1. Media partners

Gazeta Wyborcza runs its campaign together with an outdoor advertising company AMS, a news radio network TOK FM and a web portal Gazeta.pl. They all belong to Gazeta’s publisher: a multimedia group Agora SA.

This is an easiest way to use internal synergies and reach the public with our message: “Humane Dying. A social campaign.” This is the slogan on billboards – outdoors and online.

The graphics is a play of two Polish words: “umiec” (can) and “umierac” (die).

We wanted very simple layout for billboards, as the topic deserves careful design. Maybe, it could be easier to get an attention by putting photos of dying people (as Benetton once did with a photo of a man dying from AIDS), but it would not be the attention we were looking for. 

2. In-paper promotion

Paper edition of Gazeta has at about 6 million readers a week. So it is a perfect advertising channel also for our social campaigns.

Two days before the launch of “Humane Dying” Gazeta run the full page ad.
It used the last words of Ilona Miller, the first volunteer of our campaign who died just before it started.

The ad read:

“The death closes one’s eyes and opens somebody else’s”

How do we die in Poland. An art of talking about the death. Dying with God and without God. Features, interviews, readers’ letters – daily in Gazeta Wyborcza from Monday

3. Online promotion

Online portal Gazeta.pl has over 6 million real users a week and its general audience tends to be younger than the printed newspaper’s readership.

So the web is a perfect channel to reach young readers.

Working on a campaign we prepared something special for this medium: a video documentary about a Warsaw hospice: “The house of departures.” It had its premiere on the web and an advertising campaign in the printed newspaper.

The movie was shot by Gazeta’s journalists and some volunteers. It is a heart-breaking and eye-opening story about one day in the hospice from the perspective of its staff and patients.

Would you like to learn more about the campaign “Humane Dying”? Read here.

How to debate publicly on death? Find an answer here.

“Dying is an experience that we don’t know how to cope with. We are afraid not only of dying, we are afraid of talking about it, even thinking about it,” wrote Piotr Pacewicz, deputy editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, the best read Polish newspaper in March 2008.

Gazeta – well known for its public campaigns – launched a new one called “Humane Dying”. It is an obvious reference to the campaign “Humane Birth” that in the last 12 years improved services offered to young mothers by Polish maternity wards.

Now we decided that it was a high time to try to improve services offered to old and ill people.

We launched this campaign together with the Hospice Foundation based in Gdansk. It is a non-governmental body that offered us a professional support and advice.

1. Debate in the newspaper

On the launch day we put “Humane Dying” slogan on the front page. We explained the reasons of the campaign and our plans in an editorial article that served that day as a main story on page number 1.

The campaign started with a new daily section in the newspaper. During the week Gazeta published many features, interviews and letters.

The first feature was about Ilona Miller, a woman from Gdansk who volunteered at the hospice there. When she found she had a cancer, she decided to die in the same place she served. Ilona adviced us when we were working on our campaign’s plans. She died just before the launch.

She said: “Death is closing one’s eyes and opening somebody else’s.” We run this campaign with her last words in mind.

Examples of other topics:

• How to die in a humane way? “The beginning is not very different from the end. A man is nude and helpless. He needs a support because he is afraid,” said in an interview Piotr Krakowiak, a director of Hospice Foundation that co-organises the campaign “Humane Dying”.
• I did not come here to convert you: it was an interview with Father Stanislaw Wysocki working with dying persons in the hospital (see the picture below).
• Come to me, please: it was a feature story about “bad deaths” – about the people who pass alone.
• A house of departures: it was a heart-breaking video documentary shot at the hospice by our journalists and some volunteers. It had its premiere online.
• Where is the death hiding today? There were opinion articles by a sociologist, psycho-oncologist, advertising proffesional.
• Letters: we got thousands of letters. We could publish in the printed newspaper just a fraction. We put more letters online. Read a short summary prepared by our deputy editor-in-chief Piotr Pacewicz.

2. Activities on the field

As we really wanted to make a difference, we prepared a campaign’s plan for the whole year. Gazeta is happy to have its own public campaigning department financed by a foundation of Gazeta’s publisher: a multimedia company Agora SA.

