Integration is a neverending process

Agora’s (Poland) Sport.pl Group is one of the leaders of the Polish Internet ‘Sports’ category. After merging its various sports newsrooms into one, Sport.pl attracts 3.5 million users monthly. Marcin Gadzinski, the editor-in-chief of Sport.pl, explained to us the core of this success.

Sport.pl is available on the Internet since 2007 and is co-developed by the team of Gazeta.pl portal as well as the journalists, who for years have been arranging the sports supplement of ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ as well as commenting on sports events in ‘Gazeta’, online, on the radio and on TV. Sport.pl features news on most sports disciplines, popular blogs, readers’ forums, as well as numerous top-class video coverages – both self-produced and provided by partners, e.g. Ekstraklasa.

In June 2010, Sport.pl websites were visited by more than 3.5 million users, each spending an average of half an hour on the Group’s websites (according to Megapanel/PBI Gemius). Marcin Gadzinski, the editor-in-chief of Sport.pl will present the successful case of Poland’s AGORA sport websites during this year’s INMA/OPA conference in Krakow. Today, he answers few of our questions just before his interesting presentation in Krakow.

Forum4Editors: How does the work in the integrated sports newsroom look like. Does each of the journalists have same skills or are they specializing in different tasks and topics (audio, video, live coverage)?

Marcin Gadzinski: Our team is divided in three parts – people working for online only, crossmedia group – journalists writing both for online and print, and a few editors focusing almost only on print.
We managed to find few journalists/reporters in our traditional editorial team who managed to use multimedia while covering a sports event – they write a coverage for the newspaper, create quick news for the web, blog, tweet, take pictures and make videos for the web. Their work is the greatest success of our integration process.

Agora brought different sports editorial teams together and integrated them under one brand: Sport.pl. What effects did it bring?

Marcin Gadzinski: There is less repeating and coverages of the same sport events on different platforms. The content is more complex for our readers now.
It is also easier now to promote and advertise our sport media platforms, when they are under one strong brand. What’s more, we managed to gain higher profits thanks to our integrated crossmedia advertising offers.

Was the process of integration itself very complicated? Did the structure of employment change during or due to that process?

Marcin Gadzinski: Integration in media is not a process that has a specific ending date. Even when the structure of the department is set, the budgets are integrated and so on, the real integration proceeds (or suffers a loss) during the everyday work of the editorial team. Definitely, most valuable are those journalists who know how to work for different media platforms, and are very intuitive about this.

One of the most popular sport sites in Poland is your light and humorous zCzuba.pl website (live coverages of sport events with funny, personal commentaries). How many people are behind this project? How many smaller sport websites do you own and what are your plans for the future?

Marcin Gadzinski: ZCzuba.pl is one of the greatest success of Agora (our owner/publisher) within the online projects. It is created by just a few workers and co-workers, and to greater extent, by thousands of users who became fans of zCzuba.pl.
Except for zCzuba.pl, in our group of sport online services we also have:

• Ciacha.net – a website for women who enjoy the pictures of handsome sportsmen;
• Ekstraklasa.tv – a website with exclusive videos from the Polish ekstraklasa soccer league;
• Sport websites of our special editorial action, promoting healthy and recreational lifestyle – polskabiega.pl (Poland runs) and polskanarowery.pl (Poland on bikes).

We also plan to start a recreational website about fitness.

Thank you very much, and see you in Kraków!.

Agora will support innovative internet entrepreneurs

12,5 thousand Euro in cash plus advertising campaign worth 25 thousand Euro – this is the main prize in Startup Fest – a competition for independent internet entrepreneurs organized by Agora.

The publisher of the largest Polish daily “Gazeta Wyborcza” will make an overview of the most interesting Polish startups dealing with the internet and new technologies. The overview will be organized by Gazeta.pl (internet branch of Agora) in a form of a two-day festival on 11-12th October in Agora’s headquarters in Warsaw.

The entries are already incoming (the deadline is September 30th), and the interest in this event is very strong. Not all of the entries will get to the final, only a few projects will be chosen for the final round.

