Imagine that you launch your newspaper from scratch
October 8, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
Two editors from two generations were asked the same question: 79-years-old Francois Regis Hutin, CEO of Ouest-France, a regional daily newspaper in France, and Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at the UK nation-wide daily The Guardian, who is almost 50 years younger.
Interviews with Messieurs Hutin and Anderson were presented in Vienna last week at the INMA Outlook 2009: European conference during a session titled “Newsmedia that is relevant to the society”.
The session was hosted by Grzegorz Piechota and Jerzy Wojcik, two editors of Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza and this forum4editors.com.
The answers they got from CEO of Ouest-France and Blogs Editor for the Guardian turned to be pretty similar:
- newspaper’s goal is to connect people,
- they should focus on community,
- journalism is a service for that community,
- and editor serves as the moderator.
“Messieurs Hutin and Anderson use different languages to name the same ideas. We cannot see any important difference between the concept of Ouest-France and the modern, high-tech… hip-hop… news websites mentioned by Kevin. Ladies and gentlemen, as you see: future of newspapers is a very old concept,” commented Piechota and Wojcik.
Watch an interview with Francois R. Hutin
(Video in French with English subtitles. Kindly brought to you by Olivier Bonsart of Ouest-France and INMA.)
forum4editors: Fundamentally, what is a reason to publish Ouest-France? Why there is the newspaper?
Francois Regis Hutin: This is a great question. One can make a newspaper for money. It is not prohibited. But one can also make a newspaper to inform and to connect people. To be a link in the society.
On the first page of your newspaper, one can see words: Justice et Liberte. What do they mean?
These words are inscribed into the newspaper’s nameplate and fill newspaper’s blood. Since the Liberation, justice and liberty were – for us – inseparable values. We cannot imagine justice and equality without liberty. Those who wanted justice without liberty… We know how it ends. With goulags. Everywhere on the planet.
So we want justice and equality within the liberty. In the same way, one cannot imagine liberty without justice. Everybody knows the excess it can lead to. It can lead to exploitation of people, to contempt. Liberty without justice – that’s for sure inequality and mitigation of people. That’s why we want liberty and justice.
You ask: why have not we inscribed ”brotherhood”. We think that when one speaks about justice and liberty, there is brotherhood already. The brotherhood unites us.
Why should a journalist write for Ouest-France? At the same time, why should a reader read him?
I think that a journalist, worth of its profession’s name, who would write for Ouest-France, would like to serve. To help people. The newspaper has no goal in itself.
The newspaper is a tool to help others. And I think that in general a journalist who writes for a newspaper, especially for Ouest-France, is aware of the service he is asked to provide. This service is really to help a person to join the community, but also to help the community to understand needs of people that compose it. It all goes together. In this process, the newspaper is the mediator.
Imagine that Ouest-France does not exist. Would you risk your and your family’s money? Would you manage to convince them that it should be launched?
It’s just impossible to imagine that Ouest-France does not exist. Impossible! And even if it disappears, the empty space would be so huge, that it wouldn’t stay empty for a long time. It would be filled very quickly. So, if Ouest-France hadn’t exist, we would come to fill the empty space and we would make Ouest-France.
If you had to start from scratch, what would the newspaper look like? Would it be any different from the today’s Ouest-France?
Maybe different in its form, format, rythm and internal organisation. But certainly not different in its ideals. Otherwise, it would not be worth to make the effort.
Watch an interview with Kevin Anderson
(Video in English. Only web addresses mentioned are subtitled. Video shot on Skype by Kevin Anderson.)
forum4editors: Imagine that The Guardian does not exist. If you had to launch it from scratch, what would it be? A website?
Kevin Anderson: I’ll start with two models that I have seen in the United States and then I’ll go to Singapore.
So two of the models I think are very exciting are BlufftonToday.com and the other one is MyMissourian.com. And these are very small sites and very geographic specific areas. Bluffton is a small community, retired community in South Carolina. MyMissourian is done in Columbian Missouri and it is a part of a professional journalism program at the University of Columbia.
What both of these sites share is that they are actually multi-platform and what I mean by that is they still have a print component, but instead of the newspaper being the primary focus it is in fact a web-to-print product. So the content is produced for the site and for the newspaper, but the primary focus in absolutely on the web. And furthermore it is a hybrid product meaning that there is a mix of a community-generated content and a staff-created content which I think is incredibly important.
If you have something significantly different to offer them then that is your unique selling proposition and unfortunately I think there is a certain lack of awareness or possibly even honesty that news is not necessarily an unique selling proposition anymore. And it is not providing the type of experience that people really crave. So I think that news is important, it is important part of the strategy and I would be really careful to say that a new news site would not have news, but what I am saying is that it is just a part of a compelling offer these days. I think, really, especially for geographically focused sites, community is what is going to be a differentiating factor.