Here are the main activities planned for “Humane Dying” campaign:

• Volunteers: We invited schools and universities to attend training sessions about how to serve dying patients at the hospices and hospitals. These training programs are open to teachers and students. All participants will get professional advice and diplomas. Students are invited to write down their experiences from volunteer work at hospices and hospitals. The best articles will be awarded.
• 10 rights of a dying human being: We promote the ten commandments, for example: dying person have a right to die in his own home, a right to get an honest information about his condition, or a right to get a professional psychological help. We invite hospices and hospitals to promote these ten commandments among their workers and patients. We offer them materials and professional advice.
• Guide on hospices and hospitals: In November we are going to publish a guide about conditions and policies at hospices and hospitals in Poland. It will be based on data gathered from the authorities, these institutions and a survey among Gazeta’s readers.
• Communication: We launched a secretariat for the campaign, a hotline and a website for all the parties involved. This is the best way to spread information about our activities and how to get involved. Of course, we launched also an advertising campaign. If you want to learn more about it, read here.

The best read Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza broke the story on its front page in March 2008.
Reporters Roman Daszczynski and Pawel Wiejas found that Father Andrzej, director of a centre for difficult young people in Szczecin, was accused of paedophilia a long time ago.
People demanding that the truth to be revealed had been hearing for thirteen years: do not act to the Church’s damage.

Reporters gathered confessions made by the wards of the St. Brother Albert Centre in Szczecin. One of them reads:

I came to the centre in 1992. I was fifteen. Father Andrzej asked me to his room. He started groping me, touching my genitals, encouraging me to do the same (I didn’t, I just lay there, helpless). He made me come. When I got up, he told me to hit him for hurting me.

The alleged molester was Father Andrzej, the Centre’s founder and then-director. The boys told their tutors, and they, in 1995, notified Bishop Stanislaw Stefanek, the hierarch in charge of educational matters at the Szczecin archdiocese.

Bishop Stefanek dismissed the depositions as non-credible and refused to talk to any of the boys. “I didn’t receive such orders from the Archbishop”, said Bishop Stefanek, today the bishop of Lomza.

Embittered, the tutors asked two monks for help. Bishop Stefanek’s superior, Archbishop Marian Przykucki, received them. ‘He told us he was sorry about the matter and would help to solve it’, one of the monks recalled.

You can read more about the case in English.

The full story was published on March 10, 2008, in Gazeta’s feature supplement Duzy Format.

Is the Golden Age of investigative journalism already past?

Two reporters of Gazeta Wyborcza investigated this story for several months.

In the age of cost-cutting and newspapers’ downsizing one could say it is not a cost-effective way to do journalism: two people keep digging one big story despite the fact that they can at a time cover hundreds of simpler and easier news stories, for example local ones.

Gazeta’s first deputy editor-in-chief Jaroslaw Kurski spoke about this issue in a recent interview with the Editors Weblog:

Jean Yves Chainon asks: Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

Jaroslaw Kurski answers: Investigative journalism is a core of our editorial practice and as our world and lives become more complex, I see the need for this kind of public service rising.

We live in the world flooded with information, but it is served in bites, so many bites, that it is getting harder and harder to see the whole picture. We need wise journalists to solve this puzzle.

We live in the world of instant news, but it is often reaching only the surface of problems and challenges that we face. We need great journalits to show what was NOT on TV and the net. We need to understand what really happened.

We live in the world influenced more and more by professional public relations; it changes the way politics is done. We need clever journalists to see what’s behind the curtain, to ask the hard questions, to watch hands of those in power.

We live in the world of global economy and large corporations that affect people’s lifes and business. We need investigative journalists to provide us all with reliable information to make better decisions.

On March 10 we broke an exclusive news about a Catholic priest who reportedly sexually abused young boys and about three bishops who – although informed and alerted about the abuses – have been reluctant to investigate the case for 13 years! We publish Gazeta Wyborcza also to uncover stories like this.