LePost.fr: How amateurs produce valuable journalism
October 7, 2009 by marek.miller
Two weeks before the start of the INMA / OPA Outlook 2010 conference, Forum4Editors is here with the series of exlusive interviews. The speakers who will be presenting their ideas during the conference agreed to answer few questions about what they do best, and what, in their opinion, is the best strategy to develop the best relation with their readers.
First in the series is Benoît Raphaël, the Editor in Chief of LePost.fr, a subsidiary of “Le Monde”. He will be telling us about this new brand of Le Monde featuring user-generated content, videos, blogs, and more.
forum4editors: LePost.fr is a subbrand of Le Monde. What differs this project from other based on civil journalism? What is Le Post all about?
At Le Post, a journalist is, at the same time, a news producer, an aggregator and a community organizer. Because of the way he approaches information, he is first a network journalist. He checks first what has been said and published in other media. He aggregates the best content from different sources, including blogs, Twitter, You Tube, etc. and traditional medias. Then, on some of them, he brings complementary information, new elements, adds value and fact checks. Even the news published by other journalists.
The information is a permanent conversation that is built step by step by the community of am and the journalists.
Each journalist is also in charge of a small group of active amateurs. He is their coach and teachs them the basics of the journalist job, tries to encourage them and even meets them in person. He understands that information is a conversation. He does not produce an article but more a process.
How popular is Le Post in France?
All the content is filtered, a posteriori, by a team of moderators. We want to make sure that there is no illegal content, that am follow our guidelines and that they are not propagating rumors. Then, the newsroom also looks at it. Each journalist is specialized and manages a small community of am that he trusts. So each interesting content that we receive is checked according to our techniques of “fast fact checking” that we have developed.
We publish 500 am articles a day versus 40 from pro. But, it does not mean anything because in fact the newsroom really takes advantage of the community, reacts to what they are sending, checks and updates information. The majority of the articles that appear on the HP (70 a day) are a mix of pro and am. In fact, our goal is to co-produce the content, not to have on one side the pro and on the other side the am.
And sometimes, they are helping us on fact checking. It is because of an amateur that we have been able to figure out that a video about Gaza was a fraud. France 2 (the French public television chanel) published the video without fact checking it.
Because we needed to be free to experiment. And you can’t really experiment when you have a strong brand. You can’t risk to degrade it by making errors, testing new ways to produce news…
And, we’re more “popular” than Le Monde, with more politics, crimes and accidents, web/buzz subjects, montages and collages with news content, and testimonies… not exactly the type of news what LeMonde’s readers are used to read.
Thank you very much.
Tagged: business model, content, INMA, Liverpool, newspaper, Outlook 2010, quality journalism
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