The competition is open to anyone from Poland that has an idea how to make money from the web. Those cannot be solo projects – only teams of 2-4 persons can aplly for the competition.

The prize for the most interesting project is funded by Agora: 12,5 thousand Euro plus an advertising campaign worth 25 thousand Euro. The publisher will not however take charge of any shares of the projects participating in the competition.

As Pawel Wujec says (director of Gazeta.pl and marketing director of Agora’s internet branch), it is much worth to support the new initiatives on the market. Either through direct capital investment or by creating the right environment for creative entrepreneurs to present their ideas to the wide target and consult them with specialists.

Agora’s Startup Fest is not the first of its kind in Poland. There are two others popular events like that in Poland. One is Startup School, organized by the founding father of one of the most popular social networks in Poland – fotka.pl. Startup School’s rules are similar except for one difference – the organizer takes control of 50% shares in the projects.

Similar project is organized in the northern part of Poland, with 200 thousand Euro prize for the most interesting project. There are as well many investing fund on the market in search for interesting startups.

Does strong competition mean that the most interesting projects will not be entered in Agora’s competition? Agora has no need to worry, not all of the startups are interested in giving over the control of their idea to the fund or other player. Many develop their ideas with their own money. 12,5 thousand Euro plus advertising campaign could be a great chance for them to grow without losing control of their companies.

Photography in the age of tablets

Two editors went to Arles in France not only to watch pictures at the famous photography festival, but also to talk with the world’s best photographers about their pictures.

Les Rencontres (“Encounters”) is one of the most important photo festivals in the world. It’s organized in Arles in the south of France for 41 years. This year’s edition is made of 60 exhibitions that provide – as the Financial Times’ critic noted — interest for almost every photographic allegiance.

Kinga Kenig and Piotr Wojcik, two photo editors of Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, went to Arles and shot eight very interesting video interviews with the ehxbitions’ curators and photographers.

Time magazine and iPad

Kira Pollack, photo editors of Time, talks about her experiences with photo essays on the iPad app for the magazine.

“You [have to] look [at iPad] as a new, unique product rather than >>this is our content going on the iPad<<. That’s not going to work. I think it’s really how to make it dynamic, how to make it exciting and really different than the web and different than the print,” says Kira.

Watch an interview (it’s in English with Polish subtitles):

Portraits of consumption

Martin Parr, a documentary photographer famous for his critical look at modern society, shared some secrets of his latest project: “The world is consuming despite the recession… I am going to China this summer to photograph people and beaches there — I have never done that — [and to photograph] the aspirations of people having the fridges, the cars.”

All the faces of Mick Jagger

Francois Hebel, curator of an exhibition of portraits of the Rolling Stones star, explains what’s really difficult in taking pictures of Jagger, a rare celebrity that has such a long relationship with the best photographers in the world.

You can watch all interviews on Gazeta Wyborcza’s photo site called Duzy Kadr (Big Frame).

How were these fotocasts made?

We talk with Kinga Kenig, a photo editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, and a devoted photography blogger.

forum4editors: Kinga, tell me about your visit to Arles. Why did you do these fotocasts?

Kinga Kenig: I’ve been doing interviews with photographers for a few months. I was getting very good feedback not only from people interested in photography. It turns out that people prefer to watch a photographer talking rather than read an interview.

Did you plan to shoot these interviews from start?

Yes, Piotr and I went to Arles with an intention to do short video interviews with photographers and curators during the opening fortnight in July. We spent there 5 days. It was the first time that we were doing such an assignment so we also wanted to check if it would be possible to do interviews, edit them, translate them and publish quickly afterwards. Unfortunately, this turned out to be too ambitious. I think we could have made it if we’d been a team of three.

So what exactly were you doing to achieve this?

During the first 2 days we tried to see all the exhibitions and decide who would be most interesting to interview. There are 60 exhibitions that are spread all around the town. Then we tried to arrange interviews. We also attended symposiums and book signings and night screenings. Altogether, we managed to do nine interviews.

Which interview was the most interesting, intriguing to you?

