« Holding out for Java ES.next | Main | No questions asked JDS, part III »

July 25, 2004

20 minutes: journal gratuit

On Thursday, July 15, I received No. 555 of 20 minutes, a journal gratuit (free -- as in lunch -- newspaper) published by 20 Minutes France, SAS, which is a Paris-based company. No. ISSN 1632-1022. Over the last couple of years, traditional reader- and advertising-supported French newspaper publishers have either complained about the journal gratuit phenomenon, or have hopped on the bandwagon. One talk show on France Inter radio suggested young people with less spending money had flocked to the new newspapers, which publishers distribute near public transportation stations in French metropolitan areas. (Like Lyon Part Dieu train station, where I received my issue.) This aroused my curiosity about the content of a journal gratuit.

What I found bored me more than anything else. 20 minutes appears to have been designed specifically for those of us waiting to do something either useful or fun, who given a cultural background that frowns on such Zen non-activities as sitting to sit or waiting to wait, feel compelled to fill the time with some sort of production or consumption. Reading the newspaper, we have a diffused sense of doing something, keeping up with the world, even as we read, "RELIGION Babarin opere: Le cardinal Philippe Babarin a ete opere lundi d'une hernie. Selon son entourage l'intervention s'est bien deroulee." (RELIGION Surgery for Babarin: Cardinal Philippe Babarin underwent surgery for a hernia Monday. Sources close to Babarin say the operation went well.)

20 minutes, at least the issue I was given, includes no letters to the editor. This omission seems odd, since I recall hearing somewhere that letters to the editor tend to attract more readers than most other features. Instead, the last page offers "une nouvelle inedite ecrite par un lecteur" (an original story written by a [20 minutes] reader).

Furthermore, 20 minutes appears aimed so squarely at M ou Mme Tout Le Monde that even the overt advertising carries little of the amusing bias one discovers in US monthlies such as Wired, a catalog for well-paid, post-adolescent, male IT enthusiasts, or Harper's Magazine, which caters to left-leaning post-adolescents who cynically accept that exposes about US aggression in Iraq get paid for by Shell, GM, and BMW ads.

In 20 minutes, the large cover picture of Chirac looking concerned about the nation or life in general or something may say less than mere arithmetic observations about the surface areas devoted to various topics. I therefore examined this copy of 20 minutes with measuring tape in an attempt to learn something specific that perhaps Herman and Chomsky had not already prefigured.

Full disclosure: I did this exercise quickly, over breakfast this morning and did not fully document my findings so as to render them easily reproducible. In other words, measurements may be valid only to about one significant digit, and might turn out somewhat to significantly differently if you did them. Clearly, the results would carry more weight had I taken the time to provide operational definitions for my observations. That said, you can download the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet used to calculate sums.

Factoids:

* Counts infomercial articles, except those for whole businesses rather than specific products, politicians not ostensibly or immanently running for election, entertainment and sports events that either already happened, are sold out, or are still in production

** Does not count faits divers, sports, local color, pictures (as opposed to informative charts and graphics), vacuous banalities and platitudes not contained in the body of an article, comics, word games, etc.

Conclusion: You get what you pay for.

Posted by Mark at July 25, 2004 10:20 AM

Comments


Mark,

Nice one.

Now let's do the same for that paragon of people's reporting "The Anglophones"

Rob.

Posted by: ROb at July 27, 2004 09:13 AM