Results matching “the french exce”

In April 2007, French regional newspaper Le Télégramme launched an original online offer: a miniature, daily, television-type news report.

At the time, the experiment was hailed as most innovative in the French regional paper landscape. Has that particular format borne its fruits though?

Télégramme and JT Web

The paper built a studio within its newsroom at a relatively low cost, about €70,000 including two professional cameras, an editing console and lighting. The paper hired a professional broadcast journalist to produce daily video footage with professional standards (about one original report daily, sometimes two). The actual news show, dubbed 'JT Web', lasts about five minutes. It is staffed by four of the paper's journalists, who come from diverse backgrounds and desks, on a rotating basis. It is published every weekday at 5pm.

Each journalist compiles video content shot by the videojournalist, gets a share of his or her own footage or carries out short interviews with the paper's journalists, and serves as an anchor for the news report. Each underwent a 4-week training program. They attend the morning news meeting and pick out the stories that will have most visual relevance.

The JT Web has helped to expand Le Télégramme's multimedia coverage. However, the televised format of the JT Web has borne disappointing results traffic-wise. Of the roughly 40,000-50,000 daily unique visitors to the website, there are only between 1,000-3,500 video downloads, depending on the news event.

In these baby steps of online video though, editors shouldn't be excessively concerned by eyeballs, as the JT Web served more important purposes, helping to modernize the newsroom's culture.

Video fueled newsroom convergence

The 'JT Web' was launched with two main purposes. One was to "surf on the growing enthusiasm for video news coverage" that was emerging on all the major international news sites, said Olivier Clech, Digital editor at Le Télégramme. Secondly - and as importantly in Clech's view - the JT Web was a good way to engage in cultural change within the newsroom (which isn't integrated but Clech would like it to be), by creating curiosity amongst journalists.

"Video was a lever to trigger evolution," he said. It was both used to fulfill the audience's needs and made journalists " realize that multimedia was inevitable." This doesn't mean that all of the paper's 200 journalists will regularly produce multimedia coverage, but the JT Web was a good way to make them more Web-friendly.

For the last municipal elections in March 2008, the Télégramme organized diverse video coverage to complement its print and online stories. Video interviews were shot with editors of the paper's local editions ("100% print people") to discuss the details of the elections. On election day, the Télégramme gathered spontaneous reactions from voters and politicians, and provided video analysis from its main offices.



Newspaper video: towards on-demand, news YouTubes

According to Clech, the JT Web's televised news format was a good way for the paper to tackle video, since it required a rigorous and structured approach. But it doesn't fall in line with the expectations of the online audience, "which is a more of a consumer of short video sequences." Most Web users seek short and diversified on-demand clips. The JT Web may have also suffered from insufficient visibility on the homepage, lack of broadband penetration and a relatively slow server.

In the future, the JT Web could be scrapped, or perhaps the Télégramme will save this format for talk shows, profiles or select news items. The TV news report format simply doesn't bring enough people. And there seems to be a disconnect between waiting on videos of 'hot' breaking news until the 5pm news report, instead of publishing them immediately.

Clech couldn't give too many details, but the paper is working on its next set of video offerings, which could include a larger selection of on-demand video clips, which users could freely browse. Content would be more systematically indexed to make it easy for readers to find and share. Sounds familiar? Perhaps there could even be some participatory features...

Last but not least, Clech reminded: "Let's not focus on the platform, and instead keep doing our jobs." That's the secret.


Stay tuned for Part 2, with an interview with Ian Vaile, Director of Digital Productions at Fairfax Media in Australia.

Source: Olivier Clech, Digital Editor-in-Chief at Le Télégramme

An amateur video of former Société Générale trader Jérôme Kerviel, whose unauthorized activities caused the bank to lose €4.9bn, was sold to Paris Match and will bring in at least €100,000 in revenue. This is one of the first big deals for citizen imagery agency Citizenside.

The video depicts Kerviel as he signed his statement at the police station.

Paris Match bought the exclusivity of the video for the French press and was to publish excerpts today.

Citizenside was created in 2006 and is specialized in collecting footage and still pictures from amateurs, which it then sells to traditional media outlets.

“This video will generate at least €100,000 in revenues,” said Citizenside founder Matthieu Stefani. “The author will receive between 50% and 75% of this sum.”

Citizenside recently signed a partnership with news agency Agence France-Presse. “These images are a new source of information,” said Stefani, “we don’t do the same thing AFP does, we’re complementary.

Source: Le Monde

In a surprise intervention, French minister of the Interior and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, along with other politicians, defended the press’ freedom of speech, in light of suit against Charlie Hebdo launched by Islamic organizations, a year after it published cartoons of Mahomet.

This article about the future of the French press was recently published in Le Monde in its Nov. 16th 2006 edition. Since comments can’t be posted by non-members on Le Monde’s website, the following is an extract from the article:

"Everything had started off well: in 1900, France led the world in the distribution of daily newspapers.

