In the French journal Esprit, “Laurent Mauriac and Pascal Riché, members of the team behind French politics website Rue89, explain how they attempt to bridge the gap between print and the Internet by encouraging contributions from experts and web users, but using journalists to coordinate, direct and edit this participation.”

Here’s an excerpt in which Laurent Mauriac gives an interesting typology of how journalists can work with citizen bloggers:

“Esprit: How would you describe current strategies that try to take account of new technology?

LM: I would say there are three different attitudes. First there are the traditional media that use the Web as a new channel for diffusing the information that they are already producing. Little by little and very warily they are including some degree of participation. The possibility of reader participation was already there, in the form of readers’ letters, for example, but this was very circumscribed in that it was under a separate heading that had no impact on the content of the newspaper or how it functioned. And yet Libération, when it was first set up, had already proclaimed: “By basing itself on the voice of the people, Libération will provoke discussion”. In the 1980s, radio and television had responded to the demand for listener and viewer participation right across their programming, with phone-ins, talk shows that involved listeners, panel discussions such as Ça se discute, and even reality TV in its various forms. The printed press played no part in this process of evolution. At best one can point to the appointment by some publications of “readers’ editors”, who would produce journalism based on readers’ letters. But for the most part, the profession stuck with the idea that only journalists themselves were competent to provide information. And this divide probably contributed to the crisis of confidence that developed throughout that period between readers and their newspapers. The media are largely seen as the voice of the powers that be and not as a counter-force. The perception of journalistic independence in relation to political power, and indeed to financial power, worsens year on year.

Another attitude consists of “non-journalistic” information. But the truth is that what has been called “citizen journalism” – an expression that doesn’t mean very much – is not terribly convincing as anything more than a passing trend. An endeavour of this kind relies on the idea that the Web means that the monopoly on information traditionally exercised by the media is no more – which is perfectly true. But it also relies on another idea, one that isn’t true, namely that this development makes journalists superfluous. Now you cannot just turn yourself into a journalist any more than you can turn yourself into a bricklayer merely because someone shoves a trowel into your hand. The real question is how journalists will have to redefine their role by including and guiding the contributions and participation of non-journalists, for example by locating and promoting some of the excellent blogs produced by specialists in their area. In this regard it is comforting to note how some journalists have taken the initiative and developed their own blogs; by doing so they have reinvented their approach to information and to writing, found a different tone and brought themselves closer to their readers.

The third area then lies between the first two. This is where you find sites which, like Rue89, are trying to create a synthesis between the culture of journalism and the culture of the Internet, sites such as Médiapart, Bakchich, Arrêt sur image, De source sure, La télé libre, and Slate.fr. From our point of view, what this amounts to is a kind of cooperation between journalists and non-journalists, but where the journalists are responsible for the editorial framework.”