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”.

However, as the Daily Telegraph reports, he said that increasing job cuts and gloomy predictions sweeping Silicon Valley are an “excessive over reaction” as the expected slowdown will be nothing like the “bloodbath” of the 2000-2001 dotcom crash:

“It won’t be a 10pc collapse which kills everybody, but [advertising revenue] is going to drop and that is going to hurt people, a lot of marginal players are going to have serious problems…

I could see some of the major players’ stock suffering, some of them quite badly, but overall I don’t think it will be that bad…

We’ve been through somewhat of a boom but it has not been anything like the dotcom boom. A lot of start-ups out there are not yet profitable, but at least they have an idea of a business model and are mostly doing things that will work. But a lot of them will still fail.”