This is what I said at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, March 12, 2011. It went well.

Many thanks to Lisa Williams for helping with the tech and the backchannel. You can find a live blog of my presentation here. Audio will be available later. When it is, I will link to it. Here’s the official description.

There’s an old rule among sportswriters: no cheering in the press box. In fact, a few weeks ago a young journalist lost his job at Sports Illustrated for just that reason: cheering at the conclusion of a thrilling race. Sportswriters could allow themselves to cheer occasionally without it affecting their work, but they don’t. And this rule gets handed down from older to younger members of the group.

So this is a little example of the psychology, not of individual journalists, but of the profession itself. We don’t often talk this way, but we could: “No cheering in the press box” is the superego at work. It’s a psychological thing within the sportswriter’s tribe. You learn to wear the mask if you want to join the club.

Six years ago I wrote an essay called Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. It was my most well read piece at the time. And it made the points you would expect: This distinction is eroding. This war is absurd. Get over it. Move on. There’s bigger work to be done.

But since then I’ve noticed that while the division–-bloggers as one type, journalists as another–-makes less and less sense, the conflict continues to surface. Why? Well, something must be happening under the surface that expresses itself through bloggers vs. journalists. But what is that subterranean thing? This is my real subject today.

And to preview my answer: disruptions caused by the Internet threaten to expose certain buried conflicts at the heart of modern journalism and a commercialized press. Raging at bloggers is a way to keep these demons at bay. It exports inner conflicts to figures outside the press. Also–and this is important–bloggers and journalists are each other’s ideal “other.”

In tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine, which went online Thursday, Bill Keller acts out a version of bloggers vs. journalists. He ridicules aggregators like the Huffington Post and pokes at media bloggers (including me, Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis) for producing derivative work that is parasitic on news producers.

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.

Of course the Times does aggregation, too. When it reviews a book or play that’s… derivative. We could charge Keller with petty hypocrisy, but that’s not my point. This is my point: There’s something about bloggers vs. journalists that permits the display of a preferred (or idealized) self among people in the press whose work lives have been disrupted by the Internet. There’s an attraction there. Spitting at bloggers is closely related to gazing at your own reflection, and falling in love with it all over again.

This is from an editor’s column in an Australian newspaper:

The great thing about newspapers is that, love us or hate us, we’re the voice of the people. We represent the community, their views, their aspirations and their hopes. We champion North Queensland’s wins and we commiserate during our losses…

Bloggers, on the other hand, represent nothing. They whinge, carp and whine about our role in society, and yet they contribute nothing to it, other than satisfying their juvenile egos.

Editorial writers as the voice of the people? Are you quite sure, Mr. Editor? Well, compared to bloggers…. yeah, we’re sure!

And to go with this preferred or idealized self, a demonized other, the pajama-wearing, basement-dwelling blogger. Andrew Marr is the former political editor of the BBC. He says:

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people. OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk.

But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night. It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism.

Now there’s a clear risk in trying to do this at South by Southwest: to many people who have been paying attention, especially the digerati, bloggers v. journalists is almost the definition of a played-out theme. Aren’t we past all that by now? I know this is what some people will be thinking because I thought that way myself. Blogging is far more accepted today. Most journalists are bloggers themselves, so the distinction is getting weirder. Many newsrooms are trying to attract bloggers into local networks. Blogging itself has been overtaken by social media, some people think.

Did you catch that word, replace? For this subject, that’s like a blinking red light. Or better yet: an icon on your desktop. Click on the icon, and all the contents of bloggers vs. journalists are displayed. Ask bloggers why they blog and they might say: because big media sucks! But they will almost never say: I AM YOUR REPLACEMENT. This fantasy of replacement comes almost exclusively from the journalist’s side, typically connected to fears for a lost business model.

Frédéric Filloux is a former editor of Liberation in Paris. His view:

Today’s problem is not one media versus another, it’s the future of journalism — it’s finding the best possible way to finance the gathering and the processing of independent, reliable, and original information…. I don’t buy into the widespread delusion that legions of bloggers, compulsive twitterers or facebookers amount to a replacement for traditional journalism.

Keep clicking on the “replace” icon and other fears surface.

This is Connie Schultz, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which has had a number of run-ins with local bloggers.

