Podcast — Hervé Kempf, Reporterre: Running a Free Media Outlet (4/6)

Margaux Vulliet: Hello everyone, welcome to the Médianes podcast, where we sit down with media founders so they can share their experiences with you. I’m Margaux Vulliet, a journalist at Médianes, and you’re listening to *Chemins*. In this episode, we’re meeting the team behind the online media outlet Reporterre. Launched in 2007, Reporterre covers environmental issues and views the environmental crisis as the most critical political issue of the early 21st century. This “daily environmental news outlet,” as it describes itself, aims not only to expose problems but also to highlight alternatives and solutions. It started as a magazine, then became a website, but it is first and foremost an online media outlet that has chosen to be entirely free and to rely on reader donations. So how do you run a free media outlet? How do you launch a donation-based media outlet? How do you ensure that this model is sustainable? And what are some ways to engage its community? We’re discussing this with Hervé Kempf. Hello, Hervé.

Hervé Kempf: Hello, Margaux.

Margaux Vulliet: You relaunched Reporterre; you’re its editor-in-chief and publisher. You worked for fifteen years at the daily newspaper Le Monde covering environmental issues, and then you created the weekly column “Écologie” in that same newspaper. But most importantly, in 2007, you relaunched Reporterre online. In this somewhat lengthy introduction, have I covered everything sufficiently, or are there any points you’d like to address or add to?

Hervé Kempf: There are two key points: first, Reporterre is the daily newspaper for environmental issues. That means that every day, we publish a series of articles, interviews, investigations, and reports on environmental topics. The second important point is that we don’t just expose problems—we inform; we’re a news outlet.

Margaux Vulliet: So let’s start over. Reporterrewas a print magazine that launched in 1989. Why did it have to shut down?

Hervé Kempf : It must have been discontinued because it was a monthly, *Le magazine de l’environnement*, and it was doing well—that is, we had an average of 26,000 buyers every month and ended up with 4,500 paying subscribers. But to publish a print magazine back then, just like today, you need quite a bit of money—or even a lot. In particular, you have to be able to maintain cash flow over several months because what’s now called Presstalis, that is, the distributor, pays you quite late—around the third or fourth issue—so in the meantime, you have to produce three or four issues, or at least two or three, while paying salaries—which is the main expense—as well as for paper, etc. So you need a fair amount of cash flow, and since we’d really launched this with whatever resources we had on hand—well, with whatever resources we had on hand, but with a lot of enthusiasm and also a lot of professionalism—despite everything, we lacked the capital. We had to stop because even though we were getting these good results, we were running up a deficit and didn’t have the means to cover it—especially since, at the time, there was no advertising, at least not in that field. So that’s it—we stopped after a year.

Margaux Vulliet: Was it better to stop rather than continue with another model?

Hervé Kempf: Well, when you lose a lot of money, after a while—I mean, we weren’t losing an enormous amount, but we really couldn’t cover it. At some point, you have to call it quits. Anyway, the bank tells you to stop after a while, too.

Margaux Vulliet: So why did you relaunch it in 2007—and, more importantly, exclusively online?

Hervé Kempf: Well, first of all, it wasn’t planned that way. So, in 2007, I published *How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet* with Éditions du Seuil, and it’s a book that explains how inextricably linked social issues are to environmental issues—and that to solve environmental problems, we must address social issues, specifically—to put it simply—by drastically reducing inequality. So, at the time, that was a new idea. Now, the idea that there’s a link between the system—the social system—and ecological issues has become common knowledge. That’s great. And I think that book contributed to that. But back then, it was quite new. I also wanted to accompany the book with a news website to show that, in everyday life, the argument I was making was playing out in reality and was supported by concrete, day-to-day facts. So I created this little website with a friend. We were still much less advanced with the Internet back then than we are now. I called it Reporterre , and the idea wasn’t yet to have a daily site—nor was it a blog, meaning I wasn’t writing about my life or my worldview. It was more of an aggregator site where I’d copy and paste information that seemed relevant to me and where I could also publish articles or reports that didn’t fit in Le Monde.

Margaux Vulliet: What was the difference, ultimately, in terms of intent, between the print magazine and the website? Was the intent the same?

Hervé Kempf: Oh no, when we launched Reporterre print edition in 1989, we operated like a professional organization. We had a team, everyone was a salaried employee, and we’d drawn up a business plan, we’d done market research—we were really committed to taking the plunge. When, in 2007, I founded and redesigned the website, it was almost more to support this book, which, by the way, did very well—it’s a best-seller and even a long-seller, since it continues to sell in paperback. I think it’s because it’s still relevant, so for me, it was almost like a hobby. It was also an introduction to writing for the web, which is a specific style of writing and a unique way of presenting information—something very new and very interesting. So I learned a lot about writing for the web through that experience—many different aspects of it—so at first it was really in that spirit; it was kind of my Saturday hobby, you know.

Margaux Vulliet: And at what point, exactly, did you decide that Reporterre become a media outlet that you run full-time, one that operates professionally just like any other media outlet?

