Students were invited by Poland’s best read quality newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza to find out whether the country is ready to host UEFA Euro football championship next year. During nine-day journeys in June they were sharing in real-time their experiences of using Polish services, travelling in the country and interacting with Polish people.

The project was called “Mission 21” and had been already recognized by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and students themselves as “one of the most exciting social-media journalism projects to date”.

George Brock, Head of Journalism at City University London, said:

“Mission 21 was an excellent example of the kind of real-time, real-life training for young journalists which rests on cooperation between a leading paper and website and a journalism school. And I don’t think that it was just City University’s students who were learning: it seems that the editors at Gazeta Wyborcza learnt a few things about social media too. These young journalists are showing how to engage audiences in ways which will help to build and sustain journalism in the future.“

21 students of 11 different nationalities had to spend nine days in Poland without any special assistance. They simply got plane tickets and the amount of Polish zlotys that British tourists usually spend there. They went to 21 largest cities chosen by a draw.

“Before the students came to Poland, they told us they expected to see a gray, depressed post-communist country, hard hit during World War II, inhabited by very conservative, Catholic people. We were so surprised listening to all these ideas. Poland has changed so much since democratic and economic reforms in 1989 and joining the EU in 2004,” said Grzegorz Piechota, Gazeta Wyborcza’s senior editor and head of public awareness & social campaigns.

Can Euro 2012 change this terribly wrong perception of Poland?

About a million football fans are expected to travel there next year. And many of them may as surprised as John Seymour, a student on a mission to Poznan, who wrote on the blog: “Call me naive but I did not expect to see shops such as River Island, H&M, Zara, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple and La Senza in Eastern Europe… Poznan appears to be a great example of Poland’s progress since the fall of communism and a city that has the infrastructure and amenities of any Western European city.”

City students found also Poland safer and less conservative than they expected. There are however some stereotypes that proved to be true.

Some non-white students and one Jewish one met with openly racist comments on the internet that made them think Poland still had a problem with xenophobia. Looking for answers in Wroclaw, black-skinned Saad Noor realized: “[Polish] racism is the result of locals having little contact with foreigners and it is more out of suspicion and ignorance than hatred.”

Exactly as feared, the students found that Poles love to complain, hate to smile and are reluctant to speak any foreign languages. Christian Jensen, who tested Gorzow, offered a rule of the thumb useful for Euro 2012 travelers: “The younger generation can speak [English], but the older generations can’t.”

After all Poland proved not that bad as seven out of 21 students decided to stay longer after the Mission 21 had been accomplished.

Grzegorz Piechota said:

“Pictures of attractions all over the country have impressed many Poles too. It seems many of us have not noticed how much our cities had improved since we joined the EU and spent billions of euro on renovations and building new attractions. It took Londoners to tell us to travel less to the Mediterranean and more around homeland.”

Gazeta Wyborcza has just announced a new supplement for Saturday titled “Poland. I like it!” fully based on recommendations by City students.

Football stadium construction sites in Warsaw, Gdansk and Wroclaw (all three are delayed) and the only stadium built on time in Poznan were also inspected. Officials of all these four Euro 2012 host cities assured the students they would be ready for the championship.

The Mission 21 was not all about testing. Journalism students did some old-fashioned investigative reporting — for example Camilla Mills put Bialystok and its mayor to shame for mistreatment of animals at the city’s zoo. Some other showed some entertainment talents — for example Petter Larsson recorded a song about Katowice and made a video clip that was broadcast by Poland’s popular public television channel TVP 2:

“Revealing experiment of use of social media”

Poles have been following the expedition with growing interest from June 6th when it had been announced to June 18th when students arrived until June 26th when most of them left. According to data from Agora, Gazeta Wyborcza’s publisher, the students’ blog at misja21.blox.pl became at that time the fourth best read on a popular Polish Blox.pl platform of 236 thousand blogs.

Despite the fact that the blog and Facebook wall page at Facebook.com/misja21 were written in English, they were read mostly by Poles and 84 per cent of readers were aged 18-34 — so difficult to reach for newspapers.

Extensive use of social media was an experiment for both Gazeta Wyborcza and City University London. All discoveries in Poland were reported and discussed with readers in real-time on Facebook and Twitter at @misja21. Later stories were reported in full and commented on the blog. Some of the students’ stories — after translation to Polish — were published in Gazeta Wyborcza on its websites and in print. Texts were enriched by pictures and videos taken by students and uploaded to the blog and YouTube channel of the Mission 21.

Grzegorz Piechota recalled: “For Gazeta it was a revealing experiment of use of social media for better reporting. Imagine the stream of raw, unedited multimedia bits published all day by 21 students, their 21 shadow journalists, some additional photo and video reporters, and hundreds of readers who got involved. Then imagine these five poor editors trying to manage assignments for all stakeholders including readers and filter from the stream what deserved to be amplified in single or all channels.”

Piechota added:

“For the first time in the history of Gazeta’s editorial projects, we have not received any single e-mail or any letter by post about Mission 21. All interaction has finally moved to social media and we the traditional media editors simply need to adapt. Real-time communication with the public becomes an integral part of our journalistic practice.”

About City University London

• City University London is an international University with a reputation for academic excellence and a central London location. It was placed in the top 5% of world universities by Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010-11.
• The University leads London in education, research and enterprise for business and the professions and is ranked 10th in the UK for both the employability of its graduates (by The Times Good University Guide 2011) and graduate starting salaries (by The Sunday Times University Guide 2011).
• City is broadly-based with world leading strengths in the arts, including journalism and music; informatics; social sciences; engineering and mathematical sciences; business; law; community and health sciences.
• The University attracts over 21,000 students from around 160 countries and academic staff from around 70 countries.
• City was founded in 1894 and in 2016 will celebrate its first half century since gaining University title.

About Gazeta Wyborcza

• Gazeta Wyborcza is the best read quality daily newspaper in Poland with paid circulation of about 335 thousand copies and weekly readership of 4.3 million people (2010).
• Gazeta was founded in 1989 by a group of journalists and activists of the underground democratic opposition press as the platform for the first democratic parliamentary elections. It became the first independent newspaper in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe.
• Part of the success of Gazeta is its unique formula of the national newspaper with regional pages in 21 regions of Poland.
• Gazeta.pl internet portal is an umbrella for 90+ online brands from news to social networks and advertising. Monthly Gazeta.pl reaches 11.5 million or 63% if Polish internet users (Dec. 2010).
• Gazeta is published by Agora, one of the most successful media companies in Central and Eastern Europe. Its businesses include publishing of newspapers, magazines, books and online services, running radio stations, production of TV, film and music, out-of-home advertising, and a network of cinemas.

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):