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[Update, 3 April, Glocals quote at end]

If you had told me five years ago that today people in the Lake Geneva region would have  seven or eight online options for finding out what’s going on I would have laughed. There was so little information you couldn’t count it on a finger – WRG radio was the only source of news, it was just becoming successful after nearly closing its doors, and it didn’t reach further than Rolle on a sunny day. Suddenly, you and I, the English speakers in the Lake Geneva region, are hot, and everyone wants to help us stay informed. Here’s a rundown in case you’ve lost track, with some reflections on whether or not we are likely to drown in news and information.

As background: the Newspaper Association of American 1 April reported "a significant loss in newspaper revenues between 2006 and 2007," according to World Editors Forum. And although Internet advertising rose, "online is no longer entirely shoring up print losses as it has in years past."

In Switzerland, the figures look somewhat brighter, but a top manager at Ringier, which just posted strong growth figures for 2007, recently told me that double-digit growth in Internet sales sounds impressive until you see how small the starting numbers are. Edipresse publishes its 2007 figures 10 April. The two leaders in the Swiss media industry earn a substantial part of their revenue outside their home market.

Swisster is the new kid in town

This week we have a new news arrival, called Swisster. It’s the latest Swiss offshoot of Edipresse, French-speaking Switzerland’s largest media group, second in the country after Ringier. As such, it’s created some buzz in the Swiss media. It bears a resembance to the English Corner, started some years ago by the Tribune de Geneve (disclosure: I wrote the EC for Edipresse for several months in 2006-07, during the runup to its new site, with GenevaLunch as an unofficial partner) and published jointly by the Tribune and 24 Heures, its twin city paper in Lausanne, for the past year. Swisster benefits from a better design and is more sophisticated in terms of technology than its English Corner sister.

Looks aside, the main difference at first sight is that the English Corner is free while the new Swisster costs what journalist Bruno Giussani calls "a rather steep 300CHF" for a individual subscription. The free part of Swisster has slightly more content (and parent company Edipresse is hiring more journalists) than the EC, although half of its front page news today comes from London’s The Times, with whom it has an agreement. The real "newness" lies mainly in the business model, with Edipresse selling bulk subscriptions to multinationals and EPFL. This content will be largely unavailable to the public. My personal assessment, since I’ve been asked for it by several people in the past 48 hours is that:

• journalists Peter Capella (ex-Swissinfo) and Jeremy Allen (ex-WRG) are good reporters with enough experience working in Switzerland to provide good news coverage, along with Malcolm Curtis and others.
• like its precursor, the English Corner, it has an underlying Swissness to its voice, despite English journalists (Swisster’s first-day video, good quality, gives a stream of business and political celebrity faces familiar to most Swiss but totally unfamiliar and probably uninteresting to most non-Swiss here)

• it will make a dent in the market because Edipresse has the
  financial prowess to ensure this, but it will fragment even further a
  small and fragile English online advertising market
• selling to sponsors a mix of news and social networking, which is
  part of Swisster’s offer to corporate groups, might make good business
  sense but it raises several thorny journalism issues that need public
  discussion.

And new kid makes, six, seven – and counting!

ONE

Swisster is the latest web site to join the bandwagon of regional
producers of news and information. Some weeks ago journalist Ed
Girardet and former journalist Bill Dowell announced they were starting
a venture called Essential Edge,
which carries  reporting as well as information about the region.
Girardet and Dowell met with me in early 2006 to consider an online
news service, which became GenevaLunch. Essential Edge is their version of this service.

TWO

A significant online shift came when well-known and popular WRG became WRS
public radio in early November 2007. It began to build its web site and
web news, mainly transcripts of its radio news broadcasts. WRS is developing from a local station to a national one with all-Switzerland news.

THREE

A few months earlier a magazine called Geneva Times was created, in print with an online version which today consists mainly of a newsletter.

FOUR

In 2006 GenevaLunch was hatched some months after I was inspired by the first Lift conference in February 2006,
initially as a one-year pilot project to see if blog technology could
be used to create an online newspaper for the Lake Geneva region,
moving beyond the traditional English catchment area of Geneva, in
French-speaking Switzerland. The answer is yes, and seven months after
the pilot ended we are in business, with more than 225,000 pages viewed
since our startup, with steady growth.

FIVE

Before GenevaLunch there was AngloInfo,
which provides information about services, rather than news produced by
journalists, and which is the Geneva franchise of a French group. We
feature it on our GenevaLunch resources pages because we think it is particularly useful for newcomers to the area.

SIX, SEVEN …

And before that, there was WRG radio. There were also, over the
years, a number of magazines and newspapers that rose and fell like so
many foreign phoenixes in Switzerland. The Geneva Post, a respectable
newspaper, and Geneva’s GEM magazine, which had a devoted following,
were two of these. Beyond the region, too, there is growth: we have Swiss News, Swiss Style, Inside Magazine, all of which have web sites although they are primarily glossy print media. Swissinfo’s site has been a solid source of news since it was created from the ashes of Swiss Radio International in 1999.

Then we have social networking groups who emphasize that they are
not just centres for partying, but forums for exchanging information. Glocals is the best known in the Geneva region and it has begun to expand to other cities. Englishforum,
which is Swiss-wide, benefits from having no commercial ties and has an
active following. Glocals has links to the new Swisster site, with
Edipresse’s Tribune as a paying Glocals sponsor for now and talk of a partnership in the near future (Glocals founder Nir Ofek could not be reached right away for comment on or confirmation of the partnership). [Update, 3 April: Nir Ofek confirmed to me that Glocals is "in talks with Swisster, we're in touch with them, but it's really early days." The two have no agreement, he says, and the Tribune is not paying Glocals to carry its English Corner, contrary to information I received earlier.]

So what makes us, the English speakers, suddenly so interesting, after years of being ignored – why does everyone now love us?

The first and easy answer is the Internet: it exists, it is
relatively cheap, therefore it creates options that were not there
before.

The second answer is advertising. Whether online or in print, it’s
clear that there is a market here for advertisers to reach English
speakers. But successful income-generating business models for the
Internet are
few, compared to all those sites that struggle to get by. Advertising
is the main form of revenue for most commercial sites and all the sites
listed here with the exception of WRS and the non-commercial
englishforum depend on advertising revenue. For advertisers, there is
at last an opportunity to reach us through several channels, although
ironically, the more of us there are the less impact this advertising
is likely to have because it is fragmented.

The third answer is that we are a growing population, although in
reality I think awareness of us is growing at a faster pace than our
actual numbers, which GenevaLunch has estimated, based on careful
research, at over a quarter million English speakers in the Lake Geneva
region.

The fourth answer is revenue, not to be confused with advertising.
We are an Opportunity, a group with good incomes and we are
well-travelled, well-educated, with sophisticated tastes. We have
appeal in a world where the media and social networks are still
struggling to make money despite some Internet income. We English
speakers represent a way to plug the hole a little bit, in Switzerland.

In other words, we represent Good Business.

Whether or not we’ll be any better informed as a result of this flurry of interest in us remains to be seen.

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