It takes some blogs and an amateur paparazzo

"Citizen journalism" is front page story these days in Switzerland. Nobody actually calls it like that, but that's what it is: the placid Swiss (and their placid media) are slowly discovering that the tools to gather, treat and publish information are out there, in the hands of many, and that has impacts.

Two of the big Swiss summer music festivals - the open-air Nyon Paleo Festival and the Montreux Jazz Festival - had planned to hold separate press conferences (respectively today and on Thursday) to unveil their programs. These are eagerly awaited press conferences because both events are usually sold out, attracting hundreds of thousands of people, so many wait for the programs to be released before rushing to the ticket shop.

But: the Paleo program, which had been making rounds on e-mail, started showing up in various versions on blogs late last week. On Sunday the Montreux official media partner, the French-language daily Le Matin, posted a flyer on its distribution boxes announcing that next Sunday it would publish the festival's program "as an exclusive" (see picture). Except that a blogger got it from some insider and posted it. By Monday the free newspapers were picking up the programs, too, and both organizations had to confirm that, yes, those were the actual programs, and to shelve their plans for controlled release. Today they were all over, published side-by-side probably for the first time, and Paleo sold in one day 120'000 tickets.

Le Matin commented the blog's scoops this morning saying that "that's nothing too bad, of course, it just confirms the popularity of the festivals", but added: "the world clearly goes too fast" and criticized "the need to know everything immediately, even if it's not very useful, even if it means publishing confidential information". As if newspapers never published confidential information.

A second story involves the Swiss president, Moritz Leuenberger. Yesterday the German-language daily Blick published a series of pictures of Leuenberger vacationing with his partner Gret Loewensberg on the beaches of Oman (one of which is reproduced on the left). The two appear in bathing suits, but the pictures are quite dignified, nothing comparable to the stuff usually published by the London tabloids for example. Publishing them however broke a strong tabu of the Swiss political culture, because the private life of top politicians was so far pretty much off-limit. Actually, off-limit was the representation of private life in a not-agreed-upon fashion: even in Switzerland most politicians regularly and happily open their houses to photographers and cameras and use their families as promotional tools. Here, though, the pictures were taken without the consent of Leuenberger, and not even by a professional photographer: a Blick reader just happened to be in the same hotel, recognized the president, shot some pictures and passed them to the newspaper (which "reimbursed his expenses" - a way of saying that they paid the amateur paparazzo just a symbolic sum for the images).

The comments ranged from the scandalized to the amused. The Geneva daily Le Temps today tried the analysis: "this evolution seems unstoppable, and it's the product of a long-term sociological trend, the desacralization and "people"-ization of the institutions, crossing a brutal technological evolution, that of the Internet and of the cell phone". Leuenberger's spokesman said that the president may consider suing the newspaper; another daily, Tages-Anzeiger, suggested that he could bring up the issue in the next government meeting. That would be so very Swiss.

UPDATE 26 april - I was on Swiss Public Radio this morning, invited to comment on the above. The journalist started out by asking whether the blogs are the beginning of the end of the established media. I don't know if I could convince him of the opposite, but: this vision of the blogs and the  media as mutually exclusive entities is starting to feel tiring and out of date. The real "new media" will grow out of the dialectical exchange between the two, producing a qualitative transformation of both. I know that this view is not very popular on either side, but a newspaper (tv/radio station, book, etc) and a weblog (wiki, podcast, etc) are complementary, not antagonist, entities.

[tags: blogospherahelvetica Moritz Leuenberger Montreux Jazz Festival Paleo Festival]

Comments

[Tom Guarriello]

I love the word "desacralization" as a description of what's happening to institutions. We should remember that the institution that controls "sacralization" also controls another, "excommunication," which many institutional leaders would love to use in response to the rampant distribution of authority now afoot in the world.

[peter]

Just a few precisions concerning the publishing of the programm of the Paleo festival. The only newspaper that gave the full programm on last monday was the Tribune de Genève (a traditional regional newspaper) originally based on e-mails and web site news. The newspaper dedicated it's cover story as well as page 3 to the event. Interesting to notice that Le Matin orange didn't mention the news. Let's guess why. Their editors were either not in the loop or they could'nt publish this not totally official news because they are one of the media partners of Paleo. The funny thing is that next day an editorial of Le Matin, which is a typical tabloïd kind of newspaper meaning that they love sometimes to play the bandits in the news field, gave an ethical lesson to those three (not free) newspapers which dared to publish the non official programm. If you have no problems publishing the pictures of a federal councellor on the beach (which is ok to me) I think it's hard to argue that it's not fair to publish a programm that is already widespread on the web...

[Peter Hadorn]

LOL that Leuenberger story is a good one (the festival one as well), so amusing from a far-away perspective, amazing if they really have time to discuss that in the Bundesrat...I fully agree on your view of the "new media". Big congrats on your blog, it is both highly educational and entertaining!