As I write this, only half of the states in the U.S. now have even one full-time reporter in Washington, D.C. No amount of random blogging and gotcha videos can replace the journalism that keeps a government accountable to its people. If you’re a journalist, you already know that. If you’re the rest of America, chances are you have no idea.

Blogging cannot replace the watchdog journalism that keeps a government accountable to its people. Journalists know that, but somehow the American people don’t. Replacement-by-bloggers talk is displaced anger toward a public that doesn’t appreciate what journalists do, a public that would somehow permit the press to wither away without asking what would be lost.

Here’s John Kass, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune:

[Our] reporters work in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. They do not blog from mommy’s basement, cutting and pasting what others have reported, while putting it under a cute pen name on the Internet.

Instead, the Tribune’s reporters are out knocking on doors in violent neighborhoods late at night, looking for witnesses after murders. Or they stand in the morgue and talk to the families of the dead. Tribune reporters are not anonymous. They use their own names, put them at the top of their stories and are accountable for what they write.

Bloggers are anonymous creeps. Journalists put it all out there and risk their reputations. Kass isn’t instructing bloggers in what makes them suck. He’s speaking to readers of the Tribune-–and especially former subscribers–-who are safely asleep in the suburbs, while reporters investigate crimes and comfort the dead. You can almost feel his rage at the injustice of the Internet.

The Tribune, of course, is currently in bankruptcy. It’s also welcoming bloggers to the fold through it’s Chicago Now site, which is a local blogging platform. Julie DiCaro, blogger for Chicago Now, responded to John Kass this way:

Being derided by reporters at the Tribune for no apparent reason probably isn’t the best way to attract new bloggers to the Tribune’s network. And, if I’m being honest, grumbling about bloggers these days is tantamount to yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off your lawn. It makes you look really, really old.

It’s not only readers who need remedial instruction in the value-added by journalists. Advertisers, too, need to be schooled. This is from a pitch to would-be advertisers by the Los Angeles Times:

What kind of awards coverage are you looking for?

Choose one:

A.) Accurate, in depth stories reported by journalists with years of experience.

B.) Unconfirmed, incomplete rumors spread by bloggers with axes to grind.

Here, bloggers vs. journalists helps underlines the self-evident superiority of the professional model. Of course, if it were really self-evident, drawing the contrast would be unnecessary… right?

This is probably my favorite quote of the ones I’ve collected. It’s from the West Seattle Herald, in an editorial about its competitor, West Seattle blog. (Hat tip, Tracy Record.)

Professional journalists don’t waste your time.

Instead of 3000 words about a community council meeting that was “live blogged” with updates every seven minutes, wouldn’t you honestly prefer 300 words that tell you what happened and what was decided?

What I like about this one is that question, “wouldn’t you prefer?” You can hear the tone of puzzlement, the plea for reason. The old school news provider struggles to understand why anyone would choose those new goods, like live blogging, that the Internet makes possible.

So far, I have been discussing what professional journalists “get” by hanging on to bloggers vs. journalists. But bloggers get something, too. I do not want to neglect that. Listen to the teet, a 25 year-old female blogger and writer in Columbus, Ohio:

I think I have an unnatural obsession with and hatred for the editor of the Dispatch.

Everything he says makes me want the throw my computer monitor out the window. Regardless, I’ve left him on my Google Reader. I always flip to the front of the Insight section on Sundays. I secretly love the pain he causes me.

By raging at newspaper editors, bloggers manage to keep themselves on the “outside” of a system they are in fact a part of. Meaning: It’s one Internet, folks. The news system now incorporates the people formerly known as the audience. Twitter and Facebook are hugely powerful as distributors of news.

I’ve said that bloggers and journalists are each other’s ideal “other.” From the blogger’s side, the conflict with journalists helps preserve some of that ragged innocence (which is itself a kind of power) by falsely locating all the power in Big Media. Here’s another blogger in Columbus, talking about the same newspaper editor:

Note to Ben Marrison: If you want to pretend that you, as a professional journalist, are somehow better than political bloggers … because you are less biased and less lazy then you might consider actually NOT being both lazy and biased while writing online rants for the world to see.

Don’t you know that’s OUR job?

