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.

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.

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.

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.