AgoraVox & citizen journalism - A case study

Résumé du document

Forums, community websites, personal pages and blogs are often cited as the most striking examples of the social revolution brought by the Internet. For several years now, the Web 2.0 has become an Eldorado for those who wish to express their ideas and opinions. This desire for expression regularly leads to new websites based on creative ideas, such as AgoraVox. Launched in 2005, this French website is now the national leader in citizen journalism. It consists of a platform where visitors are able to read and/or write journalist-like articles on a wide spectrum of topics, from politics to economics, technology and environmental issues. Thus, AgoraVox, subtitled "The citizen media", is a great example of how the Internet has deeply changed the way we interact with each other, particularly in the journalistic field. AgoraVox was born in March 2005, when two web-entrepreneurs decide to launch a platform where amateurs would be able to post journalistic articles, based on their own sources and ideas.

Extraits

[...] On AgoraVox, publication is organized in a pyramidal way, which could appear to contradict the website's founders' ambition to create a more horizontal way of doing journalism. At the base of the pyramid, writers can submit any article they want. Once this is done, moderators can vote to accept or refuse those articles; moderators, according to the editorial policy, moderators are all contributors who had more than three of their articles published. The second step is described as AgoraVox's staff checking articles approved by moderators. [...]

[...] Beginning in November 2009, this strategy seems to be still going: the website is still filled with ads calling for financial help. No information has been revealed on the amount of donations which has been collected yet. One thing is sure: if AgoraVox does not want to end like another successful but passing website, its founders will have to find a way to assure its future. AgoraVox's editorial policy: between freedom and passive control Who are those who write on AgoraVox? Why do so many people take time do write long articles that will never help them earning any money? [...]

[...] This is precisely where AgoraVox is meant to help those people who really want to express themselves, but who fear not to be read. By submitting articles on AgoraVox, they are assured that, if they articles are picked, they will be highly visible on the front page of the website for at least twenty four hours (and they will stay in the website's archives indefinitely). From this state of facts stems the great diversity of reasons for which people decide to write on AgoraVox. [...]

[...] As Carlo Revelli often states in his interviews, platforms such as AgoraVox tend to redefine our common definition of journalism[14]. Those websites do not mean to kill traditional journalism; they are actually meant to be a complementary initiative, to enrich the overall contribution that journalism can bring to democracy. Some people even think that citizen journalism cannot and should not be called “journalism”, since journalism means discovering facts and disclose them to the public[15]. From this point of view, writers on AgoraVox are more columnists than journalists, since most articles aim at expressing a particular (often polemic) view on a specific topic or recent event. [...]

[...] Indeed, many collaborative platforms have known a tragic ending because of their inability to find a way to maintain revenues. In May 2007, the Dutch collaborative website Skoeps.nl closed because of this[8]; a year and a half later, the Spanish platform Soitu.es[9] met the same destiny. Both websites were based on the same system as AgoraVox, but they did not manage to sustain economic balance. On the French website, Revelli and de Rosnay said from the beginning that they would never implement any system based on a “freemium” offer (most of the content is free, but a monthly fee allows users to have access to many more features), nor would they install a pay- wall (all people have to pay to subscribe to the website). [...]