Jul
29
French Newspaper - rewriting the rules
Filed Under France, Live, Marketing Consultancy, Work
In the age when all we seem to read and write about is the imminent demise of the newspaper, this mornings NY Times reports on a heart-warming tale from France:
Mon Quotien (My Daily)
When Elisa Cammarota gets home from school, she tosses off her knapsack and reads her newspaper from front to back. Anthony Azoulay does, too, though he focuses on articles about soccer and large photo spreads. Both Elisa and Anthony are 10 years old and entering the fifth grade in the fall. And both are regular subscribers to one of the most popular daily newspapers in France.
On a recent morning, the two children sat at a large rectangular table with several of the newspaper’s editors. The paper, Mon Quotidien, or My Daily, invites several of its readers twice weekly to help edit the paper, except for the front page, choosing stories that will be featured in its seven other pages.
The national editor, Caroline Hallé, was proposing an article about a school in Britain that had bought hawks and falcons to drive off a plague of seagulls that were dirtying the premises.
Alternatively, she proposed news of how divers had recently found bottles of French Champagne that King Louis XVI had sent to the czar of Russia, but had gone down when the ship transporting them sank in the Baltic Sea. “How did Louis XVI end?” asked Olivier Gasselin, 40, the paper’s deputy editor. “Guillotine,” Elisa shot back, without raising her eyes from the notes she was making.
“We propose, they choose,” said Ms. Hallé, 34, who joined the paper nine years ago after working at an Internet news site.
In an age when many children are addicted to computers, iPods and iPads — and when newspapers are feeling the pressure — Mon Quotidien appears to be an anomaly, all the more so in the journalistic climate of France.
Despite great journalistic names like Le Monde and Le Figaro, the French read ever fewer newspapers. On a per capita basis, only about half as many papers are sold here as in Germany or Britain, and readership is especially low among the young. Only 10 percent of 15- to 24-year-olds read a paid-for newspaper in 2007, the last time the government took a survey, down from 20 percent a decade earlier.
In fact, so concerned was the French government with the decline in newspaper readership that it detailed plans last year for a program called Mon Journal Offert, or My Complimentary Paper, to offer 18- to 24-year-olds a free yearlong subscription to a newspaper of their choice. Though the program quickly reached the 200,000-reader limit the government had foreseen, there was little sign that readers continued their subscriptions once they had to pay.
The papers, which appear every day but Sunday, are lively and colorful mixes of news, photos, cartoons and quizzes. A recent issue of Mon Quotidien featured a front-page photo of Paul the Octopus, which successfully picked the winners of 2010 World Cup soccer games. Another featured a tiny new car at the Berlin auto show that folds up for easy storage in tight spaces.
[news source - NY Times]
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