Paris Match: Commissioning readers

Content sharing technologies enhance a magazine site and encourage citizen contributors.

The Site

Paris Match, the French weekly news magazine, is using networking media on its redesigned website to encourage its readers to become contributors.

On the site’s home page a photo-panel headed Devenez reporter Match (‘Become a Match reporter’) encourages readers to upload their photographs and videos to the site, with the added incentive of earning gift points (des points cadeaux) for any that are selected for showing (mettre en avant) by Paris Match. A fresh selection is promised every day and is featured in the home page panel along with options to view the site visitors’ favourites (Le Top de vos photos) by ‘most viewed’, ‘most popular’ (Les mieux notés) and ‘most recent’ as well as the full categorised archive. To get started, users must complete a simple registration form in a dedicated main section, Devenez reporter amateur.

The Takeaway

Paris Match is adopting popular content sharing technologies to enhance its online environment and complement – rather than replicate – its print publication. Offering an open-ended commission to ‘citizen journalists’ and allowing ‘crowd surveys’ to drive editorial choices (for example, which images are linked from the home page) are examples of the experimentation all mainstream media are conducting as they look for ways to adapt and thrive in a world where they no longer have absolute control over the only media in town.

This approach does, though, carry inherent dangers, not least in its popular appeal. Some media organisations have found themselves inundated with citizen contributions – a consequence of mainstream sites still being more highly visited than all but the top few blog-style sites and offering more prestige-by-association. On top of the administrative nightmare, they then suffered a consequent backlash from the disappointed many whose material was never shown. In this context, Paris Match’s clear statement that it makes the editorial decision about what is published, with rewards for those it chooses, looks like an advisable attempt to manage expectations.

First published on 16 October, 2007