I’ve always been interested in journalism. When I was younger, I fancied the idea of reporting on stories around the world. However, as fate would have it, I never ended up pursuing it.
It wasn’t for want of trying, though. While I was an undergraduate student, I discovered that my International Business professor used to write for The Economist. Intrigued, I asked him about how the experience was and he ended up writing for them in the first place. Later on, he told me that he knew a New Zealand journalist who covered New Zealand for The Economist Intelligence Unit, and that if I were interested, I could meet him to discuss possibly writing for them.
Naturally, I was delighted by the opportunity. And so we organised a time where the three of us would meet up and talk about The Economist.
A few days later, however, I discovered that the meeting that I thought was going to happen in a few days’ time…had already happened. Somehow, I had managed to get the date wrong, and so the day I thought it would take place had already passed.
And just like that, I had created an opportunity and then blown it in one fell swoop.
I must admit that at that moment I felt regretful and more than a little stupid. I mean, while I could have written for one of the most prestigious magazines in the English language, instead I find myself blogging about French public toilets. Which is, of course, just as good (Right? Right?).
But I’m not complaining. Fast-forward a few years and I’m happy with advertising and the creative license that comes with it. Unlike journalism, advertising lets you make stuff up (or at least be open about doing it). It’s the actual job description, after all. But my interest in what goes on in newsrooms has never gone away.
Rencontre avec la Rédaction en chef du Monde.fr
So when I found out that Le Monde, the biggest newspaper in France, were holding a festival called, well, Le Festival du Monde, I jumped at the opportunity.
As part of Journées européennes du patrimoine or European Heritage Days, a continent-wide weekend event when many cultural institutions open to the public, Le Festival du Monde was giving readers the chance to go behind the scenes and see how they operate.
I caught line 5 of the metro and arrived at the Gare d’Austerlitz in the 13th arrondissement. Unlike much of Paris, this district is notable for its modern — some would say, ugly — glass and concrete architecture. Leaving the train station, I only had to walk 200 metres to reach Le Monde’s gleaming new glass headquarters.
I went through a security check, which consisted of a brief peek at my backpack, and entered the festival. At the base of the building, food stalls were selling snacks, coffee and Italian wine.
To the left of the stalls, I entered the building where a big spacious lobby awaited. I then went up a flight of stairs, passing a desk with Le Monde’s first ever printed edition along the way, and headed into the Café de la Presse, the press café where the Rencontre avec la Rédaction en chef du Monde.fr, the meeting with the editorial team of lemonde.fr, was to take place. It was a spacious area with minimalist furniture straight out of IKEA. Some visitors were already waiting at the long tables, which over the next few minutes began to fill up. Sunlight streamed in from the right-hand side, making the room unusually warm.
Two women were standing at the front, and as the room filled out, they began to speak. They introduced themselves — one as the Editor-in-Chief of lemonde.fr, the other as a journalist — and began explaining how they break news on their website.
The editor started off by talking about Ukraine and how Le Monde has committed a lot of journalists to covering the war. They have a lot of journalists on the ground, but also many others covering it from Paris. Although many of their 500 journalists are generalists, insofar as they write stories about any and every topic, they have been covering so many stories about Ukraine lately that they feel like they’ve become experts on the country.
Due to the nature of the war, they’re also exposed to highly graphic and distressing news stories and images every day. I got the impression that they seemed a little overwhelmed by the conflict, which would drive anyone insane.
Here’s a brief summary of some of the topics they talked about.
Fact-checking
The editor then talked about the efforts they go to verify sources. They usually try to triple-check pieces of information to ensure that what they publish is indeed correct. But while verifying a speech by Vladimir Putin would be easy, the news of someone being killed by a soldier in a remote part of Ukraine would be harder to confirm. As a result, they spend a large part of their days on fact-checking and proving or disproving stories that crop up online.
Live news reports
Le Monde has a bureau in Los Angeles, which enables them to cover live reports around the clock. Like many other newspapers around the world, they’ve also embraced live news reports as a way of breaking news. In addition to writing news articles, they write short updates about a major event in real time, taking full advantage of the internet. The only thing with live news reports is that they require a lot of resources, and so choosing what to do a live report on depends in large part on what they consider a ‘big’ story. If something is considered sufficiently newsworthy, they could devote resources to writing about it in real-time, but that would also require them to have sufficient boots on the ground. Providing live coverage on, say, North Korea, wouldn’t be possible simply because they don’t have any journalists based there.
Selecting photos
They spend a lot of time choosing which photos to publish online. The selection process is complicated because while they may deem certain photos newsworthy, they do not want to publish photos that could take away the dignity of those who appear in them. For example, publishing a photo of a dead man lying in the middle of the street, having been shot and killed by soldiers, would be seen as taking away his dignity, and so they wouldn’t publish it. They also consider the fact that even if a photo were deemed important insofar as it illustrates a story, if the image is so graphic that it would cause readers to look away in horror, then publishing it might fail to transmit the intended information anyway, thus making its publication pointless.
Remote work
One of the things that really stood out was just how quiet the office was. Though I only saw the bottom three storeys of the five-storey building, which would have been the most public-facing, the building was still notable for its almost total absence of workers. Of course, it’s likely that a lot of work was taking place on the higher floors, but the office was still incredibly quiet. As the editor explained, however, a lot of journalists prefer to work from home on weekends. They do prefer to meet in person, however, simply because collaboration is so much more fluid, but there’s no denying that they can do a lot of their work remotely.
The talk, which included a lot of Q&A, went on for about an hour and a half, before coming to a close. I left the building and went for a walk down to the Gare d’Austeritz, before heading back to the festival to attend the Rencontre avec le service Podcast, a meeting with the Podcast team.
But that’s for another time.
