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Interview
November 2007
newspaper techniques
XMA winner Gazeta Wyborcza’s community journalism advice
How to win the hearts
of readers: engage them
Grzegorz Piechota
Special projects editor
Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland
Agora and its daily newspaper Gazeta
Wyborcza in Poland is one of the nine winners (see the list on page 50) in the Ifra
XMA Cross Media Awards 2007 competition, which was dedicated this year to
“Building communities – engage your readers.” The newspaper, which has a daily circulation of about 474,000, won the large
newspaper category for its “Save Rospuda”
campaign, a stretch of vast, precious valley
land that could be endangered if a proposed
highway is allowed to run through it. As
Grzegorz Piechota points out in this interview, community journalism is already old
hat for the Gazeta, but the Internet indeed
has helped to expand their efforts.
Grzegorz Piechota, 31
years old, develops and
runs multimedia projects
for Gazeta Wyborcza, the
largest quality daily
newspaper in Poland,
that involve editorial,
marketing and research
teams. He has created
many successful Gazeta
products such as its
supplements, collections,
promotional and advertising campaigns. He began
his career at Gazeta 11
years ago as a reporter in
one of the smallest local
oﬃces, working his way to
the deputy editor-in-chief
position of one of Gazeta’s
spin-off newspapers. He is
also Polish director of the
International Newspaper
Marketing Association
(INMA).
newspaper techniques: How has your company
embraced community journalism?
Grzegorz Piechota: For one, community jour-
nalism is nothing new for us and it did not
start with the rise of the Internet. However,
the new technology helped us to make it
bigger, bolder and easier to launch and
manage. One of the ﬁrst projects that involved readers at its core was our campaign
to guide young mothers to humane births.
Back in 1996, we asked our female readers
to write down their memoirs from their
pregnancies and to review maternity wards
at hospitals around Poland. We got 2000
letters that helped us to create the ﬁrst usergenerated guide on hospitals in our country. In 2006 we ran another edition of this
campaign and thanks to the Internet we
achieved much greater results – we got
40,000 reviews. From the editorial point of
view nothing changed between 1996 and
2006. New technology has just improved
the scale and made it much easier. Saying
this, I have to admit that the rise of the Internet proved the importance of interaction
and showed us new opportunities. A second
point… when we launched our Internet portal Gazeta.pl in 2001, we had not imagined
that user-generated content would be so
important to the future of our operations.
Launching the portal we were thinking – as
so many others were during that time – that
its success would be based on the newspa48
per’s content, or content coming from any
other professional source with text, graphics, audio or video. We added discussion
boards (forums), commenting tools and –
later – an open blogging platform just to
accompany the newsroom-generated stuff.
... Today, we have millions of posts on our
boards and more than 200,000 blogs written by readers. In total our portal has some
6 million real users monthly, who generate
400 million page views and spend there
some 600 million hours per month.
nt: What are some of the key decisions you made
to ensure the attraction of such an audience?
G. Piechota: There are many reasons for our
success. First, the most important decision
we took was not to censor the boards preemptively. So we allowed readers to start
any topic or write any comment without
authorisation from the editors. If anybody
breaks the rules (breaks the law, harms people, etc.), every reader can act as a moderator and notice administrators about the
breach. Such a post or comment will be deleted immediately. If a user commits such
breaches permanently, his IP address can be
suspended forever (the system will not allow him to make any new comments). It
was a very difﬁcult decision – no editor
would like to lose its power over what is
published. But – in effect – readers fell in
love with this freedom and launched very
popular boards that we – the editors – never
had in mind. Secondly, we also allowed impassioned readers to moderate all of the
boards as volunteers. For example: we
searched for somebody interested in home
decoration who was active on the board
and who was respected by other users. We
offered him the right to edit the entire board
about the topic. Thirdly, we always promoted readers’ outstanding work (posts, or
blogs, or boards, or comments, or photos)
on the home page of the portal and in the
printed newspaper. Recently, we have even
launched a new system to pay semi-professional bloggers who write about speciﬁc
> Continued on page 50
» www.ifra-nt.com
Interview
Ifra XMA 2007 Winners
> Category A (Small Newspapers)
1. Bocholter-Borkener Volksblatt (BBV), Bocholt, Germany:
“BBV – Always and Everywhere”
2. Saarbrücker VerlagsService, 20cent, Saarbrücken, Germany: “Saarland Community”
3. Heraldo de Aragón, Zaragoza, Spain: “Open Heraldo”
> Category B (Mid-sized Newspapers)
1. Dagbladet, Oslo, Norway: “Reisetips.no”
2. La Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina: “La Nación and its offering for the
communities generation”
3. Südkurier Medienhaus, Südkurier, Constance, Germany: “Südkurier Debate”
> Category C (Large Newspapers)
1. Agora, Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw, Poland: “Campaign: Let’s save Rospuda”
2. PrisaCom, El País (EP3), Madrid, Spain: “Talentos”
3. Telegraph Media Group, The Daily Telegraph, London, UK: “My Telegraph”
the scale and number of people involved).