We can be lazy and biased. For we are young and irresponsible. You are supposed to be the grown-ups here. This keeps at bay a necessary thought: we all have to grow up… someday. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, and now, because we have the Web, anyone can own one. The press is us. Not “them.” Is this not the very force that brings 10,000 people to South by Southwest Interactive?

I have always found it fascinating that both bloggers and journalists will use the word “traditional” in referring to the model of professional journalism that is taught in boot camp J-schools and practiced at, say, the Washington Post. That tradition is about 80 to 90 years old, at most. But our experiment with a free press is 250 years old. Whole chapters of it were discarded by American journalists when they tried to make themselves more scientific and objective in order to claim elevated status.

But these discarded parts of the tradition live on in the subconscious. And with blogging they have come roaring back. I make reference to this in the tag line to my blog, PressThink. The subtitle is: “Ghost of democracy in the media machine.”

Let’s visit one of those ghosts. Lincoln Steffens was the one of the original muckrakers. He exposed corruption in the machine politics of the big cities. This is from his 1902 book, The Shame of the Cities.

I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts. My purpose was [to] see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride. That was the journalism of it. I wanted to move and to convince.

The part that gets me is, “I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts.” No journalist at the Washington Post would say that today. It is not permitted. It would mark the speaker as unfit for the tribe. Although the kind of journalism that Dana Priest and Bob Woodward practice is a direct descendant of Lincoln Steffens and the muckrakers, something dropped out between 1902 and 2002.

“I wanted to destroy the facts… I wanted to move and convince… ” This is what dropped out when journalism professionalized itself in the 1920s and 30s. The bloggers, in this sense, are “the return of the repressed.” They write like Lincoln Steffens.

On the surface: antagonists. Dig deeper and the bloggers look more like the ancestors of today’s journalists. They are closer to Tom Paine than Bob Woodward is. They bring back what was lost in the transformation of journalism into a profession and a business that, say, Warren Buffet could invest in.

Here’s another dispatch from the newsroom’s superego. It’s the Washington Post’s social media guidelines:

When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.

If you ask journalists why they chose their profession, they give a range of answers: to see the world, something new every day, I like to write. The most common answer is some variation on: to make the world a better place, to right wrongs and stick up for the little guy. Social justice, in other words. No one ever says, “I went into journalism because I have a passion for being… objective.” Or: “Detachment, that’s my thing. I’m kind of a detached guy, so I figured this would be a good field for me.”

And yet… When they get there, people who always wanted to be journalists and make the world a better place find that the professional codes in place often prevent this. It’s hard to fight for justice when you have to master “he said, she said” stories. Voice is something you learn to take out of your work if you want to succeed in the modern newsroom. You are supposed to sacrifice and learn to report the story without attitude or bias creeping in. And then, if you succeed in disciplining yourself, you might one day get a column and earn the right to crusade for justice, to move and convince.

This is a moral hierarchy, which bloggers disrupt. They jump right to voice, which appears to mock all the years of voicelessness that mainstream journalists had suffered through.

Last year a young reporter (and blogger) named Dave Weigel had to resign from the Washington Post after someone leaked some emails of his, in which he complained about people on the political right whom he also had to cover. After he was gone, some staffers at the Post dumped on Weigel anonymously. Here is what they said:

“The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training.”

Without the proper amount of toilet-training. Freud wouldn’t even charge to interpret a quote like that. Which shows that bloggers vs. journalists doesn’t end when a blogger is hired at a big institutional player like the Washington Post. Instead the conflict is absorbed directly into the institution.

Journalists today are under stress. The stress has five sources. Bloggers put all five right into the face of professional journalism.

One: A collapsing economic model, as print and broadcast dollars are exchanged for digital dimes.

Two: New competition (the loss of monopoly) as a disruptive technology, the Internet, does its thing.

Three: A shift in power. The tools of the modern media have been distributed to the people formerly known as the audience.

Four: A new pattern of information flow, in which “stuff” moves horizontally, peer to peer, as effectively as it moves vertically, from producer to consumer. Audience atomization overcome, I call it.

Five: The erosion of trust (which started a long time ago but accelerated after 2002) and the loss of authority.

A useful comparison would be to medical doctors: when patients can look up a drug on the Internet, research a course of treatment or connect with others who have the same condition, the authority of the doctor does not disappear. And it’s not that people don’t trust their doctors anymore. But the terms of authority have to change to allow for patients who have more information, more options, and more power to argue with their physicians.