And when I say community, I want also to draw a strong distinction. If you look at one of these community sites… Clyde Bentley who started MyMissourian… Let me just give you an example… as a professional journalist and Clyde has an amazing history as a professional journalist before he became an academic… he’s got a new sense and they assumed… this was not during this elections, but actually in the mid-term elections two years ago… they assumed that everybody was going to talk about politics. No. They had talked about pets, religion and the weather. That’s what their community was obsessed about. And their staff did planning about politics, elections and things like that. But you have this complementary fit between the agenda and things that professional journalists were most interested in and things that the community was most interested in. And that is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it is something that journalists have to get comfortable for.
The other project I want to talk about is called www.stomp.com.sg. Singapore’s Straits Times — online, mobile and print. It is absolutely exciting project. When I say mobile and online — they take submissions from people all over Singapore via SMS, MMS, e-mail, and most of these submissions are via e-mail. Videos — they’ve got their own staff. Blogs — they talk about things like food and entertainment and some light cultural issues. It’s been a huge success, absolutely it is a world-winning site. It has attracted the demographic that was not reading a paper. Again, they are exposed to Straits Times’ journalism, but the focus is much more on the community. It is a great site, something really worth to look at.
And in all of these projects community is the center of proposition, there is a strong focus on community building and building that critical mass, and there is also a multi-platform strategy. It is not that print is dead. It is not that the new media is now going to be able to bring in all the revenue to replace some declining revenues on the print side. It is intelligent, focused, multi-platform strategy that plays to the strengths both in content and also economically in each platform.
If you want to think about how to develop a news site from scratch, there are actually some good templates to base it on.
Learn more about Mr. Hutin and Ouest-France
Ouest-France, a regional newspaper in Western France, is the best selling daily in this country. Their circulation is nearly 800 thousand copies. It is twice as much as the nation-wide Le Monde is selling.
The paper has been launched in 1899 as L’Ouest-Eclair by Mr. Hutin’s grandfather — Emmanuel Desgrees du Lou — and it quickly became one of the main French dailies.
The grandfather died in the 30s, but during the World War II his son and Mr. Hutin’s father refused to collaborate with Nazis and left the company.
Mr. Hutin’s father — Paul Desgrees Hutin — returned to France in 1944 together with general de Gaulle and relaunched the paper as Ouest-France.
The paper has been always ahead of its times. It has developed citizen journalism long before the Internet made this concept famous. They invited readers to contribute with stories about their communities, villages and towns. Until today Ouest-France has over twenty six hundred citizen correspondents who help the editorial staff of five hundreds to prepare its daily 40 local editions.
When Grzegorz Piechota and Jerzy Wojcik met Mr. Hutin some two years ago, he told them an amazing story. Every new employee at Ouest-France — whether journalist or not — had to start his job with a meeting with Mr. Hutin. The CEO of this huge company was ready to devote several hours to explain what this newspaper really is for.
More about Mr. Anderson and his journey to discover the new world
Armed with a laptop and a mobile phone with built-in GPS and a photo camera, Kevin Anderson, is travelling across the United States to understand presidential elections and start a debate.
Kevin is driving 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) to learn what is guiding American voters’ decisions, to explain their concerns and hopes to the Guardian’s readers and the rest of the world while also bringing voices from around the world to Americans.
His long journey proves that online journalism is not about sitting at the office and googling for facts.
Kevin is going to do an old-fashioned reporting – meeting real people and talking to them – but he will use all the gadgets of the new media - Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, Twibble,TwitPic, YouTube, Fire Eagle and others.
You can follow his trip at the Guardian’s US election trip website.
What is also unique – he thinks as much about a story he wants to report, as about the community of readers he wants to engage with this story.
“I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that’s possible with some very inexpensive technology. It all starts with the assumption that this is journalism, that bringing together people from around the world to discuss current events is a powerful new journalistic tool,” he explained in a recent interview with forum4editors.com.
It will not be Kevin’s first journey like this – he made similar trips for the BBC, UK public broadcaster, in 2000 and 2004. He has been an online journalist since 1996 and worked in the US and UK. He writes a blog called “Strange attractor” with his wife Suw.
Tagged: Case studies, community, INMA, internet, Outlook 2009, user-generated-content
Print This Post
(No Ratings Yet)
[...] is no denying that it is a head start if you are looking to create something new. Beyond the actual experience I have acquired from it, the MSM brand is the first step toward [...]