I really loved the interview with Christian Caujolle who curated the exhibition of a photography collection of Marin Karmitz, a French movie producer. It was one of the best exhibitions of the festival. It was beautifully presented in a church. It was very cinematic and mysterious. We wanted to keep this aesthetics in our video.

Tell me all the bloody details how these fotocasts are really made?

When we were working in Arles, Piotr was responsible for filming and photographing and I was arranging interviews and asking questions. We used two cameras: a camcorder and a camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Most of the video footage that was used comes from Canon. It turned out to be much more beautiful than the one from the camcorder, which I consider too flat.
After we came back I was responsible for editing. It took me around a week to have all videos put together, but I was editing them after work and in my free time, between my regular duties.
We also had to do subtitles and it took a few days. I worked on Final Cut Pro. It is the most popular professional film editing software.

Readers of Gazeta Wyborcza find such photo casts much more often than before. What has changed?

Multimedia work has been present on Gazeta’s website for quite some time, but it is only recently that we’ve had multimedia stories produced by picture editors cooperating with photographers.
Last year Piotr Wójcik, director of photography in Gazeta introduced big changes in picture department. It affected the work of picture editors. He shifted our duties from picture editing, which is now done mostly by editors themselves, to multimedia. We started learning how to use Final Cut Pro and very quickly produced our first multimedia projects. Altogether Gazeta’s website publishes around three such multimedia stories every month.

Which one is your favourite?

The one about the Central Railway Station in Warsaw.

Time magazine, iPad and photo essays

“We’re seeing ourselves more as multimedia editors than photo editors, actually. The role of a photo editor is changing”, says Kira Pollack, photo editor of the Time magazine.

This video interview was shot at the photo festival Les Rencontres d’Arles by two Gazeta Wyborcza’s photo editors Kinga Kenig and Piotr Wojcik (it’s in English with Polish subtitles).

More interviews by Kinga Kenig and Piotr Wojcik with the world’s best photoreporters can be found on Gazeta Wyborcza’s photo site Duzy Kadr (Big Frame).

How to monetize online niches, local sites and blogs

Poland’s Agora partners with two European entrepreneurs to take the middle man out of buying advertising, selling simple ads directly through web sites. Is AdTaily.com the future of online advertising?

In August issue of the INMA Ideas magazine Marcin Grodzicki, AdTaily’s business developer based in London, UK, tells an intriguing story behind one of the top 25 European creative companies.

Back in 2008, two young European entrepreneurs had had enough of the way the advertising market worked. Instead of sophisticated targeting technologies and old-school, work-intensive manual placements, they came up with a super simple model of buying ads directly on web sites — through a widget that served both as the point of sale and an ad server. To simplify the buying process the ads were only display, only in one size, and only sold on a per-day basis.

The early concept was recognized at the Seedcamp Week, an Internet startup competition in London, and a couple of months later it was backed by Agora, Poland’s media group best known for its Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper and an online portal Gazeta.pl.

Agora was looking for an easy-to-use advertising solution for its over 90 Internet vertical sites including 20+ local portals and a blogging platform hosting over 184,000 individual blogs.

AdTaily matched Agora’s needs as:

• Blogs have well targeted communities of readers, but often struggle to make money. The reason is that most of them don’t attract visitors in big numbers. AdTaily argues it’s not the number of readers that really counts, but quality of the readers – this is very attractive to advertisers, but not well supported by other monetization solutions.
• Medium sized vertical sites: in such a case the inventory is usually substantial, but still no direct sales team is present. By installing multiple widgets in different sections AdTaily could optimally monetize the content.
• Niche and local sections of big portals or sites: AdTaily offered help to monetize new projects that were not yet attractive to large advertisers and big online advertising networks.

How does AdTaily work? Have a look at this video:

In summer 2009, AdTaily launched the beta version of the service, which immediately generated a wave of enthusiasm. The growth of the platform was faster than anyone expected — including the local traditional advertising networks. AdTaily was one of the top 10 advertising networks in Poland in 2009, within a market that had been pretty much stable for the past couple years.