Time went by and the rankings changed. The daily French press scores poorly in most European rankings. The Daily Telegraph alone sells more copies than all of the French national news dailies, and France has fewer dailies (81) than Sweden (93), a country with seven times less inhabitants."

Daily children's newspapers seem to be popping up across the globe, most recently in Bolivia and soon in Mexico, Panama, and Ecuador. Now, Play Bac Presse, the French publisher of the most successful children's dailies to date, plan to launch a new kids paper directed at 8-10-year-olds in the United States.

On 19 October 2006, French broadcaster France 2 won a libel case over accusations it faked a report into the killing of Mohammed Al-Dura, a Palestinian boy whose death in 2000 became a symbol of the uprising known as the second intifada. The Court of First Instance in Paris ordered Philippe Karsenty, director of Media Ratings, a website that comments on the media, to pay France 2 and its Israel correspondent Charles Enderlin symbolic damages of one euro each. Immediately, Media Ratings made an appeal and there will be a new lawsuit.

French media - especially newspapers - supported a lot France Televisions (see former posting) and its journalist during the last six years. The Editors Weblog prefers to ask the other part about the consequences of this - first - judgment and what it reveals about fairness in French media.

A debate about the future of the printed world in the Internet era was held this past weekend in Paris. "Cité de la russite" or the "City of Success" brought together some of the best minds in the media business in a panel entitled "Towards a new responsibility of the press."

Bill Emmott, the outgoing editor of the weekly The Economist recently commented on the success of his newspaper suggesting that dailies had contributed significantly, but not in the way one would hope. Having helped to double the paper's circulation to over 1 million during his 13-year tenure, Emmott said that the tendency of daily papers to print more "entertainment" news while sacrificing hard facts and insightful editorials left the analytical Economist a niche for educated readers craving intelligent journalism. To see if others in the industry felt that newspapers were straying from their core function, The Editors Weblog asked several newspaper men and women to react to Emmott's comments:

The mantra from digital publishing advocates at the World Newspaper Advertising Conference & Expo was that newspaper companies must rapidly move their business on-line or risk getting left behind.
 
Ironically, those same advocates provided one of the strongest arguments for staying in, and developing, the print business -- newspapers generate much more revenue per reader than on-line media, and will continue to do so for some time to come.

 The Editors' Weblog has compiled a provisional list of the newspapers that have printed some or all of the cartoons since 30 September 2005, date of publication of 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Even provisional, this list is the most exhaustive on the internet, thanks to members of the World Editors Forum and to bloggers close to the EW.

The main conclusions are:

- to our knowledge, more than 130 national or local newspapers (excluding the student newspapers and online publications) published some or all of the 12 cartoons (sometimes just a pohtography) in approximately 50 countries . It also means that around 1,7% of the dailies around the world - 8,300 paid-for dailies according to World Press Trends 2005 - made the difficult decision to publish the cartoons.

- Europe was the continent where the most newspapers published the cartoons: at least 70 papers. It is not surprising that the Netherlands was the country most involved in the controversy (after Denmark)... a few months after the assassination of the film maker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist activist. Same thing in France after the veil debate and the November 2005 riots.

- Within Europe, the first publications to reprint the cartoons in January-February 2006 were in general right-wing publications, for example ABC in Spain, Die Welt in Germany and Corriere della Sera in Italy. Then more leftist publications followed suit, for example Libération and Le Monde in France.

- Surprisingly, Arab and Muslim newspapers were also involved in the controversy from the very beginning, with the first reprint on 17 October 2005 (see below)! More than 12 Arab and/or Muslim newspapers published the cartoons. The decision to publish provoked terrible consequences for the editors-in-chief of these publications. Same consequences for some directors of television in Sudan and Algeria. 

- How to define the position adopted by American, British, Canadian and Australian newspapers? Media responsability, political correctness or self-censorship? The most surprising is not the position defined in many editorials (from The New York Times to The Guardian), but this strange impression of unanimity and consensus: only three regional newspapers on more than 1,400 newspapers in the States and zero newspaper, but a student daily in the UK for taking the risk...

- And what in the rest of the world? Nothing. Almost the desert for the publication of the cartoons in the Americas (apart Brazil), Africa (apart South Africa) and above all Asia (apart New Zealand). As if this controversy was only between Europe and the Arab world and if blasphemy was still relevant in regions as Asia and the Americas: not only about Mohammed, but about all religious issues.

My conclusion: the geography of the publication of the Danish cartoons tells us a lot about our democracies: what is allowed, what is forbidden... and what is taboo. In fact, it's more geopolitics than geography!

In these days, it is difficult to be a French journalist when you have to talk about the Paris suburb riots. Either you are accused of self-censorship and political correctness, or of damaging France's image by excessive coverage!

