forum4editors.com » business model

Agora will support innovative internet entrepreneurs

marek.miller — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:10:54 +0000

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.

The winner of the Startup Fest will have to prove that the prize was used for the development of the winning project. Theoretically, in case of many interesting projects, the prize may be divided in three. Agora may also abandon the main prize when the competition level is too low.

Is iPhone a panacea for newsmedia digital revenues?

grzegorz.piechota — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:30:47 +0000

Mark Challinor, director of mobile at the Daily Telegraph (UK), answers to the question: does the success of the iPhone represent the answer to future digital revenue streams for newsmedia companies?
Mark gave this speech at the INMA World Congress in New York this April:

Hunting the elusive online business model in news

grzegorz.piechota — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:24:57 +0000

Do throw spaghetti to the wall! It’s just one piece of advice that prof. George Brock of the City University in London, a former Saturday editor of the Times, offers to news publishers.
Here’s his presentation to Zeitung Online 2010 conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, in June 2010. Shared by LinkedIn/Slideshare:

LePost.fr: How amateurs produce valuable journalism

marek.miller — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:42:37 +0000

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?

Benoît Raphaël: LePost’s model is quite unique in the world: it’s a social media + a newsroom of journalists who produce their own content and co-produce news with users. Le Post take the “pulse” of the news : what people are talking about concerning the news.

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?

After 2 years, it’s trafic is about 2,5 million unique visitors (Nielsen) a month.

Who creates the content for the site?

Users (communities), invited bloggers and journalists.

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.

The problem with Twitter and social media services is that there is a very low percentage of users actually producing content. It is said that among one hundred of Twitter users, only one creates content, ten reply, and the rest is following in silence. Le Post is a mixture of amateur and professional content. How high is the users’ activity? Where do you take professional content from?

2% of readers produce content (8,000 comments a day, 500 posts a day).
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.

What makes a reader-generated content more attractive than the one generated by professional journalists?

Active amateurs help us to collect and add value to information by proposing smart angles, aggregating, finding witnesses, etc. They are also “the eyes of the newsroom”. They are following the news for us, on print, tv, radio, news sites, but also blogs. They are sending us valuable links with quotes.
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.

Why do you create a separate brand for reader-generrated content? If you believe in it, why don’t you integrate with Le Monde’s brand?

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.

Peter Vandermeersch: how newspapers can set a mobile strategy

tom.corbett — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:43:36 +0000

The first step is a mental one, claims Peter Vandermeersch, an editor-in-chief of De Standaard, a Belgian daily newspaper.

De Standaard is published by a Belgian group Corelio.

Mr. Vandermeersch spoke at the Web Goes Mobile seminar in Grimbergen in Belgium on Dec. 4, 2008. (Read a summary of his speech written by Tom Corbett.)

Peter Vandermeersch gave a short interview to Inge van Gaal of INMA.

Asked for an advice how newspapers can set their mobile strategy, he said: ”The major advice is to forget that we are newspaper companies to realize that we are media companies.Some content that we are strong at, that we produce daily has to go the paper, but the other content really has to go on web and mobile immidiately. If you make this mental step, that is the basic point to set a successful mobile strategy in your companies.”

Watch full interview:

(Video by Tom Corbett of INMA.)