At the beginning of 2010, AdTaily released a new version of its product, catering to a global audience. New features were introduced: advertisers could design their banners without leaving the publisher’s web site and publishers could easily inject the ads in their social streams on Facebook or Twitter, for example. The company also opened an office in London, to be closer to the largest European advertising market.

Marcin Grodzicki writes in the INMA Ideas magazine:

“It is still too early to judge the impact AdTaily will have on more mature and sophisticated advertising markets like United Kingdom or United States. But as the concept has already proven, less can really be more. And it seems like 15,000 publishers generating around one billion monthly impressions are eager to agree, as CNBC Business magazine just named AdTaily one of the top 25 European creative companies.”

Here’s a short video interview with Mr. Grodzicki shot at the Minibar London, a monthly meeting of the online community there:

Marcin Grodzicki at MiniBar from MiniBar on Vimeo.

Do you want to learn more? Jakub Krzych, co-founder of AdTaily, will present an update of its case at the INMA/OPA Europe Newsmedia Conference in Kraków (September 29-October 1, 2010).

Newspapers can help schools to enter the digital age

Today’s pupils are the first generation that does not remember the world before the Internet revolution. But our schools got stuck in the “chalk age”. What newspapers can do about it?

This May twenty five reporters of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s best read quality daily, got back to their schools — primary and secondary, public and private all over the country — to check how did they embrace new technologies.
Reporters had to spend there a week going to classes, doing homeworks, talking to pupils, teachers and parents. Some of them finished their education there 30 years ago. Imagine the challenge!
Readers could follow reporters’ expedition on their blog, give them tips, share experiences.
Sadly, they found that Polish schools are “museums of chalk”, as one of teachers wrote in a letter to editors.
Grzegorz Lorek, a biology teacher from a city of Leszno, claimed: “Schools pretend the Internet does not exist. Some teachers don’t have even e-mail addresses. I am also a ‘digital immigrant’ as I grew up in the world before the Internet revolution. And my pupils are ‘digital natives’. They live in a sort of an avatar. When they go to school, they get out of their avatar for a while and what do they find? Me — a teacher at the chalk board. I work in the museum of “the chalk reality”. How can I teach them to live in the new brave world?”
We believed Mr. Lorek’s testimony was so important that we quoted his letter on the front page of Gazeta when we started our week-long series called “School 2.0″. The headline read: “The end of the chalk age”.
From May 17 to 22 we published 25 articles about it in the nation-wide edition and 205 articles in 21 local editions of Gazeta. All stories, photos and videos were posted in a new section on the newspaper site.

Findings of Gazeta’s reporters embedded into schools

Over 91 per cent of pupils in Poland have a computer at home and most of them have an Internet access. But some teachers still ask kids to write — for example — a definition of a metaphor as their homework and then surprisingly get the same answer copied from Wikipedia!
Gazeta’s journalists surveyed 2,081 pupils and learned that 71 per cent used the Internet when doing their homeworks. 45 per cent admitted their homeworks are fully based on information found online!
Nobody has taught them how to use this information critically, how to evaluate and compare sources. Where were the teachers?
When reporters talked to them, they so often seemed to be helpless or overwhelmed by the speed and variety of changes in the society.
One history teacher complained: “I ask pupils what’s the source of knowledge today and the answer they give is: ‘You log in to Wikipedia and copy”. I ask who’s been at a library recently? I hear: ‘Me, I logged in to www.library.pl’.”
But is it any wrong?
Another teacher — the Polish literature specialist — cried: “Six-graders don’t remember an alphabet as they use computer dictionary tools to write. They speak abbreviations, their sentences get poorer and poorer. The language of text-messaging has entered the everyday conversation.”
She and the others didn’t know how to include new technologies and Internet tools into their practice. They didn’t know any good examples of good practices. They didn’t know if there were any teaching materials available, where to find them and how to use them.
During our research the social impact of new technologies seemed often to be out of radar of school authorities with one exception. Schools reacted quickly when noticed about pathologies like privacy breaches on the Polish Facebook, any pictures or videos showing misbehaviors etc. The problem was they did nothing to prevent them. There were no lessons on Internet safety, privacy, or copy rights! Only 28 per cent of pupils told us their teachers had given any lesson about the guidelines to use the Internet.
But there is hope. We found out that teachers — however afraid — wanted to change their practice, learn more and share with pupils.
It is a paradox — almost all Polish schools have computers but they are rarely used during lessons other than computer science. It’s one of the reasons why teachers usually tell pupils what the rainforest looks like instead of showing it to them or sharing a link to YouTube.
Another reason is that nobody really cares if teachers innovate at work. “Despite all the governmental programs and official statements being innovative does not help teachers in their careers”, claimed our leading writer on education Aleksandra Pezda. “Their main goal is to prepare kids to national exams. And these exams are still very traditional. For example teachers fight with kids using computers to prepare homeworks claiming they would have to write exams by hand! Is this really the main problem of our age?!”
All these revelations made us think how to bring a change together with teachers, parents and pupils themselves.

