Disrupting journalism from scratch

One characteristic that defines both pure players and technological start-ups is the continuous testing of their product, both pre- and post-launch, with their readers. All four pure players experienced a pilot period that varied in length according to the medium. In three cases out of four, this period was based on test interaction with potential future readers. This served promotional as well as research and development purposes. This interaction played out in various ways and sometimes persisted after the medium’s launch.

In the case of Brief.me, the pilot period involved enrolling an initial cohort of funding readers to test the medium. In the autumn of 2014, a campaign was launched on the French crowdfunding platform, Ulule.

https://fr.ulule.com/briefme/ [accessed 2018, August 18].

Other publications based this relationship on regular meetings with their readers. These happened before the launching of the media, as was the case for Médiacités, and then often continued throughout the pure player’s existence. Le Quatre Heures’ journalists (who did not benchmark their medium with testers before its initial launch) organized a monthly conference, open to all, in a café. Amélie Mougey (interview, 18 May 2016) reported that it served to promote the latest Le Quatre Heures story by introducing the media to potential new readers and strengthening the relationship with subscribers.

The relationship that these media developed with their readers helps in keeping track of the audience’s satisfaction. Raphaël Garrigos, from Les Jours, believed that “being on the internet is an advantage in order to change easily and quickly, and constantly”. This regular interaction with readers is comparable to the market tests that some publications carry out when they are in the process of changing their product (for example the layout). However, these tests are habitually expensive services led by benchmarking companies. In the case of these pure players, the journalists are in direct contact with the readers, performing the research and development themselves. Sometimes these practices are undertaken in less sophisticated ways than can be observed in legacy newsrooms (Anderson, 2011; Salles, 2018), allowing more attention to qualitative than quantitative, metric-driven, data. Nevertheless, this illustrates the journalists’ embrace of market-driven practices. These are justified both rhetorically as not systematically having repercussions for their decisions and organizationally by promoting transparency with the audience, to which they lend a monitoring role of the way in which they function. This is part of readjusting the boundaries with readers (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2015) and empowering them as customers and advisers yet distancing them from journalists’ specific competences: those of developing editorial content.

The flexibility that defines start-ups is also identifiable in the pure players’ internal hierarchy during the first few years of their existence. In her article focusing on “internet workers” in charge of innovative projects at Le Monde Interactif, Camille Dupuy (2013: 26) observed a heterarchical configuration (Stark, 2009) in the newsroom: “a flexible organisation in which hierarchical relations are diminished, thus favoring innovation in the logics of an ongoing project” (Dupuy, 2013). Heterarchy is described as dynamic in her article, evolving from one project to another.

All four pure players were created by more than one founder. Médiacités was created by six journalists and a journalism specialist. Although all are founders, and four out of the seven are editors-in-chief, the roles were distributed according to previous job positions as well as regions of origin. For example, Jacques Trentesaux is the oldest journalist on the team and was head of the Cities column at L’Express. He is the president and head of publication of Mediacités. Nicolas Barriquand, a native of Lyon, is now editor-in-chief of the Lyon issue; the same applies to Sylvain Morvan and the Toulouse issue. Le Quatre Heures now has a team of seven. Amélie Mougey explained that, once the team reassembled around Le Quatre Heures, the roles were distributed according to affinities with competences and availability. One of the team members had always been interested in programming and sales. He was given the role of head of publication, dealing with administrative paperwork, and of editing the site according to multimedia content. At Brief.me, they were four investor–founders. All four came from different backgrounds with different competences. Laurent Mauriac had the most journalistic experience and thus became editor-in-chief. Les Jours was set up by a dozen journalists who now practise somewhat heterarchical editorial management. Each writer of Les Jours is supervised by another journalist on the team. Hence, although the editor-in-chief has an overall view of the stories that are being written, and when to expect them, he does not have the responsibility for closely supervising each of the contributing journalists.

