AgoraVox, crowned best French journalistic weblog at the 2005 International Weblog Awards (for the rest of the winners see here), is "leading the field in European citizen journalism" asserts Jemima Kiss of journalism.co.uk. Traffic to the blog is currently increasing at a rate of 40% per month and the Yahoo News is already listing its stories beside AFP and Reuters news reports.

Journalism.co.uk interviewed Guillaume Champeau, UK executive of AgoraVox, here are some of his comments.

Asked whether he feels blogging is a threat to traditional media, Champeau answered:

"Let's be honest. You cannot expect individual bloggers to accomplish the same job that professional reporters do for newspapers. Writing articulate articles requires skills, knowledge and experience that most citizen journalists don't have. Some bloggers may have some of these qualities, but most don't.

Bloggers have different qualities: they are better at providing local news, at analysing facts on original angles and at providing readership with a certain kind of expertise."

When Champeau was asked about the general reaction to citizen journalism in France, he said:

"Contrary to what happened in other countries, newspapers in France seem to have adopted blogs as partners fairly easily. The online edition of Le Monde created its own blogs section and Liberation regularly features blogs in their papers. And bloggers often rely on information provided by traditional newspapers to open discussions with their own information or viewpoint.

It is very complementary, and we hope the AgoraVox initiative will help raise the level of confidence in citizen journalism to that of traditional newspapers."

When asked what he feels is key to making a citizen journalism site a success, Champeau responded:

"We believe the best way of becoming successful is to do a good job finding and keeping the best writers, respect everyone's opinion and check that each information published is accurate."

Source: journalism.co.uk