From School 1.0 to School 2.0

We asked numerous independent experts, non governmental organizations and companies to help us. We want to prepare over this summer and introduce this fall new teaching materials to Polish schools, train their teachers and provide them an online platform to share experiences and good practices.
It’s going to be the largest and the most expensive social campaign this year just after our “Humane healthcare” activity. We’re now securing sponsors and merit partners.
We count on participation of at least 7,000 schools that have engaged into our earlier educational campaigns called School with Class. We run them for many years together with the Center of Civic Education, a non-governmental organization.
We are going to start in September by announcing a new Codex of School 2.0, a list of issues and ideas how to include new technologies in education.

• When and how to use computers at schools and homes to help pupils succeed in education and their adult lives?
• How to use Internet tools creatively, safely and responsibly?
• How can new technologies help students to work together on their projects?
• How to improve communication between teachers, pupils and parents?
• How should they adjust lesson plans, homework tasks, exams?

The Codex will not serve as a final list of orders for schools. Its aim is rather to start internal debates at schools and then to inspire them to adopt the results of these debates.
Schools will get a set of new teaching materials for free and will be able to apply for online training programs for their teachers. The most active ones will get additional support and become Labs 2.0.
All teachers will be free to start their own projects — plan and run innovative Lessons 2.0 or other activities — and to share their experiences with others on the Internet platform. We’re going to name Teachers 2.0 — the most creative and innovative — over the school year.
The best case studies will be presented at the national conference for teachers we want to organize next June. We will call this event Festival of Schools 2.0. It will include professional discussions and presentations to young people.
Additionally, the best Polish experts will work on sample exam questions to help the authorities in opening Polish exam system to innovations. We will invite schools to participate in the trail exams. We’ve got some experiences in such trials — we organize them every year in association with Operon, a leading publisher of schoolbooks. Over 300,000 students took our trial exams in 2009.
Last but not least we will publish a guide for teachers and parents about all the Internet tools that kids have been using already and that could be applied in education also — like wikis, blogs, Twitter-like feeds, Facebook-like networks, photo and video sharing sites etc.

Why it is a newspaper that may help

We believe in building bridges across generations. We don’t build ghettos for young readers and try to engage them into the regular newspaper and our campaigns instead. It works — we are happy with one of the youngest readerships across Polish newspapers: 53 per cent of Gazeta Wyborcza’s readers are younger than 40 and almost every fifth

young Pole aged 15-29 reads Gazeta at least once a week. In 2008 the World Association of Newspapers awarded us with the title of the World Young Reader Newspaper of the Year.
Education is on our radar for many, many years. We were supporting reforms of the system in 90s and 2000s. Our campaign called “Schools with Class” is widely recognized among educators. Many teachers are our readers. As we know and trust each other, there is just a small step to do something together again.
We are not afraid of the Internet world. We have embraced it many, many years ago and today our online portal Gazeta.pl is the fourth largest website here after Google, a Polish clone of Facebook and a TV-owned portal. It attracts 11,8 mln users in a month. It’s 66% of all 17,8 mln Polish Internet users (Poland has 38 mln inhabitants in total.)
And finally, here at Gazeta we believe that our mission is broader than just delivering honest news. We initiate and support nationwide social campaigns like “Kids get home” , “Poland runs”, “Dad’s return”, “Transparent Poland”, “Let’s save Rospuda”, “Humane birth”, “Humane healthcare”, “Loose weight with us”. Readers know our campaigns bring the real change and so they are happy to get involved.

