The I’m a pothead has his routine. At the end of each editorial conference or show filming, the final word goes to Grégory. Between thanks addressed to each of the “atypical journalists” (there are around fifty of them, it could be a long time), always with a big smile, Grégory systematically drops this little sentence: “It’s happiness.” This Wednesday, January 8, we imagine what “happiness” even bigger: after 35 years of selling yourself informally, The Papotin is finding a place on newsstands alongside dozens of professional magazines. The success story continues.
Until now, the magazine produced since 1990 by journalists with autism spectrum disorders, which appears approximately once a year, could only be purchased on the Internet, or in a bookstore in the Barbès district of Paris, where the magazine works. neighbor psychologist who coordinates the making of each issue. Sold for 10 euros and printed in 10,000 copies, its 42nd issue, which devotes its front page to singer Philippe Katerine and Shoah survivor Ginette Kolinka, will be available “in nearly 3,000 points of sale throughout France”announces in a press release the press group Prisma Media, which supports this launch free of charge. The artistic director of the Paris 2024 Olympics ceremonies, Thomas Jolly, the host Daphné Bürki, the former Minister of Justice Christine Taubira and the Russian model Natalia Vodianova also appear in the summary of the 136 pages of this edition, faithful to the previous ones, where many personalities took part in the game of unfiltered and confusing interviews.
A “brilliant idea” that appeals to celebrities
Created by Driss El Kesri in 1990, then an educator at the Antony day hospital, near Paris, The Papotin is based on an editorial committee made up of around fifty non-professional journalists. The idea had come to him, he told us in 2023, when he came across an article in Monde which evokes the launch of a newspaper made by homeless people in New York: “I found the idea brilliant, so I wanted to reproduce it on my scale, with two simple principles: whoever wants comes and the word must be collected as it is.” A first issue appeared in May 1990 with an interview with the American artist Howard Buten, passing through Paris. “It served as a launch and very quickly, other celebrities came.” Marc Lavoine, Valérie Lemercier, Zazie, Vincent Cassel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac… The big names have been jostling for decades at the I’m a pothead. Some, like the singer Barbara, even ask the editorial staff directly to be interviewed.
“From the start, it was extraordinarytestifies Driss El Kesri. It allowed young people to feel part of an environment, to have a full place as citizens when many were excluded from society at the time. We tell them so much to do this, to change that… At I’m a potheadwe accept them as they are and we don’t want to transform them. Like everyone, everyone has their potential, their strengths, their weaknesses, succeeds in certain things and fails in others. We want to promote that.”
From TV to kiosks
The Papotin had taken a new turn at the start of the 2022 school year with a television adaptation based on an idea from directors Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache (Untouchables, Exceptional, In therapy…). The Papotin Meetingsbroadcast once a month on France 2, brilliantly uses the recipe that has made the magazine successful for more than three decades. Under a swarm of cameras and in a happy mess, the journalists cook up personalities happy to be asked questions that are out of the ordinary. On the floors of the Arab World Institute in Paris, where the filming took place, Gilles Lellouche was asked if he liked cassoulet, Emmanuel Macron if he had “a lot of money”and a journalist pointed out to Camille Cottin that it was not happening “not much” in the series Ten percent in which she plays.
This television appearance, which brings together several million viewers, had already enabled the magazine to greatly expand its distribution (around 3,000 to 3,500 sales per issue). Requested by the newspaper team, Prisma Media, the leading magazine press group in France (Télé-Loisirs, Voici, Femme Actuelle, Geo, etc.), “mobilized its various partners” to allow its distribution to newsagents, explains the group in its press release.
“Thus, the MLP (Messageries Lyonnaises de presse), the SNDP (national union of press depositaries) and Culture Presse (union of press distributors) all three accepted that the magazine be distributed free of charge in the press network”according to Prisma Media, which is also “intervened with the printer to adapt the production method to the increase in print run”. On the other hand, “editorial work remains exclusively managed by the editorial committee of the I’m a pothead»swears Prisma Media, in the bosom of far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
