Results matching “poland new dail”

The proposed merger of two Polish dailies and the launch of an entertainment version of a political weely, both intended to conquer a new public and consolidate readership, have raised some doubts in the Polish newspaper industry.

Poland's largest business and legal daily Gazeta Prawna (87,000 paid circulation) will merge with the second quality news daily Dziennik (147,000 readership), in a 51/49% partnership between Infor Biznes and Axel Springer, their respective owners. The transaction, which will result in a combined newspaper strong in economics on one side, and politics, culture and sports on the other, is still subject to approval by the authorities.

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with  Jaroslaw Kurski, first deputy editor-in-chief, Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland.

The list of upcoming interviews will be updated as they are published (click here to view all interviews in this series). Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

1. How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We stopped being a newspaper-only company in 1993 when we launched our first internet discussion board. Today we have millions of boards. Our web portal website Gazeta.pl reaches now 6 million unique users per month. It is a magic figure, as it is also the total number of readers of the printed edition of Gazeta Wyborcza.

We started our company in 1989 with a newspaper, but today we are one of the leading multimedia companies in Central and Eastern Europe. We publish newspapers, magazines and books, we run networks of radio stations and an outdoor company.

And we strongly invest in digital media. Our board has an ambition that in three years time more than half of our revenues will come from other sources than print. Until now all our websites reach 44 per cent of internet users in Poland. This is an extraordinary outcome for a newspaper publisher like us.

2. At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

Futurists like bold predictions, but as a journalist I prefer to look at facts.

Since 2003 there have been seven new national printed daily newspapers launched in Poland. So we faced a new competitor every single year. Is this rush any sign of weakness of the printed medium?

I believe that as long as we have something important to say and people here care to listen to us and talk with us, Gazeta Wyborcza will exist. The message is important, and the dialogue; and not the channel.

If print becomes irrelevant, we will spread our ideas in any other way. Newspapers will not die, they will change.

Last but not least: a Polish word for a newspaper - "gazeta" - does not have any "paper" in it. So even if futurists are right and print newspapers will disappear, Gazeta will remain.

3. In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

Journalism is about intelligible conveying of news and about telling stories of importance that move the community. I appreciate digital tools, they are great and helpful, but they are tools only. You still need a story, a teller and a community. So has anything really changed in journalism?

4. Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

This active role is more than welcome. Let me give you some recent examples from Gazeta Wyborcza.

Since 1996 we have been reviewing maternity wards in Polish hospitals; we wished to improve a quality of healthcare in our country. We could have sent there 100 journalists, but a single mother - who really gave birth in any hospital - can tell you more than reporters. So we asked young mothers for help. In 1996 we got 2000 (two thousand) letters by post. In 2006, thanks to the internet, we gathered 40 000 (forty thousand) personal reviews. We were able to review 423 or 96 % of all hospitals in Poland. We would not be able to do this without our readers.

When we recently reported a huge migration of Poles to the Western European countries after Poland joined the EU in 2004 - we asked readers for help. Hundreds joined our reporting effort.
When we called for saving Rospuda, a wild river in North-Eastern Poland that was sentenced to death by the government - we asked readers for support and thousands marched in the streets, hundreds protested on the spot.

When we discussed a crisis in pensions system - we asked readers for advice and published the best investing guides ever.

We see interaction with readers not as a column of letters on page number 86. It is about inviting readers to play a crucial part in the editorial process.

5. Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

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 Monday (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.


Thanks to Kurski for sharing his views. And stay tuned for the next interviews in our series.

For its relaunch, the Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews with some top editors at leading newspapers around the world about the future of journalism. We kick off the series with Ed Greenspon, Editor-in-Chief of the Globe & Mail in Canada.

The list of upcoming interviews will be updated as they are published (click here to view all interviews in this series). Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)


"News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We no longer define our company as a newspaper or print company. We define ourselves as a news organization. I would say we began to do so about two years ago. In fact, I can almost pin it down to the day.

We had what in Canada was a major exclusive on a deal that would end the lockout of professional hockey. We were able to confirm the story at about 3:00 in the afternoon. We decided to put it up on the web rather than wait for the next day's paper, even though we would be tipping off our competitors.

While this wasn't the first time we had ever done this, it was a pretty major story and "giving it away" generated some internal debate. Two things happened:

    1. Over a hundred other media around the world cited globeandmail.com as the source of the story in their own reports.

    2. The scoop held in the Canadian newspapers. Even though we had posted it in the afternoon, nobody was able to match it. They also had to cite us in the next day's papers.

The moment presented a good opportunity to truly define what we knew we were becoming - a news organization with a strong base and history in print and a strong presence and future in digital.

At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

Not a whole lot. Printed material has been around for centuries and newspapers have encountered many incursions. The web and mobile have impressive technological and story-telling strengths. They extend our creative and physical reach.

But the newspaper also boasts unique attributes.  It is a thing of beauty that you can touch and take with you.  It is filled with information you didn't know you wanted to know.  It is an entity with which a reader can enjoy an intimate, emotional relationship.   It is a daily one-stop validation of the world around you.