The first answer is to point out that some of the most well-known French columnists and journalists have reaped as they sowed: during the London attacks and the Katrina hurricane, they gave a lot of lessons, saying that such catastrophies couldn't happen in France.

According to Reuters Rupert Murdoch will take the position as publisher at the New York Post, the oldest continuously published daily in the US (since 1801). Rupert Murdoch had this position already from 1976 to 1986. The move comes after his son Lachlan Murdoch resigned from his post at News Corp., which included being publisher of the New York Post, last week (see former postings here and here). According to Le Monde (in French) Rupert Murdoch's return is rather symbolic to reassure the staff who are facing severe competition from New York Daily News. James Murdoch, Rupert's sun No. 2,said on Wednesday that he will stay at his job at BSkyB, the satellite TV business, after "investors worried that, following the resignation of his brother Lachlan from News Corp, James would move to New York", reports thisismoney.co.uk .

Meanwhile the New York Times reports that Lachlan Murdoch will "receive a cash separation payment that could exceed $8 million." Lachlan Murdoch has been publisher of the New York Post for the last five years, "but failed to stop it from hemorrhaging a reported $70 million a year", writes concurrent New York Daily. However, circulation went up 40% while he was publisher reports Le Monde. As stated by Smartmoney Lachlan will become a company consultant: "Lachlan will advise and consult with News Corp. for a two-year period beginning on the date of resignation, or Aug. 31".

Sources: Reuters, Le Monde (in French), New York Times , New York Daily, thisismoney.co.uk, Smartmoney

Performing his watchdogging task as a blogger, Christophe Grébert has been the thorn in the side of the mayor's office of Puteaux, a rich Parisian suburb, for three years. Today, he is being summoned to court for libel, in the first French case of its kind. The case has merited front page news in Libération, a major French daily. Sticking his neck out in a town "where nobody dares speak out because the mayor's office is capable of the worst reprimands," Grébert's alleged crime is publishing extracts of an article concerning problems that an ex-employee of the town hall had with her former employer, and then adding his own commentary on his blog, MonPuteaux.com. Believing that his blog is simply a tool for freedom of expression, Grébert had previously been banned from entering municipal meetings because of the trouble he was causing the mayor's office, run for 36 years by the same family. Now, a man who for two years endured the jeers of his fellow citizens because of the light the mayor portrayed him in, Grébert has gained the sympathy of the blogosphere through which he is raising money to pay his court costs. Loic Le Meur, European director of SixApart, a blogging software company and host of MonPuteaux, says that blogs aren't outside the law, but they shouldn't be excessively regulated either.

Source: Libération (in French)

Performing his watchdogging task as a blogger, Christophe Grébert has been the thorn in the side of the mayor's office of Puteaux, a rich Parisian suburb, for three years. Today, he is being summoned to court for libel, in the first French case of its kind. The case has merited front page news in Libération, a major French daily. Sticking his neck out in a town "where nobody dares speak out because the mayor's office is capable of the worst reprimands," Grébert's alleged crime is publishing extracts of an article concerning problems that an ex-employee of the town hall had with her former employer, and then adding his own commentary on his blog, MonPuteaux.com. Believing that his blog is simply a tool for freedom of expression, Grébert had previously been banned from entering municipal meetings because of the trouble he was causing the mayor's office, run for 36 years by the same family. Now, a man who for two years endured the jeers of his fellow citizens because of the light the mayor portrayed him in, Grébert has gained the sympathy of the blogosphere through which he is raising money to pay his court costs. Loic Le Meur, European director of SixApart, a blogging software company and host of MonPuteaux, says that blogs aren't outside the law, but they shouldn't be excessively regulated either.

Source: Libération (in French)

"Our motto is show the truth," so François Dufour defines the success of his daily for 10-14 year olds, Mon Quotidien on expatica.com . Claiming to be "the only newspaper for kids in the Western world," Mon Quotidien has seen its sales skyrocket to EUR 15 million a year. Darfur says that the success of the paper is due to a "virtuous triangle: children who like to read news that is directed at them; parents who just like their children to read; and teachers who welcome material which feeds into the school curriculum." Producing 200,000 copies a day, two-thirds of subscribers are families and the rest schools. An eight page paper designed with short news stories, lots of illustrations and cartoons, provides a perfect 10 minute read for French youth and has become so popular that it has already spawned three spin-offs aimed at children in other age groups. Although Mon Quotidien avoids extreme images, it still attempts to give kids a good idea of reality, treating controversial subjects such as homosexuality and violence in schools. The contradiction lies in the fact that French parents are encouraging their kids to read, but are not picking up the paper themselves. "It is an incredible fact that 70 percent of the parents who subscribe to one of our papers for their children do not take an adult newspaper themselves. And it turns out that a lot of parents actually read