Hervé Kempf: Two things happened. First, traffic to the site was steadily increasing—it was still at very low levels, but it was rising steadily. I could see that something was happening, that people were interested in the stories I was sharing. And then the second thing was that the newspaper Le Monde censored me. The newspaper Le Monde had been owned since 2010 by Messrs. Niel, Bergé, and Pigasse—in other words, millionaires and billionaires. Whereas before, Le Monde was a free newspaper—free in the sense that a large portion of its capital was owned by the journalists. And we’ll come back to that; this issue of freedom is absolutely crucial. So it was a newspaper that had all the flaws in the world but also a great many strengths. It was a great newspaper. And I, when I was covering environmental issues, was able to accomplish a great deal—to publish a lot of news, investigations, and new stories, and so on—and to explore many different topics. So, journalistically speaking, I was happy. Then, starting in 2010, the atmosphere began to deteriorate, and in particular, I was prevented from covering the police operation—which was, in fact, a truly violent police assault—against the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in October 2012. And this was a story I’d been covering for at least three or four years—one I’d featured on the front page of *Le National* several times. In short, I was truly the journalist who had been following this story and knew it best. So, the usual practice is that when a reporter knows a story well, they’re generally allowed to cover it—they’re considered the most qualified to report on it. And then, suddenly, I was prevented from reporting on what was happening—this extremely violent police operation. I won’t go into details because that’s another story, so we ended up in conflict. And then I sensed that things were going to go badly with Le Monde—it was truly an act of censorship that was unbearable for a journalist. And so at the same time, there was this website on the rise, making a name for itself, and then some young people came to see me, saying, “What you’re doing is great,” “We like your books,” “We like your website—what can we do to help?” So there I was—things were happening with them and with other, more experienced colleagues— we set up an association to shore up the foundation—the Association for Independent, Free, and Ecological Press—to begin building a truly solid structure around the website. And along the way, I realized it was impossible with Le Monde—they were really waging war on me—so I left Le Monde in July 2013. And we’d been preparing for two or three months beforehand to relaunch on Reporterre. Reporterre hasn’t really changed, but I’ve sort of made it more professional. I launched an ad campaign with virtually no resources—we’ll come back to that—but since I was relatively well-known, I was leaving Le Monde—which is quite rare, especially over differences in reporting. So it generated quite a buzz; I gave a few interviews here and there, Le Monde was forced to defend itself. Step by step, I launched a little battle on Twitter because some journalists at Le Monde were trying to smear me, so I responded to them, and I won because I had the facts and credibility on my side. So from that point on, Reporterre got its start.

Margaux Vulliet : This story promoted Reporterre after all?

Hervé Kempf: That wasn’t the goal, but in July, when my colleagues and I started preparing Reporterre, I still spent the entire month of July recovering psychologically because it had been a very difficult ordeal. When you have a publication—one that, despite all its flaws, you really loved—and it actually betrays you, well, that was a pretty tough emotional, physical, and psychological blow. Then, in August, I started getting ready. I actually made do with whatever resources I had on hand. I also wrote an article that got a lot of views; there were interviews, and then this Twitter battle that I hadn’t anticipated, but I was really ready to defend the song and, above all, to promote Reporterre because I didn’t want to go to war with the newspaper Le Monde—I didn’t care about that; but on the other hand, promoting Reporterre and saying, “Something new is emerging, and we’re going to talk about the environment, and we’re going to be free.”

Margaux Vulliet: Speaking of which, how did your experience with the print magazine help you relaunch Reporterre —particularly with the business plan—in terms of how a media outlet operates? How do you run a media outlet? Did those previous experiences help you?

