Bondy Blog School

Together with colleagues from the newsmagazine L'Hebdo, the French daily Le Monde and the Swiss Television I'm animating this week a "blog school" in Lausanne, Switzerland, attended by seven young people from Bondy.
Regular readers of this blog know that Bondy is a town in the outskirts of Paris, and one of the 300+ French "banlieues" that last November became the scene of violent riots. Last month I wrote a story for the Herald Tribune and the NY Times telling how L'Hebdo (which is based in Lausanne) experimented with a blog to cover daily life in Bondy over several months, sending all of its reporters and editors there on a weekly rotation, and how that changed their ways of working and produced better journalism (and better information for their readers). This was the story's closing paragraph:

In March, the exercise will slowly come to an end. But the blog experiment will return in a new form: L'Hebdo plans (...) 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."

They did gather the young people, and brought them to Lausanne. Here they are:

From left: Radouane, Kamel, Mohamed, Nadia, Sada, Hakim, Elodie and Nacima (more on them - in French). Students, workers, two in search of a job, a teacher - Mohamed, the one that will play editor-in-chief.
They arrived on Monday, and were immediately thrown into the water: classes on journalistic genres and formats, fact-checking and accuracy rules, interview training, field reporting (in the outskirts of Lausanne) and writing and editing, photography, newsmeetings: basic journalism stuff, complemented by an introduction to blogs and blogosphere tools, "dos and don'ts", blogging training, several practical report-and-post sessions (what the coordinator described in the program as "blogging à go-go") and feedback. That will extend until the end of the week, when they will "graduate" by receiving the passwords to the Bondy Blog's editing platform and go back home to start working with it.
The seven young people travelled by subway from Bondy and then by train from Paris to Lausanne, and apparently two television crews followed them, from the French national channel France2 and Britain's Channel4: that's a sign of the uniqueness of this initiative, which since the beginning has attracted an inordinate amount of media attention (it's also a sign of how mainstream media still regard blogs as an exotic phenomenon). What are their expectations? "We want to expand the banlieues, give a different image: there aren't just burning cars in Bondy", says Radouane. Sada and Nacima want to understand how a newspaper is created, how media work, who takes the decisions and how. Sada feels that, in general, marketing is the defining force in media today. Hakim and Kamel see the opportunity in very pragmatic terms: "it's a chance to learn new skills". They are all very enthusiastic, ask many (sophisticated) questions, raise serious concerns about "covering" local life in a tense social environment, make efforts to understand the technology. Over lunch they came up with a long list of very good ideas for posts. They also laugh a lot: the climate in the team is pretty promising.
Says Mohamed: "Personally I'm very interested in the human side of the exercice: the team is very diverse in backgrounds and personalities, and I hope that we will be able to talk about the banlieues in a different, offering a more nuanced wiew from the inside".
When the organizer called the other day asking if I would be available to "teach a class" (way too big a word) I said yes immediately. Because I believe that what L'Hebdo is doing prefigures a possible future of journalism. A future where the tools become widely distributed, and what defines a "magazine" or a "newspaper" are its methods and practices and its capacity to use them to animate a community. There is a community in France - Bondy - that over the last few months has discovered a new identity, has learned things about itself, has started a new conversation, thanks to the work of a Swiss magazine they had never heard of - and it's safe to say that most Hebdo reporters had never heard of Bondy either. Some contend that with this initiative L'Hebdo has crossed a line: the line separating "observers" from "militants"; I disagree, as I believe that the future of journalism hinges on one crucial element: re-engagement. And that won't happen if journalists keep spending their days in newsrooms "reporting by telephone" and keep thinking of their readers as just "an audience".