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The English translation of the audio interview above with co-founder of Rue89 and Brief.me, Laurent Mauriac:

“For my part, I think Mediapart’s success is two-fold. It’s a journalistic success, but not merely that. I think that it has also been a success in the motivation of Mediapart’s readers, and that’s linked to the personality of Edwy Plenel and the strength of his convictions. I think there’s also the idea of membership, of supporting a cause—a bit like a club in fact.”

“And I think that the readers, the people of Mediapart, are proud to subscribe. But they don’t have a relationship with Mediapart like with traditional media, which is to say I am not sure that all subscribers of Mediapart read it everyday, for instance.”

Laurent Mauriac

But they are members everyday?

“They are happy they are members, there’s a feeling of membership, exactly.”

And you have learned something from Mediapart as well, or it’s a specific case?

“I think that it’s a specific case, yes. I think that Mediapart often says, look, we are a laboratory and we show the way for other media. But for my part I am a bit skeptical about the possibility of applying this formula. I think it’s a unique case.”

Why?

“Because as I explained, the personality of Edwy Plenel and all the stories that have emerged, the feelings of membership, the notion of subscribing, these are all things that are difficult to replicate.”

The English translation of the audio interview above with Mediapart’s president Edwy Plenel:

“There were several challenges. First, we faced the challenge of independence. And, second, we faced a challenge of experimentation with respect to those who, in 2007 and 2008 when the project was conceived and launched, said that information was free on the internet—that information should be free on the internet. Everyone was saying that people wouldn’t go to just a newspaper but that people would surf around and that news readers were the trend. The other nonsense people insisted upon at the time was that the internet implied short formats.

Basically, those three things refer to what sociologists would consider to be “technical illusions”—this idea that it’s the technical side that shapes how things are used, whereas it’s the way things are used that determines what we do technically. Unless we let ourselves be dominated by it. But it’s the ways things are used that allows us to do things. And we have shown that with the internet, people were ready to read a newspaper, to become loyal as an audience, and that hyperlinks also allowed them to do richer, more profound, and more lasting things than could be done in the confines of a printed paper.

And we showed that all of this could create value, because every industrial revolution is a battle about value. There’s a battle over distributing value and a battle over creating value. So we wanted to show that we could create value and to do it in a way that would profit those who create rather than the shareholders.”