Hervé Kempf: I don’t think it helped me because I didn’t think about it, and when you’re climbing Reporterre—well, we’re relaunching Reporterre in 2013, there wasn’t a business plan; there’s no plan—it’s all done purely on instinct. It’s really happening because of this very difficult situation with Le Monde that had me backed into a corner, basically. And I either had to give in and become a sheep, or rebel, or “defect”—as they say now; it’s trendy—well, it’s not really a trend; I know it’s not a trend—it’s a very deep and powerful movement. But anyway, after a while—and I hadn’t anticipated this—I asked myself, “What weapons do I have?” I mean, I consider myself a nonviolent person, but what tools do I have to defend myself? There was this website, and it became one of the ways I defended myself. And then we launched it without really planning it, but very quickly we agreed on various principles. First of all, even though we’re an organization, we’d operate professionally—meaning we produce news, and news is work. And work must be paid for. A baker, a plumber, a lawyer, a laborer—they all do good work. Or a female laborer, a nurse, a baker, or a journalist—well, we have to pay them. I didn’t want to rely on volunteers; even the freelance work at the beginning was paid at a very modest rate, but it was paid—that’s the principle. So there were two factors at play. First, I was receiving unemployment benefits. That’s important—it meant I didn’t have to work; well, actually, if the organization wasn’t paying me, I could still work. The second thing is that we received support from a foundation, which was very important. I mean, it was invaluable because there were no strings attached—they were completely open to what we were doing. It was the “Un monde partout” Foundation—I think it was 5,000 euros—but when you have nothing, 5,000 euros goes a long way; it allowed us to offer a short-term contract to a fellow journalist. And I also had my books How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet, To Save the Planet, Get Out of Capitalism, Enough with the Oligarchy, Long Live Democracy, a number of books—so I was giving a lot of talks, and from that point on, I started saying, “But listen, the talks will be paid for, and it’s not me, Hervé, that you’ll be paying—it’ll be to support Reporterre.” so that became another significant source of income during the first two years. So there you have it—as we went along without any preconceived notions, we learned as we went, and I learned as I went. For example, at one point we asked ourselves about advertising: why not? Personally, I think we should avoid advertising as much as possible—though that’s another debate—but I’m not completely opposed to it. But we started looking into it and realized that to generate revenue—given that our traffic was still relatively low—we would have had to put ads everywhere, so we decided against advertising. So, what do we do without advertising? Well, we turned to donations, among other things. Back then, the question didn’t even come up; the debate online was that either media outlets made their content freely available—and then you waited, not really sure for what—which might be the case, for example, with Rue89 , which was a good news outlet and a major website but never found its economic footing, or the model used by Mediapart —which I hold in high regard but which was a different choice: “We have startup capital, so we’ll invest the resources, build an editorial team, and publish news, and then, little by little, people will subscribe.” I was aware of all that, though. I had looked into all of this carefully, but I didn’t have any preconceived notions, so we started out with the idea of donations. But at first—and this might sound hard to believe—I didn’t even know PayPal existed. A friend told me, “You know, there’s PayPal,” and I said, “Oh, really? How does it work?” Well, that’s how we got started, and then other things came along, but the whole thing happened without any capital or initial investment. At first, we rented half an office two days a week at La Ruche, which has a co-working space. Little by little, a virtuous cycle kicked in—that is, traffic started to grow, and we learned to do things better and to seek out donations more effectively. We produced news content, hired journalists, and published more articles, which attracted more people who understood that we needed their support. And then there were also some foundations that helped us. We didn’t receive any government aid, but we did get support from foundations. That amounted to €5,000 here and there—from La Fondation de France, the Fondation la Luciole, or for journalistic projects as well. And so, in the end, that accounted for 40 to 50 percent of our revenue during the first two years. To prepare for this interview, I took a quick look at our financial statements—since we publish them publicly.

Margaux Vulliet: Is it important to you to be transparent with your readers?

Hervé Kempf: I’d say—and I don’t think this applies just to us—that it’s absolutely essential. But anyway, maybe we’ll come back to that later. But when it comes to donations—if we’re going to ask people, “We’re asking you to support us”—we have to be absolutely, completely transparent. So the priority is obviously to publish the financial statements as soon as possible. All serious newspapers and media outlets do this. And even when you’re a small media outlet, you have to do it very quickly because people completely understand. First of all, they don’t necessarily know much about economics. And then they think, “Oh, right—you need to pay salaries, rent an office, and cover reporting expenses?” Anyway, we also explain what we do and where the funds come from. Well, there’s this foundation, and there’s the Fondation de France. At one point, there was the DRAC, the Directorate of Cultural Action, which provided funding for this or that, etc.; there are these conferences that we published as early as 2015—less than two years after we launched— and in 2015, 47% of our funding came from donations; by 2016, that figure had already risen to 68%, and then in 2017 to 74%. As for what happened next—that’s the rest of the story—we’ll come back to it another time, perhaps.

“My only strategy—our only strategy, really—was this: to be relevant, accurate, innovative, reliable, and solid when it comes to information.” 

Margaux Vulliet: And that’s exactly the point—it was a requirement from the start to create a free media outlet, but you have to convince people to donate so that you can have that launchpad and continue to grow. Do you have a specific strategy for getting the first group of people to provide some support, at least financially?

Hervé Kempf: So, that wasn’t a condition. Once again, we were being completely pragmatic.

Margaux Vulliet: So, right from the start, you didn’t say to yourselves, “We’re definitely going to offer something for free”?

