I just attended a local journalism gathering: 5 key elements that emerged
On June 28 and 29, Nantes (France) hosted the Festival de l’Information Locale (FIL), a local journalism gathering organised by Ouest Médialab. Journalists and editors from different areas in France, French-speaking countries and United Kingdom sat around to try and answer a question: is local journalism dead?
Journalism can still be attractive
The Festival identified over 1400 local media outlets active in France, many of them many decades old, others recently created. Many of the recent local media outlets promoted a type of journalism that could differ from the traditional — and sometimes dusty — model of the local daily newspaper. Mediacités is a pure player (it is only accessible online) of investigative journalism over four French cities (Lyon, Nantes, Lille and Toulouse). As well as Marsactu (also an investigative newspaper, reporting on Marseille), its stories are long, rich, and there is a guarantee of exclusive revelations. Far Ouest documents, in longforms and enriched stories, local news in Bordeaux.
Every area still needs to be covered by journalists, for people still want to know what is happening around them. But what people seek today in the newspaper is not what they were looking for in the past. In order for journalism to remain attractive, French media sociologist Jean-Marie Charon analysed:
Local press’s tendency to seek for consensual content is contrary to the spirit of the time: fragmentation.
Work on your connection with your readership
Because of the internet, many newspapers had abandoned the page dedicated to the letters to the editors. Today, these newspapers realise that it has weakened their relation to their community. Olivier Bonsart, former director of 20 minutes, insisted:
Internet shall not be used only as a means of emission. It is a network.
MaTélé, a Belgian local TV, had created 15 Facebook groups, one for each city covered by the TV, so that the community could discuss random things and the media could do the promotion of its own content. The most active members of the group became “Superfans” and were offered access to exclusive content, such as a one-day experience with the television crew.
Many speakers insisted on the idea that media outlets had to offer more than just information: journalists shall keep on doing field reporting and investigation — that it, I think, an important point — , but the media in itself can create masterclasses, conferences, etc. I feel like the key element here is to keep a balance and insist on offering services that require journalistic skills. Many things can be done from journalism practices other than writing reports, but you have to be careful not to end up organising a Chocolate Festival.
Price matters: how to make your readers pay, and how to pay your writers
Everyone faces the same problem: money is gone. There were many talks about the most appropriate business model.
- Gathering paid subscribers is the most classic and traditional way, but the problem is that the stock of subscribers tends to decrease.
- Some media outlets, such as Marcelle, asked patrons to pay for a category — a company will pay to make every article in the “Agriculture” category free. The problem here is that there is quite an evident risk of conflicting interests.
- There was also the possibility for a media to be associated with a foundation, as it is the case with The Guardian. Foundations can receive donations from members of a community.
- One trendy business model nowadays is membership: the vast majority of the stories are free, but some content is exclusively accessible to paying members, who also get the chance of participating in events, etc. Pros : it is a way to tie stronger bonds with your community, and to boost your motivation to produce good stories. Cons: since only a very limited number of readers become members, it might work only with wide-audience publications.
However, although models such as membership favor qualitative content and quality-demanding readers, they are mainly destined to a certain population, wealthier and more educated. For years, local media have been more widely read by lower-income populations, and going towards a gentrification of local media would certainly not be a good thing.
Subscribers might yet be an interesting option. Though, in order to transform readers into subscribers, you need to sell high-quality stories. And that comes with a price: the way writers are paid. Local correspondents are generally underpaid, noted Jacques Trentesaux, co-founder of Mediacités, although they write sometimes up to 80% of the content of the newspaper.
Local press will have to be innovative…
“In the future, there can’t be business models who rely on print editions”, stated Jean-Marie Charon. According to Olivier Bonsart, the income generated by print editions should be invested in the transformation to digital editions.
Many innovative narrations were brought forward. One of them was datajournalism: a wide number of data can be exploited specifically by one newspaper, but also be useful to other newsrooms. There are, in France, a certain number of newsrooms who share their data and work together, deeming that they are not in competition since they won’t publish the same story at the end of the day, depending on the region they’re from. Solution-based journalism was also mentioned, as well as news games, enriched content, etc.
…but all innovation is not good innovation
That was also something I noticed: Google News Initiative was extremely present in the conference. There was a talk to explain how 100M€ (out of their 16bn of advertising income) were invested in journalism projects, and how Google was helping local media to go on a great innovation lap. I won’t insist on the disastrous effect Google News has had on newsrooms, but I think it is important to repeat what someone reminded us: always be careful to be using the platforms more than you are useful to them.
There are many examples of this. Take Syllabs, for instance: it is a program which automatically writes stories from a set of data (a football game, or the programmation from a movie theater). We might find it amusing, for a while, to read an automated article about our kids’ game no one cares about. But there is utterly no interest in reading a set of data transformed into language. The point of having a journalist is that he won’t go to our kid’s game more than once a year, maybe, but when he comes, he’ll go and interview the ref, the kids, he’ll be able to say if the winning goal was lucky or spectacular. And that will be a story worth reading. A bot analysing numbers can’t replace the human perception of an event. And don’t we lie to ourselves: the money which is invested in the bot will never be invested in the human.
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