Turning an idea into a project from scratch considerably reduces the potential for disagreements and power struggles when it is undertaken as a team, because everyone endorses a decider’s status or specific competences. The team grows according to the pure player’s needs, making the newcomers essential. For example, during the interviews, all four journalists reported being in the process of including a new “associate” (an investor for some and a new co-founder for others) with entrepreneurial, financial or marketing competences. Amélie Mougey stressed the reciprocal relationship that this entails: “She’s graduating from marketing school. It takes us four days to do what she does in just two hours. And she’s also hoping to develop her career path in journalism.” Nicolas Barriquand similarly described the need for specific competences but also highlighted the candidates’ affinities with journalism:

New members’ affinities with journalism and the media being built, whether they are journalists, sales people or programmers, are secured not only by the size of the team but also by the written outline of the medium’s editorial identity. This text, often in the form of a chart or a manifesto, is published on the pure player’s site before its official launch date. It establishes a moral contract with the medium’s potential readers. It also rhetorically backs up the context and the values that bring the team together and contributes to normalizing the proximity between specific market- and technical-driven competences and journalists’ traditional editorial skills. Damian and colleagues (2009) mentioned the flexibility of these ventures’ hierarchy and associated it with the frustration and work overload experienced by some of the newsroom’s journalists. In contrast, most of the team members of this sample of pure players are founders, giving them a managerial role, rather than being subject to others’ decisions.

The workplace often plays a part in the identity of corporate media, whether we are thinking of journalists referring to Le Monde as “Blanqui”, the name of the boulevard where it is located, or to “la maison ronde” when alluding to “la maison de la radio”. Such is the case for high-tech start-ups as well, although, contrastingly, they are often described as having been created in the precarious conditions of a garage or a college dorm room (like three of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft). Adapting to various workplaces according to diverse situations already defines journalists to a certain extent: as field reporters, correspondents or freelancers. In the case of these pure players, working in a mobile, open and economic environment, similar to start-ups, is the status quo.

The workplace descriptions varied between these pure players, but they all highlighted the importance of the cost of rent in the company’s budget. Two of the four pure players did not have an office at the time of the interview. Médiacités’ co-founder, based in Lyon, was busy with many different tasks specific to the pre-launch of the medium and mentioned that he was often on the move (whether for appointments in Lyon, meetings in Paris or presentations across France), making renting an office unnecessary. Le Quatre Heures did not have the means to rent an office, so work was usually carried out from home. The pure player had been a side project for most team members since the relaunch, and they simply did not have the money to spend on costly rent. Fortunately, it was not considered to be an essential component of the pure player’s existence considering the relatively few full-time employees. In addition, the monthly reunions with readers served as a management strategy, providing an opportunity for the whole team to congregate in one place on a regular basis. Not paying rent can thus be a way of cutting costs to maintain the company, which can be both a short-term and a long-term situation. Laurent Mauriac from Brief.me highlighted just how dynamic this can be: “We were in an incubator, but it was quite expensive with very limited reason to be there. I have a big house and a big room was free, so we moved into that one. It is quite nice” (Laurent Mauriac, interview, 19 May 2016). The plan was to move out to a new office again several months later, when hiring a new employee. Les Jours also passed through several stages of office mobility:

With an 80 square metre newsroom, Les Jours is the pure player with the wealthiest set-up of the four media today. Nevertheless, it is described by its co-founder as a small and cheaply equipped open space, with personal laptops and Ikea desks. This simple and economical set-up is also characteristic of start-ups. Raphaël Garrigos stated that, in this way, “we are all on the same level. There is no closed office, and I do not want one because I need to be able to talk with people all the time.” The open space is described as promoting transparency and discussion and reducing the symbols of hierarchy by decompartmentalizing some of the responsibilities that have traditionally been kept separate in the newsroom. This applies to including the person in charge of marketing and data analysis at Médiacités in “the core of the newsroom”. At Les Jours, the two employees in charge of programming and marketing are also located in the newsroom, a set-up described by Raphaël Garrigos as being vital on an everyday basis.

