In the days of newspapers, before the internet took over everything, the media used to take sides during elections.
This was the case of The Pressfor example, which respected this tradition by officially supporting a party or a candidate at each electoral meeting, as almost all North American dailies did.
But, as a sign of the times, this practice is slowly disappearing, just as it disappeared from The Press in 2018, when the company became independent.
THE New York Times has just announced that he will no longer support New York elections, including the races for governor and mayor of the city.
Before him, it was the dailies of the second largest American newspaper publisher, Alden Global Capital (Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Denver Postetc.) who chose to no longer support candidates.
Why the end of this century-old tradition? The Press and elsewhere? Because readers are less and less tolerant of what they perceive to be a slogan, as if journalists speaking from the pulpit were coming to tell them who to vote for and how to think…
It is a sign of the times, therefore, but it is also a sign of the transformation of the relationship between readers and journalists, a dynamic that has become much more horizontal in recent decades.
With the rise of technology and social networks, readers who were once passive in front of their newspaper have become active, even participatory: their reactions are now immediate, numerous and public.
They send emails and direct messages, they ask questions and give opinions, they participate in chats and call-outs, they demand corrections and clarifications, they challenge reporters on social media and other platforms.
And they thus develop and deepen a relationship which has its dark side, as we know well (trolls, insults, relentlessness), but also its beautiful side: readers thus participate more than ever in the journalistic process, an essential element of their trust.
HAS The Pressas you know, we have made dialogue with readers a priority in recent years. In addition to scrapping the tradition of election positions, we have replaced the Debates section with the Dialogue section, and we have transformed the editorial team into a team of columnists assigned to dialogue.1.
We have also increased the number of sections that focus on discussion with readers, such as Demystifying the Economy in Business, The Club in Sports, or “What you always wanted to know about…” in Arts. Sections in which you participate with great enthusiasm.
And we also focused on chats, during hockey games, major political events or major news stories: the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania this summer, for example, the withdrawal of Joe Biden, etc.
The goal is always the same: to increase interaction with our readers and donors, with the aim of building a community of informed people who want to exchange.
And we will continue to build on this momentum even more The Press. We have expanded the team of Dialogue section managers in recent weeks in order to publish more open letters, on LaPresse+but also on the web and mobile.
We will answer your questions, as Caroline Touzin did last Wednesday on fatal opioid overdoses (good question, by the way! What’s the point of selling deadly drugs?).
We will organize round tables between readers and experts, as we did recently. We will also increase calls to all, encourage exchanges between readers and journalists and facilitate communication with reporters.2. Dialogue columnists will also ask questions for you, reach out to you, and help you navigate a sea of information.
At Sports, we will open our chat room for all games of the hockey season that begins soon, not just those that take place during the week. The podcast team Exit zoneproduced with Cogeco, will go outside its own zone by recording one episode per month in front of an audience, at the L’Idéal bar in Montreal.
In short, we will continue to focus on dialogue, we will continue to inform you, being open, more than ever, to your comments, reactions and positions.
1. Stéphanie Grammond, as chief editorialist, now speaks on behalf of the institution, without however taking a formal position during referendums and elections.
2. We are working on revising the form that many of you find laborious.
Read the first text in the series: “In Search of the Lost Context”
Read the second text in the series: “Buy rose-colored glasses from journalists?”
I ask you a question: in what way would you like to get even closer to The Press ? How else would you like to participate in the journalistic approach of our artisans?
Write to the assistant editor