A new journalism takes root after riots
By
Bruno Giussani International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2006
LUGANO,
Switzerland When riots erupted in the outskirts of many French cities
last autumn, media around the world struggled to find a way to tell the story
of those suburban areas, known as the banlieues.
A Swiss magazine took the opportunity to try a new approach
to online journalism, in an effort to report the issue in a deeper and perhaps
more helpful way.
What is emerging from the experiment is an example of how
"old" media can revitalize themselves by incorporating the tools of
the "new" media while serving readers in a way that the printed press
simply could not have managed before.
At the height of the riots in early November, the Swiss
weekly L'Hebdo decided that its initial articles had
not gone far enough in helping readers understand what was happening in
Working from a tiny room they called the "Bondy microbureau," which
they borrowed from the local soccer club, the reporters have been doing a lot
more than filing their typical weekly stories for the magazine, which is based
in
They have been posting short and long reports several times
a day, as well as photographs, on what has become known as the Bondy Blog, blogs.hebdo.ch.
"While the riots in the meantime have calmed, and the
television cameras have moved on, the reality of daily life in Bondy has not changed," said the magazine's editor,
Alain Jeannet. And the Hebdo
reporters are still there documenting it.
Blogs, the free-form online
journals that have gained wide popularity, are making inroads in the newsrooms
of what bloggers sometimes derisively call the
mainstream media. An increasing number of editors and reporters seem to accept
that adopting this form of journalism is one way they can remain relevant as
the digital era pushes media - and advertising money - in new directions.
Ten Hebdo reporters have been in Bondy so far, men and women with different backgrounds,
including a war reporter, a business correspondent, social-affairs writers,
political columnists and a culture editor. On the blog,
they have written about their daily encounters, profiled people and told
stories that would find no place in the magazine.
They do not hesitate to use "I" and
"me." They have taken risks - one of them was assaulted by muggers.
They have interviewed unemployed youth, attended ethnic parties and visited
would-be entrepreneurs. They have noted complaints against the police,
described the dilapidated town, reported on a homeless mother, explained a
death, decrypted local lingo, hung out with gang members and with the mayor.
Some of them spent Christmas and New Year's in Bondy.
They have picked up tiny, yet revealing, bits of reality. A
reporter, for example, checked the browser history on a computer in an Internet
café to see what people had searched for on Google. (Ronaldo; young "beurettes"
- girls of North African descent; clinics performing circumcision; software;
how to meet Arab women.)
For the Hebdo reporters, the blog turned the typical work routine upside down.
Normally, they would do their reporting, then write the main
piece for the magazine and finally, perhaps, craft a second article or a
"reporter's notebook" piece.
But with the blog, said Serge
Michel, the world-affairs editor who first went to Bondy
to open the microbureau, "We report and
immediately write and publish an initial draft, giving a first tentative shape
to the narrative."
When they sit down to compose that piece for the magazine,
the reporters have days of this "flow writing" behind them, and the
tone of the resulting articles has been noticeably sharper and more insightful.
While some of the reporters may have viewed the blog in the beginning as a nuisance, creating additional
space that they had to fill, within a few weeks it became the main reason to go
and spend those days in the banlieue.
"I would walk past a travel agency and just walk in and
ask for the most frequent travel destinations and then blog
them," said Alain Rebetez, a political
commentator who spent Christmas week in Bondy.
"I really don't think that this kind of detail would
have made it into my notebook if I was just reporting the weekly story."
The reporters say they also found a new relationship with
their readers, who can leave comments on the blog.
The journalists find themselves engaged in the discussion and have used reader
feedback as inspiration for more blog entries.
All of the reporters who have been to Bondy
have embraced the new format. In addition to a dozen magazine articles, the
journalists have written about 100,000 words on the blog
so far.
While L'Hebdo is starting blogs on other subjects, there are still a few reporters in
the
They will do so in the coming weeks - including Jeannet, the editor - and in March, the exercise will
slowly come to an end.
But the blog experiment will
return in a new form: 'L'Hebdo plans to announce in
this week's issue that it is going to gather a group of young people from Bondy, bring them to Lausanne for journalism training and a
"blog school" and then hand them the
digital keys to the Bondy Blog,
while continuing to support them technically and editorially.
"We came from outside, and tried to cover their reality
as best as we could," Michel, the world-affairs editor, said.
"We want now to help them do it by themselves, using
the tools of journalism and of blogging to become
actors in their own social space."
Closing the loop, the project will be financed in very
"old media" way: A major French publisher will turn the Bondy Blog into a book, and the
proceeds will go toward supporting blogging in the banlieue.
Bruno Giussani is the author of
several books on technology and society. His blog is
at giussani.typepad.com.
