At a time when press ownership is highly concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires and pluralism is under threat, this portal helps citizens in France, especially people under 35 who consume little news, to access quality journalism and discover media outlets operating in their region or covering their areas of interest.
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Project Activities
The project is available on three platforms:
- a web portal, built on an open-source CMS, offering a short daily press review of independent media (around 15 articles a day) and a personalised news feed that users set up according to their topics of interest and local area;
- two newsletters featuring the main news, under-reported stories and solutions-focused articles produced by independent media: one dedicated to French outlets (90 sources) and the other to independent media from around the world (more than 250 sources);
- a daily press overview on social media, mainly Instagram, focusing on five under-reported stories and solutions-focused articles.
What is the impact?
One of the project's goals is to amplify local independent media in areas where a single traditional outlet often dominates the market, producing consensual and sometimes lazy journalism. By bringing these new outlets traffic and visibility, the portal helps them build their legitimacy and reach their audience.
The project has shown that a small but determined editorial team, using open-source code and low-tech tools, can create a user-friendly platform capable of finding a place in people's daily news routine. "It's exactly the kind of service I was waiting for" is something the team heard many times at public events, especially from young, educated people who move between their Instagram feed and a few mainstream news sources. This is because the portal offers a time-saving news routine along with a wide range of topics, media, formats and viewpoints. It guarantees that only rigorous journalistic content is displayed, with no attempt to harvest data or steer users towards paid recommendations. And it allows users to actively build their own news feed, rather than being served "for you" articles based on aggregated data.
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