Hervé Kempf: It was at once almost instinctive, gut-level for the reasons I was explaining to you, and at the same time I was thinking things through with my comrades—we were reflecting on it—and after all, since 2007 I’d been interested in the Internet; I was watching how things were unfolding and so on. And I thought to myself—we thought to ourselves—that since 2007, this site Reporterre has been freely accessible—obviously, I couldn’t imagine launching this small site and asking people to donate money up front. So there you have it—it was growing, and I knew from various experiences that once you’ve committed to a system, it’s very difficult, even dangerous, to switch systems. If you have a model that works well as a weekly, for example, and you switch to a monthly, there’s a good chance it’ll fall apart—or vice versa. To put it another way, I feel like we’re building something through our interaction with readers, with the audience. We create a bond—not necessarily a friendship, but one of trust. We build a relationship based on mutual understanding, and we also establish habits—and habits shouldn’t be rushed. Or, if we do make a change, we have to be absolutely sure of what we’re doing, which is why we analyze the situation. We took a quick look at the ad—I told you—and it wasn’t working. And I think to myself, getting subscribers is a really great thing that you’ve got Mediapart —which was just getting started, yes, which had started and was really taking off. But I thought to myself, “We’re not offering enough yet to be able to ask for money,” and I didn’t want to go begging. It wasn’t about, “Support us because you have to support us—because we’re handsome, nice, young, and amazing, and we talk about the environment”—but rather, “Support us because we provide good NEWS.” That’s really the heart of Reporterre and our approach. A journalistic approach is, above all, about producing good news, and people will support us because we provide good news. I’m going back a bit, but to those days when everyone was still feeling their way around the Internet—well, I’d done a report in New York when I was at the Le Monde and I’d met a colleague there who knew his way around it—so it must have been in the early 2000s, around 2005, I’m not quite sure—and Sylvain Cypel, who was a journalist at the time, said to me, “The Internet? We have no idea how we’re going to strike an economic balance, but there’s one thing we’re sure of: there will always be people who need reliable information.” And actually, that really stuck with me; it became my creed, and it still is. And in fact, that’s the rule—not just for the Internet or a new media outlet—but, in my view, the very principle of news media and journalism. If you produce quality news, people will recognize it and support you—and in fact, that’s been my strategy: to be relevant, thorough, and to produce quality news. But it’s also true that I had been well-trained, after all. Le Monde, other newspapers before that, La Recherche, Courrier International, and so on. For me, the pursuit of quality journalism is a matter close to my heart, and my only strategy—our only strategy, ultimately—has been just that: to be relevant, precise, innovative, reliable, and thorough in our reporting.

Margaux Vulliet: Okay, so you presented that, and that was enough for people to say to themselves, “This is the information that’s been missing until now, so I’m going to help them and donate these amounts.” Was that enough for you to grow from there?

Hervé Kempf: So then we learned that we had to speak up. For example, at first, we started by posting a message. Then we began running fundraising campaigns fairly quickly. And there we learned again, though I’d say it was partly beginner’s luck, too. I also think there was genuine sincerity and transparency. We discovered with each campaign—at first, we ran two a year—back then it was pretty new—that there’s always a “newcomer’s advantage”; we were breaking new ground a bit because, at the time, the idea that donations could be a winning formula wasn’t obvious at all—people were feeling their way between the Mediapart and offering free access, as I mentioned. So moving toward a donation-based model at that time—back in 2013, 2016, and 2017—was still relatively new, and so we learned to run these campaigns on our own; collective intelligence really does work. And then, of course, we always have friends who help us out, people who give us good advice, etc. And the idea behind the campaigns—and this is still true today, by the way—is to get a message across, which is what I told you: “We need you to produce quality news and to show that we’re actually doing it.” And also to tell the story of the media itself: we’d put ourselves out there in a certain way so people could see us, and I think that’s still true. Finally, the way I see it, the Internet is a relatively cold medium. In fact, when you go to a website, there’s none of that tactile, almost physical contact you might have with a newspaper, which almost spontaneously creates a physical and almost emotional connection—in the sense of empathy—with the reader. I don’t know how to explain it, but a newspaper has a very strong personality, and there’s something that comes across much more powerfully than on a website. So, first of all, the universal access tool that works for many websites is that you’ll just hop from one site to another. So how do you convey that there’s a story behind it all? That’s it—so we told a few stories simply to convey that these were people who might be likable, who they were, that they were young, how we worked, and so on. So with every campaign, we keep trying to come up with a different narrative.

Margaux Vulliet: Yes, and speaking of that, between the first fundraising campaign, how do we keep engaging new readers—both men and women? Because, well, we have a very, very committed and active core group of readers who follow us, but how do we keep engaging them? Young people, people who are just discovering your outlet—even ten years down the line—how do you go about reaching even more new people?

