Launching a new and different brand may help publishers – LePost.fr case

Benoît Raphaël, the Editor in Chief, Le Post.fr (Le Monde Interactif) spoke during the INMA/OPA Outlook 2010 conference in Liverpool today. The attendees had seven minutes to learn more about Le Post, the new brand of Le Monde featuring user-generated content, videos, blogs, and more.
The idea behind LePost.fr was to create an experimental media, and find new territories. It was important to put the newsroom in the heart of where the life is. There are 10 journalists actually producing news. They are at the same time community organizers. Each journalist takes care of 10-30 amateur journalists – he teaches and leads them.

LePost also collected bloggers to the project, Benoît Raphaël believes they bring top quality content but need journalist drive.

The statistics of LePost.fr are phenomenal: 500 posts, 7000 comments per day. Everything thanks to a huge group of participants who are not paid, but are coached by professional journalists.

The speaker also believes that people no longer prefer vertical news, and not necessarily need to have their news produced and brought by journalists. They prefer having them coproduced, with a fresh point of view.

Professionals help amateurs add value to the content. They create social media, so distribution of content is much easier – friends send it to other friends.

Value of the piece comes from what you do with the news. On January 2008 a video document about people wounded and killed in the Gaza bombing was published. The video was published on national tv, but the film appeared to be a hoax, found out by the amateur journalist from LePost.fr. This is the reason why citizen journalism should not be ignored.

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