France: new print weekly aggregates online media content

Posted by Jean Yves Chainon on March 26, 2008 at 11:06 AM

A new local weekly paper hit the stands last Saturday north of France. Dubbed Blablabla Hebdo, the paper aims to offer a review of the week's media coverage - satirically.

The opening editorial is clear about the paper's view on news:

"We don't believe in 'news.' It's a journalists' invention. And it's precisely because there isn't 'real news', but only 'information', thousands of new bits of 'information' that are constructed daily, that it's of utmost importance to filter those bits."

The paper was founded by Stéphane de Rosnay and Frédéric Lafeuille. De Rosnay has already had experience as a freelancer for a publication with a similar concept, the Canard enchaîné.

Blablabla Hebdo covers media coverage, from print, through a lot of online news, to a bit of TV and radio.

The newspaper works as a content aggregator, mixing non-original content with some opinion. The print paper feeds upon a number of popular blogs and online news sites, including Rue89 and Bakchich.

According to the Calembredaine blog, despite Blablabla's ostensibly critical approach of media coverage, the paper does a good job of digging out stories that went off the mainstream media's radar.

Source: Calembredaine (link in French)