little bit of research shows that Carlos Ballesteros and Pablo Vivanco are long-standing political colleagues – evidenced by their co-existent signatures on a resolution defending the SNTE teacher union, in a La Jornada declaration from March 2013 on pages 12-13. Most outlets doing background, like myself were likely to have picked this up and seen the article as a favor to a friend.
There are other issues with this article as well, such as Carlos Ballesteros informing the reader that “TeleSUR boasts a viewership of nearly half a billion people in 110 countries,” which defies all projections that I’ve seen. However the real interesting thing, is the organic response after the profile was taken down, presumably, for political censorship.
TeleSUR English’s Actual Audience Numbers
After the false report that TeleSUR English was censored began circulation, a page called TeleSUR News Aggregate came into existence and posted notifications to follow it in a number of Leftist-oriented groups on Facebook and alternative news sites.
What’s notable about this is that the number of people who rallied in “defense” of TeleSUR English was a far cry from the ~410,000 currently “liking” it – only 3,538 people.
Also notable is how that now a single person in any of the 40+ “Friends of TeleSUR English” Facebook groups said a peep about it’s being temporarily unpublished.
Does this mean that there are 406,000 fake likes for TeleSUR English on Facebook?
It’s possible. The only was we would know for sure was if this company engaged in some radical transparency.
Crunching The Numbers Sans Fake Followers
The budget for the first year of TeleSUR English was $17,600,000.
If we presume that operating costs dropped from $17.6 million in the first year to 10 to 15 million in the following four years, this would then mean that the average amount of money that the governments supporting TeleSUR English was spending per genuine follower – taken to be the number of people that followed TeleSUR News Aggregate – is $16,053.
True, this doesn’t include the numbers of followers from TeleSUR English’s other properties, however, it’s quite likely that those numbers are equally false and I think it fair to state that the primary outlet is likely to be the most authoritative source for actual numbers.