Hervé Kempf: There’s a sort of “concentric circles” theory. You have the core of your readership. So those are them—they love you, they’re hooked, they’re hooked every day. There you go—that might work for Reporterre but probably for plenty of other sites too. Well, I’m not going to name all my colleagues, but I don’t know, Arrêt sur images, Mediapart, Basta, StreetPress and plenty of others. These folks are always with you. And then you have a second circle—people who come to visit you, who know you, who’ve been by three or four times, who haven’t necessarily decided to support you yet, but still, you’re part of their lives. And then there’s a third circle: those who’ve stopped by once by chance because they were led there by Google, Facebook, or Twitter. They come to your site and think, “Oh, that’s interesting—what’s it called? Reporterre”. And then there’s the fourth circle—that’s the wider world, all of humanity, the 10 billion people who could visit your site; well, in principle, we’re a French-language site, so that’s, let’s say, roughly 100 million. I’m just joking, but that’s the idea—and so the whole approach is going to be about moving people from one circle to another, moving them from the circle of those who know you to the circle of those who truly love you and support you regularly. And after a while, when you’re consistently putting out content and staying true to your focus, something new starts to happen. And it happens to me quite often that people say, “Well, yeah, this time I chipped in 20 euros—I’m a subscriber,” and I tell them, “No, it’s not a subscription—it’s a donation.” After a while, it becomes almost a matter of loyalty. If you visit a site really often—Wikipedia, for example—I use Wikipedia pretty regularly myself, and I think to myself, “Okay, I’m going to give them some money; I’ll send €50 or whatever I can at the time,” and lots of people think that way. So that’s how you’ll gradually expand your second circle. Well, they’ll stumble upon it by chance once. And then another time by chance, Discover in Chrome will bring them here: “Oh, wait, I’ve seen these before—oh, right, here they are.” Then, little by little, they’ll move into the previous circle—that is, the inner circle, and so on—and eventually, the general public will follow the same pattern. Then, for me, it’s always about the information. It’s once again the ability to produce the right information. Our editorial team is growing, so we can cover things better; we can tell stories, cover topics, and report on news that others aren’t covering; we’re building a network of correspondents. We have a clear editorial line and make sound choices; for example, we’ve just hired a new journalist who will start with us in January because we decided that consumer issues and practical living are important. So how are we going to reach people who aren’t necessarily passionate about the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, nuclear power, climate change, the Amazon rainforest, the biodiversity crisis, this or that; but who still know there’s a problem and who, like almost all of us, ask themselves questions about their daily lives? Like, “What should I do? Can I eat meat? Yes, but how? What about plastic packaging—how do I handle that?” And if I buy a new vacuum cleaner, which one should I get? So it’s about engaging people based on their concerns, and really listening to them. We try to get a feel for the times and ask ourselves, “What if we also reported on what matters in people’s lives—and what matters to us?” Personally, I have a theory as a journalist that we also need to report on what we ourselves feel, and we need to follow our own desires and needs to some extent. That will broaden our audience and the range of people who support us. And here, I really need to come back to a point that’s essential—our editorial purpose. Because we’re not creating a website just for the sake of it; we’re creating a website because we want to say something. As you pointed out, we consider environmentalism to be the central political issue of the 21st century. We want to bring the environmental issue, in all its dimensions, into the public debate. On the one hand, we follow these struggles closely because they’re important—they’re news—and we cover them as news, just as Les Échos reports on what MEDEF is doing and what big corporations are doing; we say, “We’re interested in knowing what the people of the Earth Uprising are doing, the people fighting against highways, the people fighting against Amazon warehouses or for organic farming.” But at the same time, that’s not all we want. We also want to reach, for example, people who might be part of Mouvement Colibris—people who are less actively involved but who have an ecological conscience and are thinking about making donations. We want to bring them on board; we want to reach both groups: those who are already engaged and have made strong life choices, and those who are asking questions—who represent today’s France, essentially the middle class, who sense that there’s an environmental problem but don’t necessarily have the knowledge or resources of an expert. So how do we talk to them, how do we get them on board?

“I have a theory as a journalist that you also have to share what you yourself feel and follow your own desires and needs to some extent. That will broaden the range of our audience and the people who support us.”

Margaux Vulliet: So, you mentioned the community and the audience you want to reach. In practical terms, since you don’t have subscription numbers, how do you measure your audience? There’s the traffic from people visiting the site—how do you gauge your influence on the site? Reporterre and what topics interest them? 

Hervé Kempf: We do have audience data from Google Analytics, but we’re currently in the process of switching to another tool called Matomo, which is very reliable and will allow us to break free from Google, which is a GAFA company. We have the daily traffic figures, and for the past month, we’ve been seeing really strong numbers. We’ve rebounded very well since the start of the year. Yesterday, for example, we had 80,000 unique visitors. And we have another tool called RealTime that lets us know which articles have been read the most. For example, yesterday we published an investigation titled “I Don’t Like Moscow”—an original piece you won’t find anywhere else—which stated that, and showed that, in fact, EDF—you know there are a lot of corrosion problems in some of the nuclear reactor pipes— which is causing a huge uproar, and EDF is basically saying, “Yeah, but we discovered that last year”—but our reporter proved that the problem has actually been known since 1984. So that’s definitely a “Wow” kind of story. And it got a huge number of readers. We also did a piece on public transportation in Germany, and Berlin has decided to make transit virtually free with a ticket that lets you go anywhere for 9 euros—well, that’s a topic about everyday life, and it’s a great alternative; that article has also been widely read. So we track this daily—how well it’s working, how it works. Otherwise, we have very few tools, and since we want to be accountable to our donors, we want to respect their…Well, how can I put it? We’re not a GAFAM company, but we don’t want to be part of that mindset of knowing everything—especially since we don’t have ads to sell. We want people to know that when they come to us, we’re not going to collect their data—on the contrary, we protect it as much as possible. So even for donations, the only thing we collect is their email address. And if they want a tax receipt, well, obviously we ask for their address, but other than that, we don’t ask them, “How old are you? Are you a baker or an executive?” “How old are you? Are you a baker or a senior executive?” We don’t ask them that. And the only other information we have—via Matomo—is the geographic distribution, so we can still get a rough idea of what’s relevant, in which region or city we’re operating.But it’s true that we still feel the need to go a little further and to make even more progress Reporterre, we might conduct readership studies by talking with groups of readers.

