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Online media. From myth to reality

Online-media and blogs are influenced less by national idiosyncracies than the classic media. Which are the French online media ? And what economical challenges do they encounter ?

There is a whole pallet of possibilities. Certain media are migrating in small steps, others are making great strides towards digitalisation. There are media that arise from digitalisation, sort of native internauts who intend to take up positions in an already uncertain market. And in fact there are bloggers who place their own thoughts on the canvas and intend to pursue a digital conversation with individuals who read and respond to them.

Photo: iStock.com/Richard Goerg

All this nebulous intrigue: it produces noises and information, and it enters into competition, in a culture shock that is slowly being transformed into a compromise, with the traditional production of information, comments and analyses.
This revolution is fascinating in that it seems to transcend distance and time. However, there are at least three sorts of illusions: the jointly admitted idea that on the canvas, there is space for everyone. The idea of the quality of the dialogue, weaving conversation, and the illusion of the gratuitousness model, which subtends this form of production at economic level.

The unedited forms of the competition

Because there is a culture of free entry dominating, and it is not known how ample a phenomenon it is. At the most straightforward stage, it is possible for anyone to set up a blog. For certain of these, it is as though they are installed in the digital landscape, specialising in such a way that they tap a regular « clientèle ». There is a struggle to capture collective attention. The first step is visibility, the second is becoming well-known, the third is referring. We are thinking for example of the Assouline blogs (La République des livres), and the Versac blogs. The blog is made prescriptive, and replaces the newspaper article. Quicker, and more likely to react immediately, it combines commentary and description, opinion and objectivisation.

Sometimes victim of his own success, the blogger puts a stop to his enterprise, as with Versac : « […]. The media bubble surrounding blogs has engendered a sort of monster, which is a stupid invention, the influential blogger. […] The climate engendered by this suspicion of influence, this fame, means that it is no longer simple to do this blogging any more. […] In this ridiculous economy of utmost visibility, inherited from these media that are dying because the flame is going out, becoming a star is a sport I do not like practising. […] It is not possible any more, never mind. »

The competition is stronger still for both categories of economic models: on one side, you find information sites, those that have the benefit of the trademark of traditional media. These media are supported by this traditional trademark to build what, in a lot of cases remains a collection of derived products. Then they are somewhat freed from the initial media, better to benefit from the possibilities offered by digitalisation (LeMonde.fr , which itself creates a more reactive site, LePost.fr). From another point of view, media directly playing the Net card are taking up their positions (Rue 89). These ventures duplicate the earlier media, (by combining the article and the blog for example). Alongside there are sites emerging, sometimes satirical (Bakchich) and very committed (samizdat.net , Acrimed) ones, made of tentative movements, very much anchored in strong personalities, but whose resources are scant and are almost entirely dependent on the welded nature of the original team.

At the margins of this already rich, heterogeneous landscape, ventures like Telos , Nonfiction , and Vie des idées , etc. are taking shape. These sites offer analyses and reflections of greater or lesser content and criticisms of books that have recently been published. We are getting closer to the offer of large paper reviews like Esprit or Commentaire. The site shows the authors, what has newly appeared, and leads the reader along intellectual paths. On the other hand, interactivity is excluded. The digital model reduces the costs, accelerates and increased the circulation of the texts, but does not break radically with the traditional model.

The digital conversation in question

Breaking point is reached when production becomes a collective process that disturbs – and perhaps even clears – the traditional separation between the three functions: production/ intermediation – prescription / consumption. Internauts enrich the message, send their own information and distort the initial content. The participants respond in an exchange, which little by little distances the initial subject. The expert is called upon to acknowledge the opinion and converse with the person who sometimes knows as much, and sometimes does not know anything about it. The digital conversation is like a cascade of information, where the point of departure only acts as an initial stimulus to a non-commercial exchange where one or other of them engages with separate projects (exchange, self-affirmation, statement, etc.).

While one part of the traditional press is condemned to producing poor information, which is like eating badly at a quick-service restaurant, there is a demand for real-time access to commentaries that are indispensable for comprehension of the facts, which in the language of modern communication is called deciphering. The production of poor information by the traditional press is also connected with the reductions in costs it is suffering and the various pressures for being profitable, which originate from the dual competition of what is free of charge and what is digital. All of this makes particular sense when the Internet makes it possible to combine with this offer a whole series of links and meanderings, which cause there to be fewer possibilities of being informed. So there is a demand for immediately getting more deeply into the subject-matter. Does the Internet really meet this need? Badly-trained internauts get lost there, true is mixed with false and fiction with reality.

The free model

Is there an economic model of digital media, in this world of crisis, where the traditional paid press is finding it increasingly more difficult to fulfil its function of analysis and commentary? On the one hand, a resolutely non-commercial world is outlined, but one where symbolic payments may replace pecuniary income. On the other hand, experience of launching paying press sites hardly lead to the number of subscriber required for financial balance being attained (this is the case with Mediapart , launched by Edwy Plenel, who was the editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Le Monde). So the other sites are persuaded to look for publishing recipes (paired with increases in capital resembling the gesture of Mycenae, if need be), in an ultra-competitive world. All of the economic players who are working in double-paying markets (which offer at once space for advertisers and content for internauts) depend upon the advertising basket; well this market is growing less rapidly than is required, and the chances of everyone capturing a share are decreasing, in a world where the leader's option (that is to say the advertisers' logic, which means that advertising naturally turns towards the most visited sites) continues to play its part [see table below]. In order to get enough publicity, it is necessary to reach a million visitors per month. Certainly, the internauts are multi-consumers, but only up to a certain point. So emerging and keeping to these conditions, is quite a venture.

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Source : France Publicité.

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