[3] He then worked as a data-journalist and information designer at El Mundo, Spain's second largest printed daily newspaper, where he experimented with emerging tools like Macromedia Flash to make multimedia infographics.

[3][4] He became the director of the paper's online component, supervising five people, at a time when very few global newspapers were doing similar graphical work.

[3] Notable multimedia articles included the paper's coverage of the September 11 attacks in the US in 2001, and the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

[3] In 2005, Cairo was hired by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to teach Flash, 3D animation, and interactive graphics.

[3] He returned to the publishing world in 2007, now based in São Paulo, Brazil, where he worked on graphics for the magazine Época.