Ateliers des Médias: Five politicians in a room, and cameras all around

Running notes from the Ateliers des Médias (The Media Workshop), a half-day gathering of media and advertising people that takes place annually in the scope of the Geneva Book Fair. The event is in French, most of the speakers are Swiss, about 250 people in the room.

The event opens with a panel with Bernard Rappaz, head of TSR.ch, the website of the French-speaking channels of Swiss Public Television; David Moginier, who leads the online news for Edipresse, the second-largest Swiss publishing group; and Thierry Zweifel, of RSR.ch, the site of Swiss Public Radio. Moderated by the editor in chief of weekly L'Illustré, Christophe Passer.
Rappaz explains how the modes of television production and consumption are "fundamentally changing", and how TSR is pursuing a "multiple screens" strategy (TV, computer, cell phone). "There is a new tectonics at work, with TSR.ch -- one million video downloads per month, not bad for a small reality such as Western Switzerland -- we are re-attracting people that had abandoned television". The TSR.ch site's viewership has an average age of 33, while that of the main TSR TV channels is of 52.
Edipresse just re-launched the sites of two of its largest local dailies, the Tribune de Genève (Geneva) and 24Heures (Lausanne), including also sections in English (there are some 100'000 English speakers living in Geneva) and a number of invited bloggers. Moginier: "the newspaper used to be one of the media distributed most often: daily. In the last fifteen years it has shifted to the end of the spectrum, to be the least often distributed. The Web allows us to seek a new balance: 24/7 flow of data and information online and developing possibilities for interaction with the audience; reports, analysis and perspective on paper. But it's clear that the websites will be moving towards becoming a platform for public conversations". Swiss newspapers have been slow in really adopting the Web, and the same is true for advertisers: just above 5% of ad budgets in Switzerland are currently spent online.
Swiss radio is also evolving: go to their website and you will find live webcast, videos, 24 hours info, participative journalism, articles. The latest initiative, explains Zweifel, is a sort of political "Big Brother"which started this week: The Swiss will vote this autumn to renew the federal Parliament, and to start the campaign the RSR has launched a program called "Le génie suisse" ("Swiss genius") where they put 5 political candidates of all parties in a room for a day tasked with suggesting solutions for a public policy problem, with five webcams rolling (screenshot). This week, they discussed migrants, integration and multiculturalism. The whole day is videostreamed live online (viewers can comment on the site or by SMS texting ), discussed on radio, and at the end of the day one of the five has to "report" back to the radio audience.
Rappaz: in our small reality we are really timid in what we do online. Other markets evolve much faster, and the result is that, for example, through AdSense Google has sucked out 5 million Swiss francs of advertising from the small Swiss-French region in the last 12 months. "We need to inject some sense of urgency in our newsrooms and in the publishing hierarchies".
An anecdote that a couple of the panelists mentioned: who is Lunettes Rouges, one of the most popular bloggers on the site of French newspaper Le Monde, writing about modern art? He's a top headhunter who travels around Europe for his job, and devotes a few hours a day to modern art. On the site, he's rated higher than Le Monde's own art critics.   

Comments

[Lunettes Rouges]

Well, thanks for the praise. I didn't think that my private (i.e. non-blog) life was of so much interest. To tell the whole truth, I have indeed been for many years a top-level headhunter, but I work only half-time nowadays, trying to devote more time to other things than business, and especially to art.
I don't intend to be rated "higher than the Monde art critics", but I try to have a different posture, to be more sensitive, more accessible, something relatively rare among art critics, albeit much needed in my view.

[BrunoG]

Hello Lunettes Rouges, don't fool yourself, you *are* highly rated, and possibly for the very reason that you mention: being more accessible, less formal. Thanks for completing the information about your background, and keep up the good work. B-