These pure players’ similarities to start-ups highlight the readjustment of the traditional newsroom–business boundary, often referred to as “the wall” (Coddington, 2015), through the normalizing of market-driven competences and postures in proximity to or in the hands of journalists. Coddington specified that the erosion of “the wall” is common in online media businesses due to higher competition, and it is particularly visible in the “use of tools to quantify audience interest [serving] to replace news judgment with a thin, incomplete view of the audience driven by commercial considerations rather than professional ones” (Coddington, 2015: 144). However, it is interesting to note that, in the case of our sample, the journalists in charge also rhetorically readjusted their distance with regard to metrics and the audience (through the critiques of online practices that appear in their project descriptions) to safeguard their traits of autonomy and independence.

When announcing that their media will be independent (including the funding model for three out of the four media), these pure players aim to depend on subscriptions in the long term, such as their quoted model Médiapart. During the first few months, however, pure players tend to be funded indirectly by the state or through various private means. The public funding comes in three forms that highlight the fragility of these companies.

Several of the journalists whom we interviewed said that they had invested most of their severance pay in the medium. The severance pay was allocated by the medium that they worked for previously, and, in France, this is calculated by multiplying their latest salary with the number of years spent at the medium. In parallel with their severance pay, journalists usually also receive unemployment benefits. Three of the four journalists interviewed stated that they were living off this allowance. One of the journalists said: “I have a certain financial security that is provided by my unemployment benefits. In this way, I can devote at least half of my time to the media.”

In addition to unemployment benefits, French unemployed citizens are followed up by employment services on a monthly basis. These services offer training programmes for those with a concrete project. The founders of Les Jours benefited from some of this training in the context of a “contrat de sécurisation professionnelle” (professional securing contract). Nevertheless, the training, which in this case was focused on developing one’s own company, encompassing entrepreneurial skills, was not journalism-specific.

Other means of public funding sometimes arise during the first few years after launching a medium. The French Ministry of Culture offers a selection of grants and awards

For a list of these grants, see: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Presse/Aides-a-la-presse[accessed 2018, August 20].

These direct and indirect means of public funding mostly serve during the launching of the project. The fact that they may not cater specifically to journalism or that they rely on criteria oriented by public policy leads to the question of just how independent these projects actually are from the start. This does not include the funding and support that private firms, such as Google and Facebook, provide, but, at the time of the interviews, none of the four pure players had submitted a project to these platforms.

As a result of a lawsuit against Google won by French authorities in 2013, Google had to pay 150 million euros to French media over the course of three years and decided to do so in the form of a grant that would award innovative media projects. This fund was made European in 2016 and renames the Digital News Innovation Fund.

All four of the pure players benefitted from a crowdfunding campaign, and all campaigns managed to exceed their targets. All except Le Quatre Heures ran it before their official launch. For Le Quatre Heures, the CFJ covered the cost of programming and graphics. However, the graduates organized a crowdfunding campaign a year after the pure player’s relaunch to pay for a new internet site and a mobile application. Both Les Jours and Médiacités relied on crowdfunding to develop their site; Médiacités also used these funds for their first few investigations.

There are more benefits to be obtained from this operation than just a one-off financial gain. Indeed, it is a good promotional opportunity that generally receives good media coverage from peers. Furthermore, our analysis revealed that some of the contributors were journalists, among whom were founders of other pure players, suggesting solidarity within new media. As mentioned earlier in regard to Brief.me, a crowdfunding campaign is also an opportunity to test potential readers’ interest in the project, usually starting with the members of the founders’ close social networks, who are expected to initiate funding and promote the project. In the case of Les Jours, Raphaël Garrigos said that crowdfunding attracted many new subscribers. Most of the time, the reward included a subscription to the medium.

Moreover, those who submit their projects to these platforms are given marketing advice (fed by the platforms’ statistics) on how best to organize their campaign. This guidance is provided throughout the process, before the launch (in summarizing the project and planning the contributions), during its running time (to promote it in internal and then in external circles) and afterwards (when sending out the rewards). Again, marketing competences are introduced to journalists, entrusted by these platforms to succeed with their campaigning.