Margaux Vulliet: You have some perspective on the donation-based model for someone who wants to get started but is hesitant to use this particular model—what advantages and disadvantages do you see with this specific business model?

Hervé Kempf: Well, as far as we’re concerned, I’m not sure I see any advantages because it reflects an editorial choice and a worldview. So we consider information to be a common good—though that’s debatable—but that’s the approach we take. It may have been theorized after the fact, but along the way, we’ve learned a lot—myself included—so we consider information to be a common good. And, for example, information about the environment is so vital that it’s almost absurd that there might be good articles—I won’t name any mainstream media outlets—but there might be, in fact, there are, good articles—and sometimes it’s absurd that they aren’t freely accessible. So we believe that explaining climate change, highlighting this important alternative in Germany, discussing agroecology, and addressing how the government is currently trying to roll back progress on organic farming—all of this is important. Everyone needs to know this, so as much as possible it should be part of the common good; and besides, the donation—since we’re offering it—is also in line with what we believe collectively, which is to say we must break free from this system—let’s call it what it is: capitalism—that is destroying the planet, severely damaging relationships between people, and turning everything into a commodity. To break free from this, we need values like cooperation, simplicity, and the refusal to accumulate. But also, as much as possible, through giving and exchange—so that not everything is a commodity. And so we’re very much in that mindset; you see, I don’t consider that we have a specific model, or even that the model of giving is just one system among many. There may be very good arguments for other media outlets or fellow activists who choose to rely on subscriptions or, possibly, advertising. In that regard, I’m more skeptical, especially when it comes to environmental issues. But still, it’s understandable… Donations are also a way to create and foster new social relationships—solidarity between people and exchange—that aren’t mediated by commercial relationships, which are often driven by a desire for profit. So the fact that we’re a nonprofit organization is really great. I think our readers aren’t either. They know that if there’s any surplus money, it will be put to good use. It will first be set aside to guarantee our independence—because that’s something we won’t compromise on. No one can buy us, influence us, or put pressure on us. So there’s a safety net because in the media world, there are good times. There can be bad times too—I’ve experienced them myself, to quote Le Monde, a newspaper that at one point failed to build that safety net and, well, to produce better journalism—which meant hiring journalists. The foundation of all this is producing quality journalism. Well, you need a certain number of talented people, and you need to have a clear idea of what you want to report on. But after a while, how many journalists are there? And if there are more of us, well, we can do more—we can tell more stories.

Margaux Vulliet: In this case, there are no shareholders to pay.

Hervé Kempf: Absolutely! We have an operating surplus, there are no shareholders to pay out dividends to—we’re consistent with what we say—and I’d also add that the pay gap is small; it’s between 1 and 1.9 at the newspaper. We’re trying to keep it that way—it’s a real advantage not to have shareholders to pay, and it’s a real advantage to be able to put everything we have into working together to do what we’re trying to do well.

Margaux Vulliet: You’re on the J’aime l’Info platform—could you tell us a little bit about what it is and why it’s important for you to be on this platform?

Hervé Kempf: We contributed quite a bit in the beginning, a few years ago, to improving it. It’s a platform set up and managed by Spiil, the union for independent and free online media, which is a very good union. It’s a professional union that brings together websites and has therefore set up this donation platform so that people can, for example, say, “Well, I want to support Reporterre or StreetPress.” I suppose that StreetPress is on the “J’aime l’info” platform, so is anyone else. Well, I’ll go there, I’ll do it through “J’aime l’info,” and I’ll donate, say, €50.00 or €60—that’s about right. The average annual donation from Reporterre’s readers—or, more precisely, donors—is €60, “J’aime l’info” will forward it to the site while keeping a commission—which can be around 3 or 4 percent; that’s normal. There are administrative fees, and the donations are also tax-deductible. That means the donor can deduct this amount from their income and thus pay a little less in taxes. So if you donate €60.00 to one of these sites, for example—though you can give more, right? Don’t hesitate to give €100 if you can—but even €5.00 is great, and even €1. We know it’s tough for everyone. Well, instead of paying €100, I’ll just take €100—it’s simpler. In reality, if they’re taxable, of course, they’ll pay—I think it’s actually €30 or €34, to be honest.

Margaux Vulliet: Okay, you were talking earlier about fundraising campaigns. Why is it important to run them? You mentioned doing about two a year—to make a bit of a splash, so to speak, by saying, “We’re reminding you that we’re here and that we need your donations”?