In pro journalism, it is similar: the terms of authority have to change. The practice has to become more interactive. And this is happening under conditions of enormous stress.

The psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of The Moral Life of Children and other great works, wrote a book called The Call of Stories (which is another reason people go into journalism, to answer that call.) In the beginning of that book he reflects on his early training in psychiatry, at a mental hospital in Boston. He is told to make his rounds and classify his patients by the diseases they seem to be exhibiting, and note any changes in their condition.

After a few weeks of this, Coles is depressed. He’s doing the work, classifying and observing, but he cannot see how his patients are going to improve. So he goes to see his supervisor, a wiser and older doctor. Coles complains: I don’t get it. I am doing what they told me to do, but how are my patients going to get any better? The older doctor listens to him, and pauses. It’s as if he’s been waiting for the question. And this is what he says:

Our patients have been telling themselves a story about who they are and where they fit in the world. And for reasons we do not understand very well, their story has broken down. It no longer lets them live in the real world, so they wind up here.

Your job—your only job—is to listen to them, and then get them to see that they have to start telling themselves a better story. Or they won’t get out of here. If you can do that–any way you can do that–you are doing psychiatry. Coles got it. And this was the beginning of his career as a clinician.

I think this illuminates the situation with the professional press today. The story it has been telling itself has broken down. It no longer helps the journalist navigate the real world conditions under which journalism is done today. Somehow, journalists have to start telling themselves a better story about what they do and why it matters. And we have to help them. We interactive people.

For people in the press, bloggers vs. journalists is an elaborate way of staying the same, of refusing to change, while permitting into the picture some of the stressful changes I have mentioned. A shorter way to say this is: it’s fucking neurotic.

Thank you for your attention.

(Dedicated to James W. Carey, 1935-2006.)

>> This article was originally published on Pressthink.org

>> Photo FlickR CC by : RedJinn: Questions are not lonely without answers, Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Owni entame aujourd’hui un cycle de traduction des articles que vous avez préférés sur la soucoupe. Ce n’est que la première de nombreuses surprises à venir.

Nous commençons par un article de Benoit Raphaël, rédacteur en chef du Post (UPDATE).

Bienvenue à bord aux nouveaux venus !

Today Owni starts a new cycle : we will translate some of the articles that you liked the most. It is only the first surprise of a lot more to come. We start here with the translation of an article written by Benoît Raphaël, editor in chief at Le Post.

Welcome aboard to foreign friends !

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Turbulent times can become very productive to create new ideas. In my spare time, I had the chance to think about the concept of a blended newsroom combining harmoniously web and print dimensions. Since I found this issue fascinating , I decided to share it with you and start a conversation.

It has long been talking about models of integrated newsrooms (the best known is the one Ifra suggested). Another one is Daily Telegraph’s integrated newsroom. Quite scary at first glance, hum?

But very often theoretical models clash with day-by-day reality of newsrooms that include today a large majority of print-oriented journalists with small web experience. If you ask them to write both for print and web, you’ll get them torn between two media. This produces two blocks:

1) The web is not a pipe in which you can put any type of content. Print articles are very often unsuitable for web and mobile use. Just think that at LeMonde.fr, print articles represent 30% of production, but less than 15% of traffic. You can not just write and redirect to a pipe. To produce a content you have to take an evolving environment into account

People make the same mistake today with mobile phones, when they pretend to replicate there the same content that has been conceived for desktop devices.

2) Journalists become schizophrenic. They become “bi-media” and feel they are bi-working, which for them means “twice”… As a consequence, they keep producing with a print-oriented vision.

Thus, we have to forget that old idea of merging newsrooms. And make a choice: go where the information breathes, where readers/users are connected and involved. Create one newsroom “where everything happens,” that is to say on the web. This is the heart of information system. The rest is just appearance.

Why the web ? Because the Google era has changed everything. And generated the emergence (and necessity) of the so-called networked journalism. A journalism that is not just content production but becomes an on-going process that is based on the strength of the network (information fragmentation, new rhythms, social media, user generated content…) to produce and distribute information.

