Badredine Ladjemi
Journalism is living a deep crise. Internet is, for many people, part of the problem. It destroys value. Google, and other web search engines, are “stealing” content from online newspapers and index them in their huge databases. They republish it without asking for consent and gain revenue by putting advertising below them. Journalists are not paid for this new support. Their work is used but no new revenue is coming…
Who Killed Newspaper?
Worst : advertising on the Internet makes 10 times less revenue than in paper for the same audience. Still 90% of revenue is coming from printed press but more and more people are reading it on the Internet for free and not clicking on ads…In the US, advertising revenues have fallen by 28% this last semester. And Internet is not taking the lead because ads revenue is falling too on this support by 13,4% ! Local newspapers have been deeply weakened by the availability of free information on the Internet. Libération, one of the major French newspaper, boss, Laurent Joffrin want to raise taxes on ISP. Another one, after copyright fees for music, now newspaper ones !
However Internet brings innovation to journalism. Newspaper is sick but journalism has never been as healthy! So I decided to present you innovation Internet is bringing to journalism.
UGC Newspapers
The oldest initiative has been the collaborative newspaper. In France there is Agoravox (200k UV/month), Le Post (70 K UV/month), Mediapart (45 K UV/month) and WikiNews (10K UV/month)[1] . Their model is simple : people want to produce themselves information, so they write for free and experienced users rates the news. Then you’ll find them on aggregator portal like Google News. They drag audience and their costs are very way smaller than their professional counterparts. It’s empowering the consumer making him a real actor. On these medias you’ll read facts or point of views not raised by mainstream medias. It’s like filling the blind corner of traditional journalism.
AgoraVox, the user generated content media
Online Newspapers
Another one is exclusively online newspapers , made by trained journalists but are published only online and for FREE. That’s the case of Rue89 (~100K/month), Marianne2 (~30K/month), Slate.fr (~10K/month), Arretsurimages.net (~10k/month) and Ecrans.fr (~30K/month)[2]. They let you comment and enjoy a fresh content with original . The concept of long tail is here very accurate. News events that are oftenly pushed on the least readed pages of a newspaper are here treated as almost equal. And on the opposite, hot topics could benefits from a different approach highlighting facts which are treated exactly the same in paper newspapers : it’s a niche journalism.
Rue89, the outsider
Journalists Blogs
Along this traditional forms of journalism bring online. Almost every newspaper has launched its own platform of blogs. Journalists publish on them articles that aren’t published on the newspaper but are worth reading. Among them : Corine Lesnes, Guy Birenbaum, Francis Pisani, Olivier Bonnet, Pierre Assouline, Benoït Raphaël or Alain Gresh. So you cand read your favorites journalists online for free and follow each news events they comment and analyze for you. It changed the way you experience information and point of view with information making you have a personal relationship with a particular journalist. In the old times you were used to like one particular newspaper depending on who you are. Working class used to read l’Humanité; Conservative people Le Figaro and so on. Now you can follow a person, knowing his strength, his opinions, his weakness and his position and build your own editorial line.
Link Journalism and micro-blogging
Press review has always been a standard of journalism. But nowadays with the profusion of sources it has become one of the major form of journalism online. Link journalism is about constant selection of articles, photos, news available on the Web. It’s also giving a short and personal comment about a particular information identified by a link. It’s called microblogging. Twitter has been the major tool for microblogging. News like fraud in Iran elections, death of Michael Jackson, or proof about fraud, or proof that the proof is a fake and so ones have been revealed by microbloggers on Twitter.
Death of Michael Jackson live on Twitter
Lawsuit against Veronique Courjault microblogged
The Washington Post and Le Monde.fr are using it on their own websites. Almost every major newspaper, online or paper, has now in France its own microblogging space where it broadcast links.
A reader follow one or many link journalists gathering by this way the best of the Web minute by minute. Link journalism is a new form of live reporting. It’s a smart way to capture audience and not letting it go to other sources of information by becoming a sort of “Best of” the Web.
Aggregation
Almost all of these medias are publishing RSS feeds. That could seems not important. But it’s transforming the way people consume information. As I said before, they have the choice to build their own editorial line, actually their own newspaper. Taking from this person, from this newspaper, from this microblogging stream and building a completely different perspective on news.
Google News is the prototype of that, and it’s an intelligent tool because it learns from your preferences and suggest you the news you’ll like. Yahoo News is more old fashion and selects from all of these news papers the ones they think deserve attentions. Wikio.fr is a link provider who present you the headlines of the Web. Another approach is personal aggregation on iGoogle, Google Reader or Netvibes : using RSS feeds you build your own custom newspaper. But there is still a space for tool between mass aggregation (Google News, Yahoo News, Wikio) and manual custom building (Google Reader, iGoogle, Netvibes). My guess is that they’re coming very soon !
Critical Analysis
The famous French journalist of “Le Monde”, Xavier Ternisien, wrote an article on them. He described them as the unqualified low-cost working class of journalism. They’re not paid or for a very modest price but are happy to do it because of the fame they’ll outlive from it. And Emmanuelle Anizon from Telerama described this new type journalism as very poor quality and low cost.
Arretsurimages.net has released a video about this topic, I recommend you to watch, it’s short (2 minutes) and focus on the subject.
Conclusion
Journalism is changing and even if revenues are falling there is new ways to capture audience. It’s only by understanding these new forms of journalism that we can monetize online press. Old plain boring ad banner is living its last days…
– written by Badredine Ladjemi
[1] Source Google Ad Planner 06/2009
[2] Source Google Trends for Website 06/2009