Hervé Kempf: Now we do more than one a year. And the second thing is that it can be—it’s a moment. Right now, for example, we we receive donations every month—that is, there are monthly donations—meaning people who agree to have 123 to 5 euros deducted each month, sometimes 10, but sometimes more, though that’s pretty rare because we don’t get large donations. I’d also like to clarify that I’ve been asked this question: we don’t receive large donations, and there are no hidden donations. I don’t know of anyone who would give us… Total or someone posing as Total who might donate, I don’t know, 10,000 euros—no, no, these are really just small donations. When we see one come in—I’ll have to check—but I think we received a donation of 2,000 euros recently. When we get a relatively large amount—more than 1,000 euros—we know where it’s coming from, we look into it, and we’ll accept it, but there have been two instances, for example, where we turned it down. It happened two years ago. One was from a town in the Loiret department—I don’t know—we received a check one day with a very kind note from the mayor: “Well, there you go—you’re doing a great job, and we’ve decided to support you. The town council voted.” And there, with all the niceties in the message and all the gratitude, we told them, “Listen, we can’t accept this because imagine if we were to visit your town—whether to praise you because you’ve done something wonderful, or to criticize you because, unfortunately, you might have done something wrong—we’d be in an awkward position either way, so we want to remain completely independent, so we have to decline your donation. Another example is a botanical society—which, by the way, does a great job—and publishes a very, very nice magazine, *La Garance Voyageuse*—they also sent us a donation of 1,000 or 2,000 euros on behalf of the association. So I wrote back to them: “No, we don’t need it as much now as we might have in the past. That’s very kind of you, but perhaps you could donate it to an organization—we’d suggested, for example, one focused on agroforestry or alternative forestry. We receive monthly donations as well as one-time donations. So now, the regular monthly donations are starting to account for—I think about 60%—of what comes in every month, and then with the end-of-year campaign, we’ll still send a stronger message; we’ll share our story too; we’ll say, “You know, we don’t get much publicity because we’re so focused on the work at hand and on reporting the news that we can’t really get involved in PR or anything like that. But we’re here, and this is what we’ve done. That’s what we want to tell you.” It’s the end of the year; there’s a Christmas atmosphere. There are also tax deductions for those who are thinking about their taxes, so it can be a time that really wraps up the year in a way, and we get good feedback.

Margaux Vulliet: To take a step back and return to the editorial aspect, do you consider that Reporterre as a counterpoint to or a complement to traditional media? There are major media outlets that cover environmental issues, but in a different way—through dedicated sections. Reporterre, on the other hand, is a media outlet that’s all about the environment from A to Z. So, do you see it as a counterpoint or a complement?

Hervé Kempf: What I’m about to say might sound a little pretentious, but we are now the largest newsroom dedicated to environmental issues. With Fabienne, who’s about to join us, we’ll have 15 journalists, and we plan to hire at least one more journalist by the end of the year, so we have the largest newsroom—the largest, to my knowledge. The other one is the “Planet” section of Le Monde, which does good work. But we don’t see ourselves as a complement to them—it’s really rare that there’s a major story in this field that isn’t covered on Reporterre. So, we cover the news—we’re the daily newspaper for the environment. That’s our mantra, after all. And that’s it. But we at Reporterre, we certainly aren’t complementary to anyone else. Normally, someone who’s truly interested in the environment, Reporterre is among their favorites. They take a look, they subscribe to the newsletter—I forgot to mention that we have a huge number of newsletter subscribers. We have 80,000 subscribers to the weekly newsletter, and for the daily one, we’re probably between 25,000 and 30,000—and that number is growing steadily. So people who care about the environment know they should check out what we’re reporting. But I’d say there are still plenty of ways to cover ecological and environmental issues. So there’s also a lot going on at Le Monde, on Basta, and Vert, on Arrêt sur image —the whole galaxy, even—on Bon pote, plus Twitter accounts, and there are a thousand things going on, but it seems we’re still a leading force in this area, and since we have a strong editorial line, we make choices that I think allow us to exert influence. I’d also say that we’re making an impact because the key aspect of a lot of things is that we’re moving beyond the news—so what does “moving beyond the news” mean? Well, for example, sobriety. Two days ago, *Le Monde* ran a front-page story, I think, on sobriety. Great, fantastic—I was thrilled. But a year ago, we did this investigative series, and I think we helped really put the issue of moderation on the table. We did it in five parts; we put in a lot of work, and little by little, it’s spreading. I also saw the other day, Le Pèlerinhad a front-page story on sobriety—so you see, these things are happening. In fact, an independent media outlet acts as a catalyst, and similarly—let me give another example— *Mediapart*—with whom we get along well and who are much bigger than us, but who do great work in other areas—has often acted as a catalyst. They publish a news story; they run a piece. Well, all the mainstream are forced to follow suit after a while; for us, on a smaller scale, it’s kind of the same thing. I could mention quite a few things we’ve published, but if, for example, we’d run a major five-part investigation on Amazon or 5G. To say it once again, the reason we rely on donations is so we can invest in investigations—and we’re doing that more and more—meaning that a journalist can spend two months or even longer on an investigation, and that’s what we want to move toward so that the reporting is solid. So with 5G, we really got to the bottom of it. It was the first in-depth investigation in France on the subject. And then six months later, a year later, we contributed—I mean, it took off like a rocket—and now the backlash against 5G is in full swing. I’m not going to say it’s going too well for Reporterre but I really want to highlight this important point: the independent press isn’t valuable just because it’s still small. You know, all of us together—with everyone I’ve mentioned and everyone I haven’t—we must account for 5% of TF1’s reach. But there’s this leverage effect—we’re opening doors and forcing the mainstream media, even if they’re owned by awful billionaires, to at least talk about this or that topic. So we’re really shaping the conversation.

