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PorCausa is a new species of digital media for Spain: nonprofit journalism. Its founder and director, Gumersindo Lafuente , is a respected veteran of some of Spain's most important media -- El País, El Mundo, and the late lamented digital pioneer Soitu.es ). Given the limited resources available, he runs the operation much in the style of a movie director by signing some of the 21 affiliated professionals on a per-project basis.  Lafuente emulates Propublica of the U.S. (Photo: James Breiner) "When we secure financing, we put together a team for the project. When we finish, we dissolve the team," he said in an interview. Poverty and inequality PorCausa is an experiment in several senses. It is not a news medium but a foundation that was launched in 2013. It is a novelty in Spain in that it is financed completely by private donations. It is an experiment in subject matter . Its specialty is two topics, inequality and poverty, especially childhood poverty. The founders...

Julio Alonso, director general WeblogsSL (James Breiner photo) BURGOS, Spain -- In 2004, management consultant Julio Alonso got the itch to write about gadgets and technology. He started a blog and a year later that evolved into the website Xataka . Since then he and his partners have built WeblogsSL , a community of 36 websites in Spanish with more than 13 million unique visitors a month. The sites focus on autos, lifestyle, business, leisure, and technology. They have survived the global financial crisis, which hit particularly hard in Spain. And they have expanded their websites to Mexico and recently Colombia . (Versión del blog en español) However, Alonso, 45, struggles with what to do about the latest tsunami of change. The audience has flooded to mobile devices and advertisers are going with them. He has more than a decade of experience in the business of digital media, and an international perspective, having studied in Holland and worked in Brazil and Italy, among other place...

According to eMarketer , half the digital ad spending this year will be on mobile , a total of $29 billion. Advertisers want to know if their messages are reaching the right target groups of people at the right time so that ad dollars are not wasted . Some people are better targets than others for messages about, say, infant car seats, or trips to Mexico, or eye makeup, or Hummers. It is not a simple matter to measure Internet traffic, whether on the web or on mobile apps. But metrics matter to advertisers, who use them to determine the amount they are willing to pay for having their messages in a digital publication. (Versión de este post en español) Advertisers want to know not only the size of the audience, but its characteristics -- income, location, interests, spending habits, hobbies , and more. But for technical reasons, it is difficult to track a single user across all the devices they may use at home, at work or on the go -- smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop. Cookies,...

Editor's note: This post was updated 3 June with an eighth best practice. For the last seven years I have been interviewing and profiling successful entrepreneurial journalists in various countries of various  socieconomic classes. I've talked to publishers and editors with staffs of as many as a hundred as well as some one-man/one-woman bands. The ones that survive and thrive after several years share some common practices: 1. They develop multiple sources of revenue. They embrace sponsorships rather than advertising, memberships rather than subscription paywalls. They recognize that they can't make money on standard cost-per-thousand or cost-per-click advertising rates. They seek sponsors who embrace their mission and core values. They monetize their audience by creating clubs or groups of members who support their journalism mission. They can actually charge much more than a subscriber would ever pay. Among other revenue sources: direct sale of products such as books, mu...