The written press, politics and social affairs have always been present in my life since I was little, my mother is a journalist and my father is an economist, both of them from a very marked political and social current, so you can imagine that I ate bread with avocado flavored for breakfast. newspaper and the political debate at the table was respectfully fierce, so it was to be expected that I would inherit at least that need to be aware of what is happening in my country. One day talking with a great political scientist friend, who in my opinion is the best reference I have in the world of political analysis, I told him: ads suck, they don't allow journalists to be really independent and readers hate ads too, what if we do something like a Spotify of the written press?
He answers me: I think you're a little late Nicolás, that already exists, it's called Paywall and the big ones are implementing it.
But he agreed with me that political journalism needs visual respect, the design must be impeccable, minimalist and essential, people need to be informed and read comfortably, the disorder that today's traditional media websites that fight for traffic cannot continue to exist. generate income with his ads , so I rephrased my proposal and told him:
I want to help journalism to become independent, creating a web platform for them to monetize their content.
Some time passed, it was July 2021 and as we already know, all of Peru was going through an unprecedented political crisis, my friend calls me, hey, I have ex-journalists from one of the most important media outlets in the country, they have come together to create a new independent medium and they need a website. So we went for them, we offered them something out of the ordinary, develop their website at no cost and support them in everything they need at the technology level, in exchange for developing their subscription platform, the idea is to allow them to get on the air as soon as possible. soon as posible.
We were in a complex time, time was pressing, there were only a few days left until July 28 and the need to be on the air before the change of command was imminent.
There were very few days left for the delivery of the web, we helped them do a pre-launch live so we opened a 300-person zoom room that filled up in a few seconds, it was overwhelming, we could say it was a success, yes . But for us it was a first headache, we had underestimated the traffic that they could generate, we needed to provide them with a website that is prepared to tolerate high concurrence and that the server bill is not huge, it was essential to have a lot of security to avoid hacking and that In turn, it is a very light page, it was not simply building a Wordpress, we needed an architecture that could tolerate hundreds of thousands of visitors and it was not a little work. Finally we managed to air the first version of the website, hours before the change of President, allowing this group of journalists to have a website free of headaches and that is how Epicentro.TV was born.
A little more than a year has passed since that experience and Cluster continues to be the technological arm of EpicentroTV, together with other brave journalists, they are laying the foundations of this inevitable process of independence of journalism in Peru and we are here behind the scenes helping them to make the technology work.