Public allowances, emerging grants and crowdfunding can only provide so much financial security. According to Nielsen (2016: 64), the level of “competition is intense” and “the basic economics of digital media suggests that the market will sustain fewer people pursuing journalism as a profession”. Whilst attempting to develop a large enough number of subscribers from which to exist “independently”, pure players’ founders look for other ways to secure capital, and investment remains a common method, as described by Smyrnaios (2013).

The founders are the main investors in all four media. The percentage of outside investment was argued to have been reduced to maintain independence. For example, Raphaël Garrigos from Les Jours explained that he and the eight other co-founders own 80 per cent of the medium’s shares. Likewise, for Médiacités, only 20 per cent of capital was open for investment. With a 2.5 per cent share, Les Jours counted Xavier Niel among its funders; he is one of France’s wealthiest technology and media moguls, who founded the telecommunication company Free. Among Médiacités’ funders is Edwy Plenel, Médiapart’s founder, who provided 50,000 euros. Similar to crowdfunding, fundraising is also revealing of support among colleagues, other media founders and media investors. However, pure players have also recently started to open fundraising to readers, and this is supported rhetorically as well as having the potential to reduce the amount of power-driven investments. Les Jours created a “société des amis” (“friends’ society”) that allows readers to become investors with a minimum donation of 200 euros (four shares):

Amendments to the French “Bloche law” were passed in 2016 to help with the creation of independent media, opening up the possibility for individuals to invest in media shares up to a maximum of 1,000 euros per person (30 per cent of this investment is tax deductible). The Entreprise Solidaire de Presse d’Information (ESPI, which means solidary news company) status was created in 2015 and requires 70 per cent of the company’s revenue to be reinvested in the medium. It also increases the tax advantages for investors with a 50 per cent deduction of up to 5,000 euros per person.

https://www.la-croix.com/Economie/Medias/Les-avantages-statut-dentreprise-solidaire-presse-2017-02-07-1200822968 [accessed 2018, August 20].

Again, instead of focusing their rhetoric on the financial challenges encountered, these start-ups encourage their audience to move closer to the medium and play a bigger role in its existence, not only for consulting purposes but also financially, arguing that this is what will allow it to stay independent.

This stresses that, ultimately, the relationship that these pure players maintain with their audience is used to justify their acquisition of non-traditional journalistic competences, such as marketing or management, in the name of searching for the most independent means of existence possible.

The four journalists interviewed belong to different generations, and their career paths vary in length and experience. However, they all had to develop new skills for the pure player.

Amélie Mougey, the only woman amongst our interviewees, was a recent Master’s graduate in journalism. Amélie Mougey had been employed on long-term and permanent contracts in a national newspaper and a monthly magazine. In January 2014, she and five other members of the Master’s degree course decided to relaunch their school project professionally as a side project to their main journalistic positions. When the medium that she was working for closed in March 2016, she decided to dedicate more time to Le Quatre Heures whilst her unemployment benefits allowed it, and she was subsequently made editor-in-chief. This implied taking on a role with more responsibility than she previously had. She had to organize her time on a monthly basis and develop managerial skills. Amélie Mougey has since become editor-in-chief at La Revue Dessinée; the experience and competences that she developed at Le Quatre Heures would most likely have served her in her recruitment.

Nicolas Barriquand, one of the seven founders of Médiacités, was a freelance journalist for nine years, including two years as a foreign correspondent in Vietnam. He wrote for several French and Belgian newspapers and magazines. Like Amélie Mougey, he stated that, as a manager, he is developing experience, skills and knowledge in areas that are new to him: “Technical, sales, marketing, communication competences are required”.

As mentioned before, Laurent Mauriac, one of the founders of Brief.me, was new neither to journalism nor to media entrepreneurship when he decided to work on Brief.me. After graduating from a Master’s in management, he created a news agency in New York. He was then hired by Libération to take part in creating a site for the newspaper and went on to write for and manage the Economics column for three years before becoming the newspaper’s correspondent in New York. He left Libération in 2007 to create Rue89, of which he was the managing director for seven years. When Rue89 was sold, he created Brief.me. Even after following this very entrepreneurial career path, Laurent Mauriac is continuing to develop new skills, some of which are self-taught, such as programming when working on Libération’s first online publication and marketing for Brief.me.