You will then get neither one “bi-media” newsroom or two, but three that I would divide into 2 subgroups:

One Creation-oriented journalism (the Google Newsroom)
One Curation-oriented Journalism (community management and copy desk)

Note that I do not use the word “journalist” but “journalism”. Journalism taken not as a profession but as a (precious) function – where sharing journalistic skills with amateurs is considered as a strength.

Take the example of a newspaper. Let’s call it “The Hope” :

- 100.000 copies / day
- 1 €
- 36 pages.
- Print newsroom: 85 journalists + 7 copy editors.
- Web newsroom: 7 journalists + 1 community manager.
That means 100 journalists.
A beautiful newsroom. But there is not a single market where they are leader. Not enough people on the web, too few on the paper.

Now imagine a new version. Always with our 100 journalists. But in this case the newsroom will be so focused on the “digital” dimension that it will be number one on the web and mobile information.
At the same time, The Hope will publish a newspaper of highest quality which will enable it to increase sales – and perhaps the price. Incidentally, it will earn more money.

1 – One Creation-oriented journalism: the Google Newsroom

Composed of 80 of your journalists, but also integrating other journalistic productions (via link journalism), blogging and user generated content managed by the media.

Your 80 journalists are gathered into 10 business units, ie in thematic clusters. Just as an independent media (which could be branded in another way) managed (or not) by a cluster manager, around which you can gather 8 journalists, bloggers, a community + 1 marketing + 1 sales officer (they can work on multiple clusters).
Each cluster can also have its copy editor and its associated community manager.
(One can also imagine 3 large clusters of 16 journalists and 3 clusters of 10 journalists etc.).

In each cluster, we will produce creation-oriented journalism. The driving question must be: since everyone covers approximately the same information on the network, what is my added value?

You will thus find:

- Reporters (Journalists + bloggers): they don’t “cover” news, they don’t replicate press agencies wires, they bring original stories.

They go on the real or virtual ground. They publish with a large array of rhythms: live tweeting, articles, videos, data, in-depth investigation… They can also manage a community of bloggers / users with whom they can co-produce the news.

- Curators (journalists + amateurs) : they “cover” the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible.

- Columnists (bloggers, journalists, experts): they start conversations and give stories another perspective.

2 – A Curation-oriented journalism:

- A team of 10 super-copy-editors, in charge of curating the news in 36 pages. They work only on 3 or 4 pages each, but they have a real old-school copy-editing job. They retrieve the content published by the Google Newsroom and make it live in a different way. They are in charge of making the news more readable and more visual. They do with the paper everything that the web can not do.
A fine example of what the paper is capable is the Portuguese newspaper “I”.

With the support of copy-editors, each “digital” business unit may decide to produce printed special issues.

- A team of 10 community journalists and database-journalists, in charge of curating the information on the web and mobile. In fact, they are primarily responsible for user experience with the news. They take care of the quality of users’ engagement.

They also work on curating the information in the form of databases (like the New York Times).

They also organize the content in topics pages assembling in one web page all that you should know about a topic (posts, links, tweets, cold data, etc.). The Huffington Post do it very well with their Big News Pages.

The result of all this is a networked, powerful, completely reorganized newsroom : The Google Newsroom.
With 80 Google Journalists, this would be France’s first online newsroom.

Imagine the same thing with the 200 journalists that work today in big national daily newspapers.

You will tell me: will your 80 journalists be able to go on the web ? In most newsrooms, the “web level” is close to zero.
I think so. What is blocking is rather bi-media, schizophrenia. Now, if the message and the environment is clear, if he/she is properly trained, a good journalist will do good journalism.

The most reluctant will have the chance of having fun with a creative form of copy-editing.

It is a model that can easily be duplicated to television and radio.

What do you think about all this ?

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» The original article (in french) and a reaction by Mikiane from France24 (in french too)

» Translation by Adriano Farano (and a litte bit by Guillaume Ledit) /-)

» Homepage illustration by mediamolecule sur Flickr

Je profite du billet très intéressant de Benoit Raphael (que je vous d’ailleurs invite à lire) pour poursuivre ma réflexion sur les modèles de création et de financement des contenus à l’heure d’Internet et de l’abondance.

L’organisation que décrit Benoit quand il parle de “Google Newsroom” est celle que plusieurs nouveaux média expérimentent.