If you want to learn more about this and other social campaigns of Gazeta Wyborcza, meet me from September 29 to October 1, 2010, in Kraków at the INMA/OPA Europe Newsmedia Conference. I am one of the organizers as the Vice-President of INMA in Europe — Grzegorz Piechota

What drives Daily Telegraph, El Pais, Le Monde and New York Times to Krakow?

80+ delegates from 35 different European newsmedia companies have already registered to the INMA/OPA Europe Conference in Krakow, Poland (Sept. 29-Oct. 1, 2010).

Among those who took advantage of the first deadline for early bird rates and registered to the conference are editors and managers of the leading European newsmedia such as the Daily Telegraph, Corriere della Serra, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Helsingin Sanomat, Irish Times, Le Monde, Mecom, New York Times, Ouest-France, Schibsted, or Styria.

In total organisers of the Krakow event expect more than 200 newsmedia executives from all over Europe to gather this year at the main annual conference of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association and the Online Publishers Association in Europe.

The programme of the conference includes topical seminars on local newsmedia, research, sports journalism and marketing, and plenary sessions on innovations in news content, advertising, promotion as well as new mobile devices like tablets. (Check the latest version of the programme at the conference site.)

Confirmed speakers include David Montgomery, CEO of Mecom Group (UK), Shailesh Gupta of Dainik Jagran (India), Bernard Asselin of the Montreal Gazette (Canada), Espen Hansen of Schibsted’s VG (Norway), Massimo Russo of Gruppo l’Espresso (Italy), Chris Pennock of Johnston Press (UK) and Florian Nehm of Axel Springer (Germany).

Krakow, the host city of the conference, is itself a reason to come. Recognised throughout the world as an authentic and charming historical city, it is one of Europe’s official cultural capitals. It has a great location between the West and the East, and travel has become easy with affordable direct flights. (Learn more at this site.)

Check who’s already registered to the event (the list updated as of July 25th):

• Belden Associates (USA)
• ComQuotidiens (F)
• Corelio (B)
• De Gelderlander (NL)
• De Persgroep Publishing (B)
• DNA (F)
• Edytor (PL)
• Ekstra Bladet (DK)
• Gijbels Groep (B)
• Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso (I)
• Helsingin Sanomat (FI)
• Il Sole 24 Ore (I)
• The Irish Times (IE)
• Kurrier (A)
• Le Monde Interactif (F)
• Le Temps (F)
• MatchWork (UK)
• Mecom (UK)
• Media Convergence (NL)
• Media Regionalne (PL)
• Mediasite (N)
• New York Times Syndicate (US)
• Ouest-France (F)
• PBI (PL)
• Prisacom (E)
• RCS Digital (I)
• RCS Media Group (I)
• Schibsted (N)
• Styria Media (A)
• Spiegel QC (D)
• Telegraph Media Group (UK)
• Verlag Dierichs (D)
• WDM Belgium (B)
• Xtreme Nordic (N)

Join them by registering here. The next early bird deadline is September 15.

Newspaper challenged by an amateur blogger

Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza believes it helps to build an open society by providing platforms for debates and inspiring readers concerned with a common good. Sometimes readers take an opportunity and start competing with their own newspaper.

That morning Wroclaw, the fourth largest city in Poland, became a stronghold. Defenders were not soldiers, nor fire-fighters. They were people like us armed with their mobile phones.

• Michal: “Kozanow district is fighting. 9 lorries with soldiers, 4 diggers, hundreds of people try to make the river embankment higher.”
• Marta: “They told us to evacuate the sick and old. We are so worried and now we’ve run out of sand.”
• Pawel: “Is there anybody from Piesza street? I can’t contact my grandparents. What’s up there?”
• Kajetan: “I am back from Kozanow. Working all night. Neighbors brought us strawberries.”
• Gosia: “I can’t help you as I am in France now, but I am following you and wish good luck!”
• Kiepas: “Fog over the city. Temperature: 13 degrees. Humidity: 93 per cent. No rain at the moment.”
• Kasia: “In Kozanow water is pouring through the embankment.”
• Magda: “What’s the source of this information? Put here only checked info. Don’t repeat any media bullshit.”
• Ziomek: “Confirmed: water really broke the embankment. Kozanow in panic!”.