Some forms of newspapers may not continue to exist, but in one form or another, newspapers will survive the internet age as they have survived other ages.

In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

I see it more as part of the continuity. I like to say that the platform isn't print or the web or mobile but that the platform is the journalism. That's the distinguishing factor and the competitive advantage of most news organizations.

The role of story telling goes back centuries and isn't going away. The craft of journalism, the skill of finding out and communicating important information and sorting the wheat from the chaff for your readers, will be in even higher demand as stories become more complex. Digital provides extra-ordinary new ways to tell stories in our world and for readers to take control of distribution and share with one another. So new opportunities abound.

It's only a break if we aren't clever enough to earn the money from the web necessary to finance our journalistic undertakings. I don't see that as an impossible challenge.

Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

First off, the closer a journalist can be to his or her audience the better. Users do not replace journalists, they supplement them. We have to stop being afraid to tap into the intelligence of our readers. We also have to understand that we play a unique role as full-time and fully-trained fact finders and story tellers. We now have a new tool at our disposal: the relationship we can build with readers.

Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I think, for news organizations that are confident enough to invest in their journalistic resources, this should be a great age for investigative journalism. In the clutter and clatter of a 500-million channel universe, it is a great differentiator and in an age in which a non-deferential public demands greater public transparency, the place for investigative journalism should be secure.

The fact that it is not speaks to how fear and fragmentation overwhelm many in the industry. It is great that a non-profit, philanthropic entity in the United States is being established to pursue investigative journalism. But I believe there is also a commercial case to be made. The fact that so many news organizations are cutting resources actually creates even more room in the marketplace for those willing to pursue this kind of journalistic-intensive, public-interest approach.


Stay tuned for upcoming interviews about the future of journalism.

Source: Ed Greespon, editor Globe & Mail

Publisher Polskapresse is using the Spanish ProtecMedia’s Milenium platform to produce its new national daily, Polska The Times, through the merging of Polskapresse’s six regional titles.

Metro International was forced to shut down its Polish edition, Metropol, due to insufficient funding, after being launched successfully in 2000.

Former Mirror Group executive David Montgomery announced plans to purchase Norway’s Orkla Media by the end of July, the Guardian reported Wednesday, a sweeping move that further extends his reach over European media.

As Germany’s Axel Springer sets to launch a new daily, Poland’s already well-established daily Gazeta Wyborcza, the country’s number 2-selling daily after Fakt, will slash its price to better deal with this new direct competition. Media group Agora will cut the cover price of this flagship daily, “[enabling] readers to decide purely on quality and not on financial considerations,” Agora said in a statement.

What remains to be seen is whether this will create a general price war amongst Polish newpapers as similar initiatives have done in markets such as Ireland and the UK.

Source: Reuters [Through the European Journalism Centre]

German media giant Axel Springer is set to launch a new upper-market daily in Poland, said industry sources. “The newspaper, the Polish version of Die Welt, is designed to compete with daily Gazeta Wyborcza owned by Polish media group Agora and broadsheet Rzeczpospolita controlled by Norway's Orkla,” said Reuters.

Polish newspaper Nowy Dzien, launched by publisher Agora in November 2005 (see previous posting), is to cease being published. The last edition of the paper will be published on 23, February 2006. The decision to close down the relatively new paper was made because of its declining sales. The paper would have needed to reach a sales figure of 250 000 copies daily to be profitable. It is currently at under 200 000 copies and falling.

Source: Agora SA (through the IFRA newsletter)

 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!

The Polish regional daily NTO, published in the South Western Opole region, launches its new format today. NTO will retain its tabloid format, but the content of the newspaper will change. The objective of this change is to interact better with readers, attract a younger readership and improve coverage of local issues.

Polish publisher Agora SA (owner of Wyborcza Gazeta) today announced that the first issue of its new Monday to Saturday paper, Nowy Dziea (New Day), will come out on November 14th.

Agora asserts that Nowy Dziea will be a mid-market paper (see previous posting). As already said, this launching is an answer to the successful Fakt launched by Axel Springer two years ago, even if Fakt is more a classical tabloid than a mid-market paper.

Things are getting hotter in the already crowded Polish newspaper market. According to the Warsaw Business Journal more than 5,400 press titles exist on this media market. And new launches have been announced. Agora, publisher of Poland's leading quality newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza plans to launch a new newspaper this autumn (see former postings here and here). This week, Berliner Zeitung reported that German publisher Springer, the biggest competitor of Agora in Poland, will also launch a new paper in Poland next spring.

The new newspaper expected to be launched by publisher Agora SA in Poland this autumn will not be a "down-market tabloid" as announced earlier (see former posting). "Representatives of the company's board declared that the new daily will not be a tabloid but a 'newspaper of the center' ", reports the Warsaw Business Journal. Representatives also stated that the new daily is not going to compete with existing papers. The new paper, whose name is still unknown, is said to be an original project of Agora SA and not copied from any foreign or national newspaper. Jerzy Wójcik, former chief editor of the Polish free paper Metro, that is also published by Agora, will be the editor-in-chief of the new paper.

Source: Warsaw Business Journal