Margaux Vulliet: I actually have one last question. You were talking about the other eco-friendly media outlets that are popping up—like Bon Pote, Climax Vert, and so on.

Hervé Kempf: Environmental news, *L’âge de faire*, *Silence*… I’m emphasizing this because there’s a certain Parisian and Internet-centric tendency to overlook everything else that’s happening elsewhere—particularly in print media, such as *L’âge de fer* or *Silence*. Well, *Silence* doesn’t have a website, or at least a very rudimentary one. But for me, it’s an important newspaper because it has historically opened up many new avenues of thought. There are many areas of ecological thought; they’ve opened up many, many topics. *L’âge de fer* is also an important publication because it relies largely on a fairly unique system of donations and subscriptions and also explores many areas, particularly regarding alternatives. But anyway, there’s Actu Environnement , which is more professional. That’s it, but it’s good that there’s this variety—that so many of us are working toward the same goal, with different resources and approaches.

Margaux Vulliet: Yeah, so you see it more as a collective effort rather than, “Well, we need to start setting ourselves apart from each other because we’re all going to end up reporting the same news.” Is everyone managing to stick to their own angle?

Hervé Kempf: We’re all about cooperation. There’s going to be a unique press gathering in Nice in early June—in just a few days—and of course, we’ll be there… Right now, we’re working on a media ecology charter; the idea was proposed by Vert. And now, several media outlets are working on it—it’s really great work being done with other journalists, so we’ll see how it turns out. With Mediapart, we get along well, and we even did a joint investigation on Bures, focusing on the incredible police repression directed at activists opposing the radioactive waste project in the Meuse department. And we worked very well together, so we can definitely collaborate. It’s difficult at times, but we have to stay positive; we need to seek cooperation rather than competition because otherwise, we’d be entering a tricky situation, and I think there’s enough for everyone. There’s room for everyone. The issue we’re discussing is, I’ll say it again, the most important political issue of the early 21st century. I’m crazy about the media and newspapers. As you’ve probably noticed, every time I take the train—which is pretty often—I check out the newsstands and the displays. Look at the number of history magazines—or even the number of auto magazines; it’s a bit disheartening. What’s going on? In fact, we’re opening up an entire audience—it’s not that one media outlet will take readers from another, or that another will take readers from yet another. It’s about working well together, in diversity, with each of us doing what we do best—like a bouquet of flowers. We’re not going to turn the whole field into tulips; a field of tulips would require a lot of fertilizer. After a while, it would be a disaster. But anyway, it’s a bucolic image—and especially since it’s spring—you’ve got poppies, you’ve got peonies, you’ve got lilacs, you’ve got geraniums, you’ve got roses, and you’ve got plenty of flowers whose names you don’t even know. And it all blends in with the grasses. But that’s the thing—so we need to keep that idea in mind. Well, my buddy’s doing a great job, Silence—I’ve mentioned him before, Vert too—whose newsletter is really good— Environmental Action—it provides reliable information, and so on… I could name them all, and each has its own unique character, so let’s leave it at that. Now, I often meet people who say, “Well, I don’t read Le Monde or Libération—I just watch Mediapart so I have a little bit of that, and I check out Reporterre, I’m going to watch France Info.” Well, they’ll mention three or four headlines. And since not everyone can spend four hours doing that—you’d have to be a journalist to take in that much information in a day by checking out tons of websites, or be at Médianes—so you guys are all over it too, but the thing is, people need to stay informed. And now, what I’m trying to say is that with this galaxy of independent media outlets—and maybe all these media ecosystems—well, we no longer need to turn to the same streams, which aren’t bad in and of themselves, I’m not criticizing journalists—it’s just that they’re owned by billionaires, and when you’re owned by billionaires—by major financial conglomerates—well, there’s bound to be a problem with how information is handled. So let’s try to look at it that way, and that’s pretty much the approach we take here at Reporterre—we’re all about collaboration. We see the independent press more as an archipelago of resistance, where everyone does their own thing in their own corner. And then, at some point, we need to come together. We need to come together. Then, boom, we regroup and work together. But in my opinion, we shouldn’t approach this with a competitive mindset.

Margaux Vulliet: Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions, and thank you, dear listeners. You can find the other episodes of “Chemin” on all streaming platforms. Above all, take care of yourselves and your loved ones.