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.

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):

Two weeks ago, “Gazeta Wyborcza” started with a small advertisement published in newspaper “Get your Master’s degree in 2 years”. The purpose of this campaign was to gain the interest of the readers – such ad is unusual, in Poland it takes 5 years to get the MA.

The MA academy did not guarantee to teach anything. It just guaranteed the degree. It advertised as the cheapest offer on the market. The address was (translated from Polish) www. quickdegree .pl The effect was astonishing:

• 5.500 users in 5 days
• 600 called a hotline
• 500 applied to study at the academy that even did not publish its address or programme or teachers
• 20+ applied to teach (!)
• Only a few had doubts if it’s legal or they could actually learn something there

Today’s front page of “Gazeta Wyborcza” said that the whole thing was just a big scoop. New campaign in TV and outdoor for this action was launched. It made many readers interact. Is it journalism? Grzegorz Piechota does not know it either, but it’s cool.

The speaker recognized 5 main directions of how “Gazeta Wyborcza” changes in terms of content:

1. Editor as a marketer. More and more often editors of “Gazeta Wyborcza” become marketeers. They publish series of stories, pages dedicated to the same stories, books and documentary DVDs. It is nothing else but monetizing the same content for several times.         “Gazeta Wyborcza” has many cases acting that way. One of them was a story about Pope John Paul II and his female friend from the youth. This story was published in the printed newspaper, had a webpage dedicated to it, then it was sold in books and as documentary DVD.                          Very interesting is also the case of “Gazeta Wyborcza’s” publishing cycle “When is the high time for women in Polish church?”. Polish society is very conservative, so this topic raised a lot of public discussions, every time having the brand of “Gazeta Wyborcza” mentioned.
2. Reporter as a brand. One of “Gazeta’s” reporters, Adam Wajrak, went to Tatra mountains to search for bears, and write an article about them. For days he couldn’t do it, and the problem was that the topic was already introduced in the newspaper. So “Gazeta” asked its reades for help. They received tons of pictures and drawings of bears. It was a spontaneous action, where readers actively took part in. During this action, again “Gazeta” offered the readers the series in print, web contest, and an extra paid for map of Tatra mountains. Is it journalism? Still cool, though!             “Gazeta Wyborcza” also prepares a series of interviews run by Piotr Pacewicz, the second editor in chief of the newspapers. The premiere of these interviews will be online – as a video. Next day they will be available in paper.
3. New identity of a desk editor. Building nichesis very important, as it allows targetting audience and giving them actually new online services, built on their needs.
4. Premium content development. “Gazeta Wyborcza” started an action: “Loose some weight with us”. Editors publicly decided to go on diets. When readers went to the website, they could subscribe to a personalised diet plan, and personal training plan. Those were of course paid parts of the site (cheap). It is the beginning of selling content, not news content though. Is it journalism? Nobody knows, but it’s very cool.
5. Experiences of interactive journalists. “Gazeta Wyborcza” started an alternative sports site: Zczuba.pl – it is a combination of news, comments and jokes about sports. Exactly like a sport meeting with friends. When users read the sites, they feel like meeting friends and talking about sport events.                                                                                   “Gazeta Wyborcza” also started producing the content widgets for TV sets. Having a deal with Samsung, the viewer can at the same time watch TV and browse through information from “Gazeta Wyborcza”.

Tomasz Józefacki

1. Aggregators. How to protect the content and compete with aggregators? There is a strong emergence of online aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo News. But there are also other aggregators that arise in classifieds. They are not only following the path of the content, but also the path of advertising.
2. Free content. How to make money in the free economy?
3. How to make use of video? How to take advantage of growing popularity of online video?
4. Great tools are appearing around. How to compete with online services like Facebook or Twitter for users’ time and attention?
5. How to deal with our users’ deepening advertising blindness? Aggressive advertising lead to ad blindness, so users learn how to skip over the advertisements.
6. How to give users the ads of products, services, they really search for?
7. How to counter media fragmentation? Media fragmentation means more competition.
8. How to effectively deal with calls for regulation?

Agora is an extremely successful newsmedia company in Poland. It has 298 million euro in revenues as of 2008. They exist on different platforms: print, radio, outdoor and of course the internet. They have almost 10 million users, and 58% total online reach in Poland. According to Tomasz Józefacki, this is how Agora deals with the challenges mentioned above:

1. Gazeta.pl is the main portal, aggregating all sites of Agora (around 70). Gazeta.pl focuses on being on top in different categories. They already are number 1 in Recruitment, number 2 in real estate, and in communities, number 3 in sports, and news and opinion. They are the largest online multimedia content producer on the Polish internet, having 70+ online brands under Gazeta.pl umbrella.
2. Free content. Agora is introducing paid content services and applications, and experimenting with e-commerce.
3. Agora does not own any tv station. They produce original news, documentary, entertainment video content and online tv series. For online only. 75% of people in Poland watch online videos at least once a month.
4. They host the second largest online community in Poland. 100 million posts on forums, 143 thousand blogs. It’s not necessary social network, but building community is important.
5. Agora integrates the ads with some none-journalistic content, and events.
6. Agora builds quality focused advertising nnetworks with other publishers. They cooperate with different companies: Glossy Media (for women targetting) or AdTaily (bloggers targetting).
7. Agora is well known for its filling the niches strategy, and efforts to expand the traditional printed brands. The latest one is wyborcza.biz built from the business content of Gazeta Wyborcza.
8. Agora strongly cooperates with local organizations and OPA Europe to promote quality standards and self regulation.

Tomasz Józefacki concluded his speech with a statement that digital is not an easy market place, but newsmedia publishers surely know that challenges are on both sides: print and online.