Laurent Mauriac, Pierre Haski and Pascal Riché, who will leave Libération, are planning on a still-vague participatory journalism website, followed by their collegues Nicole Pénicaut and Arnaud Aubron. There are other examples: Youvox, with Laurent Esposito and Christian Jegourel, Obiwi, by Julien Jacob et Jean-Louis Amblard, and Cafebabel, involving among others Alexandre Heully.

"The launch of the Politico "gave us a boost by validating our venture," explained Haski. 

Like Politico, Haski's venture, Rue89.com (alluding to the 1789 Revolution), "will be coordinated by about fifteen professional journalists, who will give it a quality label," he said.

“The new generation abandons the mirage of ‘citizen journalism’ to create participatory journalism, which advocates editorial supervision,” writes Emmanuel, ecosphere’s blogger.

Emmanuel mentions the Korean news website, OhMyNews, which succeeded using this model of user-generated content supervised by a professional or semi-professional editorial team.

These new participatory journalism ventures are based on quality, and add editorial supervision and exclusive content to the regular recipe of blogs and citizen contributions.

“These are no longer the fruits of hazardous experimentation, but instead the product of individuals who observed the market and learned about business models, content organization and editorial projects,” writes Emmanuel.

The business models of the journalists' ventures is still undecided, as some are reticent to rely on advertising, 'to keep their independence'. Haski though hopes that advertisers and sponsors will flock in the months to come, while others hesistate between subscription models or free access requiring user submissions.

“They whistle the end of recess for ‘user-generated’ content to impose criteria of quality.”

Will they work better than traditional citizen journalism sources? Only time will tell, but already Emmanuel predicts that the journalists and their sites “won’t become millionaires, but rather laboratories for future professional press websites.”

Source: Ecosphere (link in French)