Pour ma part je soutiens le schéma organisationnel suivant (chez France 24 nous nous en sommes inspiré pour réorganiser les équipes marketing techniques et éditoriales depuis 6 mois ) :

L’objectif principal de ce schéma regroupant toutes les équipes est de faciliter la fertilisation entre métiers.

1/ Le marketing (en noir) a pour charge les études qualitatives et quantitatives de trafic, les campagnes de référencement, la gestion des mailing, la distributions des contenus aux partenaires multimédia.

2/ La rédaction (en rouge) s’organise autour des rôles suivants :

Le MuJo (ou Journaliste Multimedia) est capable d’écrire des articles, de monter des sujets audio / vidéo, de réaliser des reportages multimedia comportant des composants variés (diaporamas, mashups, contenus externes agrégés…). Le MuJo est un journaliste sensibilisé à l’écriture multimédia ayant des compétences techniques qu’il peut mettre à profit dans son travail de création, d’édition, de promotion et de suivi de ses contenus.
Parmi les MuJo on peut retrouver les rôles de reporters, de curators et de chroniqueurs qu’évoque Benoit dans son article.

Le Community Manager / ou le Topic Editor est une “tête de réseau”. C’est un journaliste passionné et spécialisé dans un (ou plusieurs) domaine(s) qu’il couvre en priorité. Il construit une communauté autour de la thématique qu’il traite. Il source, recherche, sélectionne et vérifie des contenus dans sa communauté et les restitue. C’est souvent aussi un Mujo.
Le Home Page Editor est un chef d’édition. Il a pour responsabilité la construction et le suivi permanent de l’offre de contenu proposé à la une des sites (mobile, web, réseau social).
Les source hunters sont des journalistes enquêteurs sur le réseau. Ce sont les “datas journalists” dont parle Benoit dans son billet. Ils sont capables d’aller trouver des données pertinentes permettant de construire ou d’enrichir un sujet, de dénicher et d’accumuler les données qui alimentent les applications-jounalistiques telles que celles proposées par exemple ici par le NYT.

3/ Le pôle technique (en gris) est organisé autour de 3 pôles :

Les MuDev, ou développeurs multimédias sont des profils hybrides entre développeurs et graphistes ayant une forte sensibilité éditoriale. Ils sont un bon support pour la rédaction. Ils développent aussi des contenus à forte technicité (des webdocumentaires, des applications-journalistiques…)
L’IT Development & Support est en charge du développement du socle technique. Il est en relation constante avec le marketing et la rédaction pour faire évoluer régulièrement l’ensemble des technologies utilisées (Dans le cas de France 24 nous avons choisi d’internaliser ce pôle afin de gagner en agilité et en indépendance).
Enfin, la R&D, ou plutôt la cellule de veille (un Lab) permet de tester et de valider des technologies et des usages. Les équipes marketing et éditoriales en profitent pour être en phase avec les dernières tendances.

S’organiser pour trouver des sources de financement…

Le Billet de Benoit est très intéressant à plusieurs égards. Le choix un peu trop rapide du terme “Google Newsroom” est discutable. Je ne vois pas ce que Google vient faire la dedans, mais passons… Il est surtout un peu dommage que la question du financement ne soit pas abordée. Je vais tenté dans les lignes qui suivent de compléter ou au moins de commencer à le faire.

J’aime bien cette idée qu’il propose de séparer “la production de valeur” de sa “mise en scène”. A mon avis, le grand changement que l’industrie des médias (de l’info comme du divertissement voir même que l’industrie du contenu en général) connaît est que le financement ne provient plus de la production de valeur, mais de sa mise en scène!

Imaginons un instant que j’essaie d’appliquer le modèle “production de valeur” (“creating value”) et “mise en scène” (“packaging products”) au schéma organisationnel que j’ai présenté plus haut. Ce schéma est applicable à mon avis à tout média multicanal. Il l’est en particulier aux pure players. Prenons à présent l’hypothèse qu’un pure player cherche à multiplier ses modes de financement via la vente de produits… :

Dans le schéma la “création de valeur” est (paradoxalement) un facteur de coût. La “création de produit” est facteur de profit. De fil en aiguille j’ai été tenté d’ajouter des briques au bloc gris foncé. Ces nouveaux rôles sont des “metteurs en scène” de valeur, des packageurs de produits sur des terrains fertiles et non exploités: je pense notamment à l’e-paper, à l’organisation d’évènements, à la vente d’applications, à la commercialisation d’objets collectors…

Mais cette dernière partie mérite développement… La conversation continue, vos idées, commentaires et suggestions sont les bienvenus !

