Author Archives: Bertrand Pecquerie

Dan Gillmor is an internationally recognized author and Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University and also Director of the Center for Citizen Media. He is a GEN board member, and will speak at the News World Summit in Hong Kong. He serves on boards of directors or advisory boards for several media-related nonprofits including the Knight New Media Center at USC and UC-Berkeley, Global Voices Online and NewsTrust. We interviewed him about his last book, Mediactive, and the state of journalism.

How has the journalism ecosystem evolved in the past few years? How would you describe it nowadays?
It is more diverse in some respects, but less so in others. Traditional news organizations are shrinking in the U.S. and much of the developed world, though they're growing in some other parts of the world (such as India).

The most important element of change in the ecosystem, and the one that fuels my optimism, is the large number of startups. We're seeing more experiments than ever in ways of creating and providing information, though we need more experiments in new business models as well. Continue Reading

Aidan White was the General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists from 1987 until April 2011. He previously worked for several newspapers in the United Kingdom. He is a long-time campaigner for journalists' rights and is a former activist with the National Union of Journalists in Great Britain and Ireland. He is now managing consultant with the Global Editors Network where he leads the reflexion to define new ethical guidelines for journalists. He gave a long interview to the Gen Post. In the first part, he analyses the implications and consequences of the News of the World scandal. In the second part below he launches the media accountability plan of the Global Editors Network by detailing his guidelines.

Do you consider journalists and editors globally know what is legal and what is illegal? Is the frontier clear enough with the explosion of new technologies?
Most journalists and editors who have received some professional training will be aware of the ethical responsibilities of journalism, but there is a need to review how these traditional values are practiced in the context of a more open information environment. Not least is the challenge of applying ethical standards in the context of commercial competition.   Continue Reading

Aidan White was the General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists from 1987 until April 2011. He previously worked for several newspapers in the United Kingdom. He is a long-time campaigner for journalists' rights and is a former activist with the National Union of Journalists in Great Britain and Ireland. He is now managing consultant with the Global Editors Network where he leads the reflexion to define new ethical guidelines for journalists. He gave a long interview to the Gen Post. In the first part below, he analyses the implications and consequences of the News of the World scandal. In the second part to be published next week, he will launch the media accountability plan of the Global Editors Network.

Does the News of the World scandal come from a pure problem of privacy?
The scandal of phone hacking at the News of the World and the controversy that has engulfed News International and the wider global media owned by Rupert Murdoch goes much further than privacy rights. What has been exposed is a credibility crisis for media that concerns a culture of management that has compromised ethical journalism; a failure of self-regulation in the press; and profoundly unhealthy relations between media and two key sources of power – politics and policing. Continue Reading

Virgine Fortun is the head of strategic development of the Swiss quality daily Le Temps. She conducted the process the newspaper started in 2009 to meet the quality requirements of the ISAC BCP 9001 standard, a certification developed by The Media and Society Foundation especially for the media. The award makes Le Temps the world’s first print medium to obtain this certification. Virginie Fortun gave an interview to the Gen Post to detail the process.

Could you describe Le Temps in a few facts? (history, circulation (print and web), number of journalists, economic situation…)
Founded in March 1998, Le Temps is the benchmark print medium of French-speaking Switzerland, publishing its content with equally meticulous standards of quality and editorial independence in its different formats. A digital paywall has been introduced in January 2011 on letemps.ch. A quality paper with recognized areas of expertise in Swiss and international politics, economics, finance and culture, the daily edition has a verified print run of 44’450 copies and a readership of 140’000 people, 16’000 of them in German-speaking Switzerland.The well-qualified public of the website letemps.ch represents 3’500’000 pages viewed, 1’050’000 visits and 177’000 individual visitors.

Le Temps SA counts 120 employees with 90 allocated to the newsroom. Continue Reading

Pablo Mancini is an Argentinian journalist and writer. He is the author of "Hack journalism, Laboratory manual" (Hackear el periodismo. Manual de laboratorio (La Crujía, 2011)), and Digital Services Manager at Digital Media Company, Clarin group in Argentina. Before that, he was Manager of the digital operation of El Comercio group in Lima, Peru. There, he was in charge of five newspapers websites : elcomercio.pe, peru21.pe, gestion.pe, trome.pe and depor.pe. He gave an interview to the Gen Post about his vision of nowadays journalism, his job and his book.

What are the problems of the newsrooms today? You often say that the organization of the media is the same as in the 50's. Could you detail this analysis?
The biggest challenge is to increase and expand the relevance of what the media produce in a context of informational chaos and increasing connectivity that goes beyond the home, beyond the desks. The newsrooms with which media organizations operate are designed to meet the needs of another age defined by a very different architecture of cultural consumption. News factories are born in urban environments in which information was scarce and time was not fragmented. Continue Reading

Francis Pisani breaks down the business model and the concept of his new journalistic project: a world tour focusing on the innovations and the changes in our ways of living brought about by digital technologies. Packaged and sold to several international media outlets, in the form of blog posts, tweets or print contributions.

Blogger – Transnets.net – author, editorialist, speaker, consultant, Francis Pisani has been tracking and analyzing the evolution of information and communication technologies since "prehistory" (1993). After spending 15 years in the San Francisco region and 30 years outside of his native country, he is undertaking a large global investigation of the future of technological innovation and societal changes. Continue Reading

Alan Rusbridger has been editor of the Guardian since 1995. He is editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, a member of the GNM and GMG Boards and a member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian and the Observer. He is also a board member of the Global Editors Network. The Guardian Media Group announced on the 16th of June that it is to adopt a digital first strategy. Alan Rusbridger answers a few questions about this new strategy for the Global Editors Network.

What will this new “digital first” strategy change across the Guardian’s newsroom? Wasn’t the journalistic workflow already digital first at the Guardian?
It’s a way of signalling to staff (and of course readers and advertisers) that we are now putting the majority of our resources, concentration, imagination and effort into the digital expression of our journalism. We’ve been web first for some time, in the sense that we already (and have for some years) published most stories first on the website. This is the next step – a signalling of priorities for the company as a whole. Continue Reading