To Attract the Young Think of 10 Year-Old Editors!
Three Hugely Successful French National Daily Newspapers Team Up With the Miami Herald To Test If Their Formula Is Exportable to Anglo-Saxons

Philip M. Stone April 7, 2005

French national newspapers are spilling so much red ink that many have refinanced and taken on new partners over the past 24 months. But there is one great success story over the past 10 years that proves that if you have the right product at the right price (and that does not mean free) then you can even penetrate the most difficult and sought after demographic of all – the young. Even the very young.

And isn’t that the very demographic European and US newspapers are targeting?

The French Group Play-Bac Presse has struck a deal with the Miami Herald to distribute as a six-month trial English language versions of its three successful French daily newspapers aimed at the 7 – 13 year-olds. It’s a deal that is going to cost the French some €500,000 through September – quite a risk since the company only earns around €1 million annual profit -- but if the Herald shows positive results then the French are counting on that to open doors to newspapers across the US, not the least with the Herald’s owner, Knight-Ridder.

The Herald will cover the costs of printing and distributing daily 40,000 issues to chosen subscribers and students in Kendall Lakes, a Miami suburb. The French are adding seven English writing staff in Paris, plus a journalist in Miami to provide the local flavor, The proofs are prepared in Paris, sent to Miami in the evening (Miami is six hours behind Paris) leaving plenty of time for printing for the next day.

The hope in Paris is that the Miami newspapers will be as popular with the young, and their parents, as are the French versions at home. But what is it that makes these newspapers, aimed at the young, so successful when few newspapers globally have much success with that demographic and in France, in particular, national newspapers have suffered major circulation declines for years?

It probably has a lot to do with how the newspapers are put together. For one thing, since they are intended for the young it is the young who choose the stories. Twice a week children, aged 10 – 14 from around France are invited to participate in three-hour editorial meetings. They act as the editor-in-chief and section editors, picking the stories, and their ranking. Adults do the writing. Even if the adults think the stories chosen are wrong, or the Page 1 banner story chosen is the “wrong” story, they still abide by the children’s decisions, the thinking being that maybe kids have a better idea what other kids want to read than adults.

That formula seems to work. The three papers sell some 200,000 copies on a subscription basis only. Parents read it, including some who do not subscribe to any other newspaper, according to founder and editor-in-chief Francois DuFour.

If the experiment is successful it will give US newspapers a weapon to attack the falling readership of the young. Survey after survey tells publishers the earlier you can get kids reading newspapers the more likely they are to continue reading newspapers as they get older. The concept of having the stories chosen by kids for kids adds a new touch, but in the way the experiment is being set up it does raise the question of whether what interests a French kid will also interest an American.

There are a few similar experiments elsewhere in the US although not aimed at such a young age group. The Boston Globe, for instance, helps fund Teens in Print that is produced quarterly by teens and distributed to high school students throughout the city.

But for a change it is France teaching the Anglo Saxons one or two media tricks, and not being in its normal catch-up role.

France guards its language and culture very closely and takes exception to English language international media expanding English usage and, for that matter, Anglo-Saxon political policies.

For that reason the government has provided  €30 million in start-up costs for a French language 24-hour international television news channel that is a pet project of President Jacques Chirac. But he cannot be too happy that the project has become known in France as CNN a la Française.

Nor is he happy with Google’s plan to spend $200 million to access five of the most prestigious libraries in the English-speaking world and offer some 15 million books and documents online. That would mean that the research of many of the world’s scholars would come more and more under Anglo-Saxon domination.  Chirac wants to see a similar project, funded by European governments, to do the same for the best libraries in France and Europe as a whole.

But in the meantime success in Miami will bring a whole new meaning to American newspapers when they write about the French Connection.