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» Article initialement publié sur le blog de Mikiane

» Illustration : la rédaction de France 24 par Luc Van Braekel sur Flickr

Les périodes un peu agitées sont des périodes très actives où l’on multiplie les idées. J’ai eu l’occasion de réfléchir, à mes heures perdues, à un concept de rédaction recomposée autour du web et du print, et comme j’ai trouvé cette réflexion passionnante, j’ai décidé de partager son résultat avec vous et d’ouvrir un échange.

Cela fait longtemps que l’on parle et propose des modèles de rédaction intégrée ( le modèle le plus connu est celui proposé par l’Ifra). Un exemple, la rédaction intégrée du Daily Telegraph, qui fout un peu la trouille au premier abord :

Le problème c’est que, bien souvent, ces modèles très théoriquesse heurtent à la réalité des rédactions: des journalistes orientés print avec une très faible agilité web. Mais surtout, des journalistes déchirés entre “deux médias” à qui l’on dit: vous allez publier pour les deux médias. Ce qui entraîne deux blocages:

1) Le web n’est pas un tuyau dans lequel on fait passer n’importe quel contenu et les articles print sont très souvent inadaptés au web et au mobile (par exemple, au Monde.fr, les articles des journalistes papier font 30% de la production, mais moins de 15% du trafic). Il ne suffit pas donc d’écrire et de rediriger vers un tuyau. Mais de produire un contenu en fonction d’un environnement.
On fait la même erreur aujourd’hui avec le mobile, en poussant simplement les contenus web vers les applis nomades.

2) Les journalistes deviennent schizophrènes. Ils deviennent “bi-médias” et ont l’impression de bi-travailler, ce qui pour eux veut dire “deux fois plus”… Conséquence: continuent de produire avec une vision papier.

Il faut donc oublier cette vieille notion de fusion des rédactions, mais faire un choix, aller là où l’information respire, là où les lecteurs/utilisateurs sont connectés et impliqués, créer une seule rédaction “là où ça se passe”, c’est à dire sur le réseau. C’est le coeur de l’info. Tout le reste n’est que mise en scène.

Pourquoi le réseau ? Parce que l’ère Google a tout bouleversé. Et généré l’émergence (et la nécessité) de ce que l’on appelle un journalisme en réseau. Un journalisme qui passe de la simple production de contenu pour devenir process, et qui s’appuie sur la force du réseau (fragmentation de l’info, nouveaux rythmes, médias sociaux, contenus générés par l’utilisateur…) pour produire et distribuer l’info.

Vous allez donc vous retrouver avec non pas avec une rédaction “bi-média”, ni avec deux rédaction (une web, une papier), mais trois rédactions que je répartirais dans 2 sous-groupes:

1 journalisme de production de valeurs (la Google rédaction)
1 journalisme de mise en scène (community management et sécrétariat de rédaction)

Notez bien que je n’utilise pas le mot “journaliste”, mais “journalisme”. Le journalisme pris comme une fonction (intégrant donc le partage de compétences journalistiques avec des non professionnels), non comme un métier.

Prenons l’exemple de la rédaction d’un journal papier, que nous appellerons “L’espoir” :
- 100.000 exemplaires/jour
- 1€
- 36 pages.
- Rédaction print: 85 journalistes + 7 sécrétaires de rédaction.
- Rédaction web: 7 journalistes + 1 community manager.
Soit 100 journalistes.
Une belle rédaction. Sauf qu’ils ne sont numéro un nulle part. Pas assez nombreux sur le web, trop à l’étroit sur le papier.

Imaginons maintenant une nouvelle rédaction. Toujours avec nos 100 journalistes. Mais une rédaction que nous mettons presque entièrement sur le “digital” ce qui nous permettra d’être premier sur l’info web et mobile.
Tout en publiant un journal de meilleur qualité ce qui nous permettra de faire grimper les ventes, éventuellement le prix. Et, incidemment, de gagner plus d’argent.

1- Un journalisme de production de valeur: la Google Newsroom.