That morning — on May 22, 2010 – I was not there. I followed all this fight with the river on the Internet blog wroclawzwyboru.blox.pl.
Its editor, 29-year-old Pawel Andrzejczuk, a small company owner, estimated he cooperated with some 300 contributors who fed his blog with over 3000 news items and uploaded 4 GB of photos and videos.
One amateur video captured the river breaking the embankment in Kozanow district of Wroclaw. One could see the crowd running away and hear them swearing to God.

The floods and media: from 1997 to 2010

Watching streets under water I could not stop thinking about another flood that had hit the city in 1997. That time I was a young reporter at a local newsroom of my newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
Our editorial office was under water as well as the offices of the other three local newspapers. In the early days of the flood I lost my car driving through the water, so I could only sail across the city to collect information.
Fixed line phones were down. Mobile phones were big like handbags and very rare. Internet was still a toy for geeks.
The flood of 2010 was so different. It affected much smaller part of Wroclaw, destroyed many less houses and brought no casualties. But it was a bigger news event, as professional journalists were joined by amateurs who dared to provide independent 24-hour live news coverage on the Internet.
Everybody’s got a mobile phone with a camera now. Becoming an “accidental reporter” is just one click away.
Pawel’s blog directly competed with all the TV news channels, radio newscasts and newspaper portals. In just 5 days it attracted 157,000 unique users in a city of 630,000 inhabitants. It’s about one third of what our established local news portal of Gazeta for Wroclaw is attracting monthly.
50 per cent of users found Pawel’s blog when googling for “flood in Wroclaw” and similar keywords. They chose a link to an amateur news site instead of official sources, or professional media.
Official sources were in disgrace as it was a mayor who kept repeating Kozanow was safe. Professional media — a bit slower than a real-time web, more confident of the official version, cautious of the unconfirmed amateurs’ accounts — turned down some audiences.
An amateur news feed had also its flaws. Reading it I had to cut through the jungle of revealing witness-accounts and simple rumors, but at the same time I felt as a reader that I participated in something big. Such a rare feeling in our individualistic world of “Me”.
Pawel might not be a professional news editor, but over last 5 years he has built online a strong community: over 560 websites link to his blog, his Facebook profile got more than 2,600 fans and become almost as popular as our local Gazeta’s one. It all paid off during the flood.
Finally, Dan Gillmor’s “We the Media” manifesto reached its point in my part of the world.

So, how does it feel to be challenged by own readers?

Not so bad, as we have brought it in a way upon ourselves.
My newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza was founded in 1989 by anti-communist opposition to bring independent journalism to the country and support underground Solidarity’s bid for the first partly free elections in Poland.
Today Gazeta is the best read quality newspaper here with an average paid circulation of 347,000 and 4,2 mln readers reached in total every week in print. Our online portal Gazeta.pl, the fourth largest website here after Google, a Polish clone of Facebook and a TV-owned portal, attracts 11,8 mln users in a month. It’s 66% of all 17,8 mln Polish Internet users (Poland has 38 mln inhabitants in total.)
Gazeta’s publisher, Agora, is one of the most successful media groups in Central and Eastern Europe. Its offer includes magazines, books, record and movie productions, cinemas, radio stations and out-of-home advertising.
21 years later Gazeta still believes its mission is broader than just delivering honest news. Since its launch it has been a voice of “modern Poland” — supported democratic reforms, joining NATO and the European Union. It has been helping to build an open society by providing platforms for debates and inspiring people concerned with a common good.

