Launched less than four years ago, Mediapart is unique among the media, with no equivalent in terms of either its editorial identity or its business model. This December marked the first year in which it has crossed into profit, with more than 56,000 subscribers. Here, Mediapart co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel sets out why, more than ever, this fully-independent, ad-free online journal needs the support and loyalty of its subscribers to reach an enduring, solid base.
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At Mediapart we have two anniversaries - the date we announced our launch plans on December 2nd 2007 and our launch on March 16th 2008. We decided to celebrate our fourth anniversary on December 2nd with an online open day as a way of including our readers in celebrating the milestone we have now reached, thanks to them.
The online open day marked the first year when, no longer losing money, Mediapart began to build its independence on a lasting basis, with more than 56,000 subscribers, a turnover of 5 million euros and a net profit of around 500,000 euros.
Even so, the message of the open day must be that this success is still fragile, and we must consolidate it to guarantee our pioneering journal a permanent place in the French media environment. Which is to say that, more than ever, we need you, our subscribers, to offer your support and your loyalty.
Because Mediapart is unique. This is not a proclamation of faith but an objective observation. There is no equivalent in terms of either its editorial identity or its business model.
Firstly, Mediapart is an online journal and not simply a website. Through its focus on information of public interest, Mediapart aims to use the internet to recreate the press by establishing priorities and providing added value, rather than pouring out a stream of information and distraction.
It is also a journal with reader participation via the Club, a bloggers' platform open to subscribers. While the websites of traditional newspapers pick their bloggers or give outside bodies the task of choosing contributions, Mediapart chose the road of freedom and responsibility, offering a direct conversation between its editorial staff and its readers.
Mediapart is also a quality journal, and one of reference, where we put editorial innovation at the service of the public's right to know, so that people can exercise their choices as citizens in a free and autonomous manner.
As well as its daily investigations, analyses and reports, Mediapart produces in-depth features, offers an English-language version (Mediapart English) and also publishes books. A daily print version has been available for the last 30 or so editions and an audio version is available as a podcast.
We produce web documentaries and have launched FrenchLeaks, a freely accessible document database. We are regularly increasing our contacts by organising debates where we meet our readers in person.
Finally, it is a paid-for journal whose independence is guaranteed by its sole source of revenue: the membership, support and loyalty of its subscribers.
Mediapart claims a place in the new democracy created by free access on the internet, offering exchange and sharing of views via open access to the Club and the ability to send articles to friends. We have always fought the illusion of free-of-charge access coupled with advertising, since this is a Trojan Horse for destroying value and making content uniform, banal and standardised.
Our initial gamble has paid off, but it still needs to be consolidated. This is our aim for 2012, and we have three priorities for achieving it.
Firstly, we plan to make Mediapart available on all platforms. The iPad application has just come out, the iPhone application will be ready in time for Christmas and next year Mediapart will also be available on Android, Kindle and all tablet computers and smart phones.
Secondly, we need to increase reader loyalty through better commercial management. This means asking subscribers to pay by direct debit so as to avoid the difficulties encountered in the French banking system with recurrent online payments. (The numerous problems with such payments and short validity of credit cards are explained on my blog in French.)
Finally, we need to renovate and improve not only the Club but also all the tools we offer our readers, so that your journal can also take its place as a social network.
Liberty refound with the internet
Our values are independence, quality and openness to the public. These are the principles of creating value in quite the opposite way to speculative bubbles, and they are at the very heart of our business model. We have defended our approach doggedly in the face of irony and mockery from so-called experts, yet it has become a case study.
Mediapart managed to emerge from the red at the end of 2010 without advertising revenue, with income derived only from selling its editorial content. We spent almost 6 million euros to reach break-even.
We were profitable in 2011, and this has opened a new path which the websites of national dailies are now taking, offering paid-for formulas and often copying our marketing innovations.