Here are two examples, just to show you a
size, a scope and a variety of such projects:
1) In early 2007 we ran a campaign about
the future of Polish cities. We wanted to
discuss with our readers the strengths and
weaknesses of the 20 largest cities, sort of a
comparison. It was accompanied by websites, TV and radio shows, live events, etc. It
involved more than 150 editors and journalists from all the 20 local branches of
Gazeta. 2) In summer 2007 we launched a
new daily section to Gazeta called “Welcome to Poland.” We used it to introduce
daily features (1000-2000 words) to show
the changes in the Polish society. Before
that section, such stories were published in
Gazeta’s magazines and supplements. The
topics and stories have been chosen in a
way to push readers to react and debate on
those issues. We now receive, on average,
200 letters per article published and some
of the stories generate more than 800 letters
(and we don’t count online comments –
some articles get additionally as much as
500 posts). To deal with such an amount of
responses, we launched a new letters section – it is not published in the Opinion section as it used to be, but in the front of the
paper – between national and world news.
Readers send us story ideas that we often
use to plan our next features/campaigns.
Continued from page 48
topics (they get a share from advertisements
run on their blogs). All of these experiences
helped us to develop new ways of editing a
newspaper that is interactive in both print
and online. A newspaper that is interactive
in its backbone.
nt: What are some of the speciﬁc things you did
editorially to incorporate this type of interactive
environment into your teams?
G. Piechota: In 2006 we created a small team
of experienced editors to run special editorial projects on a permanent basis. I am one
of them. You can compare our jobs to producers in a TV industry: we develop editorial concepts and projects that are intended
to be multimedia and interactive from the
start; we plan and execute budgets for these
projects; we involve editors and journalists
from any desk in the paper on a project basis; we cooperate with all other departments
(promotion, PR, research, circulation, advertising, etc.) to ensure that the editorial
effort will have the right impact; we coordinate all the activities to achieve measurable
results – to solve the issue, to increase circulation (in copies sold), to strengthen the
brand commitment (in number of letters, or
e-mails received); we also train editors and
journalists; and we work on new products
(sections, websites, brand extensions, etc.).
nt: What are some of the projects you have done?
G. Piechota: We run 20 different editorial
nt: So what are some of the lessons learned thus
far and what advice would you have for other news
operations?
projects per year (of course they differ in
50
November 2007
newspaper techniques
G. Piechota: 1) The newspaper must be relevant if we want to win the hearts of readers
nowadays. As an editor, I have to admit
that it is quite hard to be relevant if one
spends the whole day in the newsroom.
How can I tell people about real life like
that? Interaction helps to keep me in touch.
2) Readers are not journalists. They are not
trained to professionally gather information
and deal with sources. Their track is not supervised by anyone to maintain the proper
quality standards and to avoid mistakes.
They don’t even try to be objective. They
don’t show two sides of the story. They often prefer to stay anonymous, so they don’t
want to take responsibility for what they
write about. So... if I would learn about corruption in the government, I would not assign readers to report that story. But readers
are experts in real-life issues that we, the
editors, often miss. We would be stupid to
not ask them for help. 3) Readers, especially
young readers, nowadays are not interested
in just the news. They want to act – to actively change the world for better. Interaction is not about a column of letters on
page number 87, it is about cooperation to
change the world. If you ask readers for any
letters or any topic suggestions, you will
fail. If you ask readers for ideas how to – for
example – save Rospuda, you will be
amazed by their response and commitment.
This is a huge change – we, the editors, are
no longer the kings who decide what is
right and what is not. We have to act as
leaders who set the cause, give tools to their
readers and work with them to solve the issues. 4) As readers use many media, we
cannot target them with just one. Our campaigns would not be so successful if we
were stuck to the printed paper only. Multimedia is not really about technology, it’s
more about thinking how to tell stories in a
different way. 5) And ﬁnally, we believe
that good journalism can sell newspapers.
Sometimes when I go to the newsstand, I
ﬁnd that newspapers or magazines seem to
be only supplements to all this promotional
stuff: DVDs, books, lotteries. This is not a
fault of marketing people, they do their best
to sell more papers and pay our bills. But if
we can’t make newspapers that are desired
by readers, we should change our jobs. We
need better journalism that is worthy of
promotion.
Dean Roper ([email protected]) conducted this interview.