Embracing new media

We have embraced new media as they make our efforts easier and more effective.
Our online boards (Forum.Gazeta.pl) let people discuss over 5,900 different topics ranging from politics to education and health-care to hobbies and over years our users shared there over 113 mln posts and 2 mln photos.
Our blogging platform (Blox.pl) became the biggest in Poland as it hosts over 184,000 individual blogs. Pawel’s blog on the flood in Wroclaw is one of them. When water broke embankments of that city, it became the best read blog on the platform. So in fact we have been sharing all his traffic successes.
We’ve been even ready to share some revenues! Pawel’s blog is a member of our online advertising network (AdTaily.com). This network helps to turn visitors of blogs and niche sites into advertisers and provides funding to independent voices in the society. Until today it has attracted in Poland over 13,000 amateur and professional online publishers.
(Recently, AdTaily.com was named by CNBC as one of the Europe’s 25 most creative companies. If you want to learn more, please come and listen to their story at the INMA/OPA Europe Newsmedia Conference in Kraków, Poland, on September 29-October 1, 2010.)

This post is a chapter of an article I wrote for the upcoming report on the future of journalism to be published by the International Press Institute in September 2010.

Ad campaigns: how newspapers go beyond print

A new branding ad campaign of Poland’s newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza shows it is no longer a paper only. It’s a website, a mobile app. It’s a news-multi-medium.

Gazeta is the best read quality daily in Poland, a country that is a host of this year’s INMA/OPA Europe Newsmedia Conference held in the royal city of Kraków from September 29 to October 1, 2010.

Gazeta’s average paid circulation is 347,000 and it reaches about 4,2 million readers a week. Its online portal — Gazeta.pl — attracts over 11 million users a month. Gazeta runs also several mobile websites and applications for iPhone.

The goal of a new branding campaign for Gazeta launched this July is to show the newspaper is no longer about paper only as readers can access its news, comments and participate in its activities like social campaigns in their most convenient channel, place and time.

The slogan on out-of-home advertisements is “Wyborcza do wyboru” that means “Wyborcza is for choice” and is in fact a play of words as the word “Wyborcza” means “for choice”, “for elections” etc.

The multimedia advertising campaign — using television, outdoor, cinema, online — was created by an ad agency JIS Advertising and media were planned by Starlink.

Have a look at this new 3D animation produced by Lightcraft, a visual effects company based in Poland. It is being broadcasted now on Polish TV and at cinemas.

Newspapers see their future in multimedia

Gazeta’s campaign reminds me about other newspapers that decided to communicate their audience big changes in their organizations. These papers can easily be consumed today on multiple platforms.

Recently, INMA Ideas Magazine featured a story by my collegue from Brazil Marcelo Benez, an advertising director of Folha de Sao Paulo, about their recent campaign claiming: “Folha. Impossible not to read it, access it, twitter it or comment it.”

Here’s just one of the ads featured in the Magazine (to read more you need to be an INMA member).

This approach to newspaper branding has been promoted many times at the INMA congresses all over the world. At the European conference in Vienna in 2008 Innovation’s consultant Juan Antonio Giner showed this campaign by another Brazilian daily O Globo (based in Rio de Janeiro):

The mobile future of newspapers

Newspapers have been looking for the Holy Graal for a long time. Finally, a new breed of mobile reading devices makes some publishers believe they are the future. Let’s have a look beyond the hype about iPads.

Here’s an overview of the latest developments in the mobile Internet industry. I used current reports from Morgan Stanley, Distimo, NetMarketShare and other sources published in June or July 2010.

The presentation features also some early findings on usage of newspapers on iPad thanks to John Einar Sandvand of a Norwegian daily newspaper Aftenposten. John Einar disclosed them during his speech at the Oxford Tablet Summit organized in May by INMA, Innovations Media Consulting Group and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. We had been trying to ask the right questions in Oxford — the list is included in the slideshow. Where to find the answers?

I hope we will be able to learn more this September in Kraków, Poland, at the annual INMA/OPA Europe Newsmedia Conference where we plan to have a special session on tablets and mobile reading devices. As we want to share the most current case studies, we are going to put them on the programme very close to date of conference. Expect then the unexpected.

Update: This deck made one of three Top Presentations of the Day at SlideShare on July 28, 2010. I think it just proves how important this topic is today.