So Mediapart has become something of a research laboratory and a creative workshop with utility for all, a kind of public asset.
Our uniqueness as an online paid-for journal has provided a basis for the online press's legal status. Right from the start we asked the authorities for equality between the various types of media, although as recently as 2008, the term "press" could only be applied legally to something printed on paper.
Similarly, our fight early on for equal rights in obtaining the same 2.1% VAT rate as the printed press was taken up by SPIIL, the association of online independent news organisations (Syndicat de la Presse Indépendante d'Information en Ligne), of which we are co-founders, and it has been taken up by all newspaper editors.
But there will always be one thing about Mediapart that is hard to imitate - its independence. And this is its most precious value, especially because it has become an increasingly rare one.
This is why we still have a long way to go. One year in the black is obviously not enough to attain the long-term aim Mediapart's founders set themselves of durably establishing a journal run by journalists, controlled by those who work there and only by them, financed only by the support of its readers, without any link that would cause political, economic, partisan or financial dependence.
Mediapart has made its guiding principle the statement of journalists' rights and responsibilities in the Munich Journalists' Charter of 1971, which says: "The journalist's responsibility towards the public opinion is superior to all other responsibilities, in particular towards their employers and the public authorities."
Through the battles lost at other newspapers, such as Le Monde and Libération, which no longer belong to their journalists and have been sold to financiers outside the information industry, we have learnt that our major adversary in this would be what Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of Le Monde, called "the press of industry". In his description of this press owned by industrialists, he commented that "it suffices that the information should not involve causing any prejudice to very material and very precise interests, or, on some occasions, that it should serve them efficiently."
Independence goes hand in hand with journalists' social responsibility, stated in the Munich Journalists' Charter as "the right of the public to know the facts and opinions". This is obviously an aim shared by many other editorial teams besides that of Mediapart. However, it would be lucid rather than excessive, given the crisis our industry is currently experiencing, to recognise the extent to which the conditions for this independence, both material and moral, are increasingly under threat in most of the recognised, existing media.
In France, the vast majority of every type of privately-owned media - print, radio and television - is controlled by industrialists or financiers who are not entrepreneurs for whom information is the sole or principal activity. "The press of industry", that is, this mix of interests, connections and influence, is king.
The current masters of France's private media are bankers, arms dealers, luxury goods firms, construction companies, port operators, import-export companies and telephone operators. They maintain all possible incestuous links with the public authorities who are their political or commercial clients, while also furthering their own interests.
If we add to this state of affairs the erosion of public broadcasting under this presidency, which is itself the representative of these private interests, we are forced to admit that the ecosystem of French news organisations is far from living up to our democratic ideals.
Wanting independence is not enough in itself. It requires the ability to be independent. That is why Mediapart intends to defend a radical and demanding concept of independence to be observed by all these players, one which guarantees freedom for both journalists and readers.
The importance of being independent
Mediapart's capital is controlled by its founders, its journalists and its friends. The composition of its board reflects this, with five of its seven members representing the internal shareholders.
All the shareholders are bound by our statutes, which affirm the "total independence of Mediapart's journalists, whose primary obligation is to the truth, whose primary loyalty is to citizens, whose primary discipline is verification and whose primary duty is independence".
In addition to its opposition to taking advertising, Mediapart decided this year to give up all public subsidies. We were granted 314,942 euros for 2009 and 2010 but have only drawn down 118,096 euros to date.
Besides the fact that we have passed our break-even point, the other reason to do this is the lack of transparency in public subsidies to the press, the allocation of which aggravates the industry's crisis and dependence rather than offering a remedy for them. A recent Parliamentary report demonstrates this (available here in French).
Lastly, in 2010 a journalists' association was set up at Mediapart with the brief "to promote and safeguard the moral interests and editorial values of Mediapart, an independent, participative online newspaper which has subscribed to the declaration of journalists' rights and duties in the Munich Charter."
