
News
Metro Newspaper
Issue 52 | September 2019
Agency
Artplan, Sa~o Paulo
Creative Team
Creative Directors: Zico Farina, Marcos Abrucio Art Director: Ary Nogueira Copywriter: Rafael Pascarella
Production Team
Production Management: Clariana Regiani RTVC: Karoline Justino, Patricia Oliva Production: Bruno Werner Production Coordination: Valquiria Pacheco
Other Credits
Customer Relation Management: Luiz Villano Customer Approval: Cla´udio Bianchini, Luiz Rivoiro Customer Relation: Dani Harriz, Kiska Kaysel
Date
June 2019
Background
Fake news has become a major issue worldwide. It is capable of influencing elections and of driving national events. To combat this, Metro Newspaper turned to technology.
Idea
Captcha is the tool that checks to make sure you are a real human being when you visit a website.
On Metro’s own website, there was a captcha tool visitors had to use before they could post a comment to a news story.
This was redesigned so that visitors now have to identify which image has the fake news. Every day, new fake news is shown to keep readers up to date.
Results
The website had a 18% increase in traffic throughout the first month, Also, people who used the tool were 40% more likely to return to the website.
Our Thoughts
Fake news is such a complicated issue. Newspapers are not always entirely blameless themselves in this regard.
Still, you can see where Metro is coming from and this idea is not so much a bold declaration of editorial independence as a neat way of getting more visitors to the site, ergo more readers, ergo more revenue.
The art of the great editor has always been to stimulate curiosity and this idea does exactly that. It’s like a simple general knowledge quiz and it gets you to want to see how fake fake news can be.