Both Raphaël Garrigos and Isabelle Roberts, the co-founders of Les Jours, were media columnists at Libération. As noted previously, the founding team’s members received training according to the employment plan that they followed with social services. Raphaël Garrigos says that this was important for his understanding of how central computer programming, graphic design and marketing are to the newsroom. He also stated that, by working at Les Jours, he has learnt to become an entrepreneur and to deal with the subscriptions himself.

When questioned, all the co-founders specified that they had extra responsibilities on top of being editor-in-chief. Nicolas Barriquand presented himself as “co-founder, associate on the Médiacités project, and editor-in-chief and coordinator for the Lyon edition”. He described his occupation as follows:

Laurent Mauriac described his role as being “president of the company, one of its main funders, head of publication, co-founder and editor-in-chief”. He added:

Part of Amélie Mougey’s work is also dedicated to marketing, including designing brochures and prospecting places across France that could be interested in Le Quatre Heures. All three journalists spend variable amounts of time focusing on editorial matters and dealing with human resources, technical adjustments and marketing developments. The first reason for accumulating a multitude of tasks is the small size of a pure player’s team during the early stages of its existence. To justify the proximity between traditionally incompatible roles in the newsroom (Coddington, 2015), such as content editing, marketing and business, our interviewees highlighted their project’s journalistic essence through their status and their passion. Nicolas Barriquand justified the venture as “a journalists’ project”. Furthermore, working at Le Quatre Heures is what Amélie Mougey described as a “projet de coeur”, meaning a project close to the heart.

Accumulating roles and jobs has become common for journalists several years after graduation before they reach a stable professional situation (Leteinturier, 2014). Working on “innovative formats” (whether in terms of editorial content, management or technology) in precarious work conditions, such as the web documentaries that were externalized by media corporations in the mid-2000s, are ways for journalists to develop and highlight sought-after skills borrowed from other professions (Salles & Schmitt, 2017). For these interviewees, creating a new medium from scratch offers various opportunities: developing experience in a niche area of journalism, becoming aware of the variety of tasks to be undertaken in a media company and that are traditionally foreign to journalists and controlling these in a context rhetorically justified as being “a journalists’ project”. Nevertheless, both the accumulation of tasks and the required flexibility are revealing of the precarious risk-taking context in which these journalists undertake these roles.

Ultimately, it is the figure of an entrepreneur–journalist that looms in the practices of these pure player-founding journalists rather than that of an unemployed journalist. Indeed, these journalists take on the responsibility of founding their own company and make use of their precarious work conditions to be more flexible by trying and testing various formats, whether with regard to the editorial content, the management or the funding. These journalists are “heroical” (Schumpeter, 1911, 1990) risk takers in that they “disrupt the areas in which they intervene, break routines and subvert stabilised power relations and instituted hierarchies” (Bergeron et al., 2013: 264), deciding to do so rather than to stay in secure jobs in which they are not happy. Although entrepreneurial competences are not the norm when describing the journalistic profession, they are not exactly new either. Indeed, rarely described as required skills for the job, they are often inherent to being a freelance journalist who manages, coordinates and promotes his or her articles alone.

In this case, the journalists enjoy the additional empowering responsibility of being a founder of their own medium, making their precarious financial setting something that they have chosen for their own values over the status quo. These founding journalists thus correspond to the model of a worker who thrives on developing personally and maintaining certain values through professional activity, according to the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999).

In France, entrepreneurial skills are still formally separated from journalism, in schools by the CPNEJ (the French commission for journalists’ employment) and professionally by the CCIJP (the commission devoted to attributing journalists’ professional cards), which does not recognize those who are paid for journalistic work as having the status of an “auto-entrepreneur”.

This figure of journalism, the entrepreneur–journalist, highlights journalists’ adaptability to the constraining and evolving context in which they work. Regardless of whether these pure players will survive, these journalists have developed new competences that could open up new professional opportunities.