Composée de 80 de vos journalistes, mais intégrant également les autres productions journalistiques (via le journalisme de liens), les blogueurs et plus généralement l’activité des utilisateurs encadrée par le média.

Les 80 journalistes sont rassemblés en 10 “business units”, c’est à dire en pôles thématiques. Un peu comme un média indépendant (qui pourrait avoir une autre marque) piloté (ou pas) par un responsable de pôle, autour duquel se rassemblent 8 journalistes, des blogueurs, une communauté + 1 marketing et 1 commercial (qu’on peut mutualiser sur plusieurs pôles).
Chaque pôle peut également avoir son SR et son community manager associé.
(On peut aussi imaginer 3 gros pôles de 16 journalistes et 3 pôles de 10 journalistes etc).

Dans chaque pôle, on s’organise pour produire du journalisme de valeur ajoutée. Où l’on se pose toujours la question: puisque tout le monde traite à peu près la même info sur le réseau, quelle est ma valeur ajoutée ?

Vous retrouvez donc :

- des reporters (journalistes + blogueurs): ils ne “couvrent” pas l’actu, ils ne batonnent pas de dépêches, ils ramènent des infos.
Ils vont sur le terrain du web ou le terrain “réel”. Ils publient sur plusieurs rythmes : live tweeting, articles, vidéos, données, enquête de fond… Ils peuvent également animer une communauté de blogueurs/utilisateurs avec qui ils peuvent co-produire l’info.

- des curators (journalistes+amateurs): eux, par contre, “couvrent” l’actu en triant, vérifiant et éditant en live tout ce qui se fait de mieux sur le web et dans les médias. Ils font du link journalism ou l’organisent, ils rendent l’info plus accessible.

- des chroniqueurs (blogueurs, journalistes, experts) : ils ouvrent des conversations et mettent en perspective.

2- Un journalisme de mise en scène :

- Une équipe de 10 super secrétaires de rédaction, chargés de mettre en scène l’info dans les 36 pages. Ils ne travaillent plus que sur 3 ou 4 pages chacun, mais ils ont un vrai travail de SR “à l’ancienne”. Ils récupèrent les contenus publiés par la Google rédaction et les font vivre différement. Ils sont chargés de rendre l’info plus lisible, plus visuelle, de faire tout ce que le web ne sait pas faire. Il peut également demander aux journalistes, ou récupérer sur le web, via des agences, des cotenus complémentaires.
Un très bel exemple de que le papier est capable de faire: le quotidien portugais “I”.

Avec l’aide des SR, chaque business unit “digitale” peut décider de produire des hors-série papier.

- Une équipe de 10 community managers et data journalists, chargés de la mise en scène de l’info sur le web et mobile. En fait, ils sont surtout chargés de l’expérience de l’utilisateur avec l’info. Ils s’occupent de la qualité de “l’engagement” (au sens américain du terme, c’est à dire l’implication de l’utilisateur avec les contenus).

Ils travaillent aussi sur la mise en scène de l’info sous forme de bases de données (comme le fait le New York Times).

Mais aussi sur leur organisation dans des pages de “topics” qui rassemblent, sur des pages web, l’essentiel de ce qu’il faut savoir sur un sujet d’actu (posts, liens, tweets, données froides etc). Ce que fait très bien le Huffington Post avec ses “big news pages”.

Résultat, une rédaction en réseau, puissante, complètement réorganisée. La Google Newsroom :

80 Google Journalists, ce serait la première rédaction en ligne de France.

Imaginez la même chose avec les 200 journalistes des grosses rédactions des quotidiens nationaux.

Vous allez me répondre : mais les 80 journalistes papier seront-ils capables d’aller sur le réseau ?

Dans de nombreuses rédactions, le niveau web est proche de zéro.

Je pense que oui. Ce qui est bloquant, c’est le bi-média, la schizophrénie. Maintenant, si le message et l’environnement est clair, s’il est bien formé, un bon journaliste fera du bon journalisme. Les plus réticents auront la possiblité de s’éclater vers un sécrétariat de rédaction dépoussiéré et créatif.

C’est un modèle que l’on peut évidemment facilement reproduire pour la télévision et la radio.

Qu’en pensez vous ?

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» Article initialement publié sur Demain, tous journalistes ? Vous pouvez y lire les commentaires et ajoutez le vôtre /-)