So Mediapart has chosen freedom. This freedom is a lever for creativity and a gauge of trust. This freedom allows the development of a shared responsibility between journalists and readers.
This freedom belongs to everyone who works for Mediapart, and who has chosen to take part in this collective adventure for which they alone, ultimately, bear the responsibility. It belongs to all those who follow us to stay informed, while always having the ability to add to, complete, question, criticise and discuss our articles in the context of a lasting, responsible conversation.
We have repeatedly said over the past four years that independence has a price and also has utility. Without the growth in our number of subscribers, this independence would not be guaranteed either now or in the future.
It is the price subscribers pay that underpins the utility of our work. There is no recipe for Mediapart's editorial originality, exclusive investigations, serious analyses and relevant reporting other than this ecosystem that provides freedom for creativity, inventiveness and risk-taking.
This is why Mediapart has been behind all the revelations that have laid bare the true oligarchic nature of the current presidency. These include the Caisse d'Épargne scandal, the Tapie affair, the Karachi scandal, the Bettencourt affair and the Takieddine saga.
Without this ecosystem unique to Mediapart, one which naturally provides our independence and which serves as a guarantee for our sources to trust in, some of these major stories would never have been revealed and would have remained outside of public debate.
For a truly free press
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Illustrated in many other less spectacular but just as essential editorial areas, this independence that is our trademark will obviously be at the core of our coverage of the 2012 French presidential campaign - which has de facto already begun.
Mediapart has demonstrated the harm this presidency has wrought with its attacks on the very principle of a social and democratic republic, and early next year the second volume of our book chronicles of the Sarkozy presidency, entitled Finissons-en ! (An end to it!), will be published by Éditions Don Quichotte.
But the failure of the Sarkozy system is quite simply that of any oligarchic system that does not intend to let go of any of its privileges, and it could well survive if there is merely a change of political colour in government. So it is that our investigations, reports and analyses will ceaselessly remind the current opposition in all its diversity, and in particular the Socialist Party, that after 14 years under President François Mitterrand and 17 years of uninterrupted rule by the conservative right, our country at last has the right to hope for a democratic reconstruction that would liberate popular energy and restore equal rights.
We will carry this demand forward in 2012 particularly in relation to freedom of information. The coinciding crisis in our democracy and the advent of the digital revolution make it imperative to call for a new founding law along the lines of the French Law on the Freedom of the Press of 1881, which had far-reaching libertarian effects.
The compliments we sometimes receive at Mediapart for our "courage" are pleasing but does one ask fish swimming in a polluted sea to be "courageous"? No, the issue is that of cleaning up the sea. Why should a journalist need to be courageous to carry out his or her trade with honesty and fairness? There is great need for an inventive political and judicial reflection on this issue, and Mediapart will tirelessly champion that cause during the presidential election campaign.
Our values are resolutely social and democratic, and in this sense they are in keeping with the so little respected preamble to the French Constitution under the Fourth and Fifth Republics.
And Mediapart's approach, which derives directly from this, is none other than a quest for news that boosts awareness, disturbs, and breathes life into public debate. It changes partisan lines and shakes up prejudices and views of what is inevitable and certain.
We take our lead from the American sociologist Robert E. Park, who began his career as a journalist and believed that "a reporter who had the facts was a more effective reformer than an editorial writer who merely thundered from his pulpit, no matter how eloquently". He was convinced that it is facts rather than commentary that form opinions.
This is the ambition that drives us, and more than ever we need you, dear reader, to realise it. We intend, with your help, to create a new press for the 21st century, one that has got off its pedestal and regained the trust of its readers.
It will not claim a monopoly of opinion and will defend an agenda beyond the control of the powers-that-be. It will demonstrate that the digital world, far from being an iniquitous mish-mash of information, is in fact a place where information can be enriched.
Accompanying us on this road is a contribution to awakening public consciousness.
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English version: Sue Landau
(Editing by Graham Tearse)