L’Éveil de la Haute-Loire is 21 journalists in Puy-en-Velay and Brioude who, each in their role, participate in the production of a daily newspaper, a weekly paper and web content. How does it work? Follow the guide through a practical case: the treatment of a snow episode in the department.
It’s 6:30 a.m. It’s time to check the state of the roads in the department. In our paper edition published the day before, we announced a possible intense snowy episode in Haute-Loire, the first of winter. This morning, even before daybreak, we want to give our readers – or rather our Internet users – everything we know about traffic conditions. Let’s cross-reference official online sources. From forecasters to associations promoting meteorology, including departmental agents already at work, webcams located throughout the department, and social networks. The network of our press correspondents, around forty across the country, mobilizes and immediately alerts us, they who are the eyes and ears of L’Éveil in Haute-Loire. The first elements are collected to launch hostilities: the article is online to allow the majority of assets to make their arrangements.
The journalists (about ten working that day) will soon begin to take to the roads themselves, they will have the opportunity to understand their practicability. Here is how to monitor the situation and update our first web article.
From hot news to timeless reporting
Once the information is hot, practical and given, the editor-in-chief and the journalists involved take stock: how can we tell readers what happened? Part of the report must focus on the analysis of the phenomenon (report of temperatures and precipitation, but also damage caused by bad weather up to the repercussions on businesses and homes in the area). The stronger and more widespread the impact, the more we will try to push the walls of these pages in which we wish, six days a week, to bring to their attention the news near them.
Besides, why not go further than the raw data? Towards this information which is not imposed on us but which we wish to seek. Wouldn’t there be eye-level stories to tell during this snowy episode? This mountain solidarity which is put in place to ensure that the elderly are safe, that families lack nothing, that no motorist is left idle at the side of the road. “A newspaper is a friend,” wrote Louis Rabaste about L’Éveil in a special issue on the making of information in 1994. “The friend who went to the news willingly reports to you what he saw, learned, remembered. » Thirty years later, the foundation of the profession has not changed.
Once the strategy has been decided, the roles are distributed: an initial work made it possible to target a geographical sector to explore. The journalist’s mission will be to go on site, to discuss with residents, traders, elected officials, to get them to confide, to collect their testimonies but also to immortalize their daily lives through images, whether contemplative or informative. that day, whether through photo or video. While a member of the editorial team responsible for running leveil.fr remains at the headquarters, in Puy-en-Velay, to contribute to the online article on the impact of snowfall in Haute-Loire, another leaves report on a given territory. Sometimes the same one who contacts several official sources to monitor the situation. Is road traffic still possible? No injuries to report? Is there power in all communities? Is the weather phenomenon losing intensity as expected? Valuable information that many Internet users seek to obtain quickly.
“The daily life of a newspaper is an active life”, we still read from the pen of Louis Rabaste. What would have been his analysis seeing that today, the time for L’Éveil to gather the information, verify it and write it, nothing has yet been printed and it is already available online. As a sort of service rendered to the public. And what will remain in the next day’s edition? The essential marrow to allow readers to understand the weather phenomenon as it really was in Haute-Loire.
Question of choice
With a bonus: this suspended moment, outside of time and urgency, the story of a snowy day on the peaks of Haute-Loire. This is the editorial choice to give an overall image of what this snowy episode was like. A collective choice which solidified at the end of the day, once all the elements had been laid out. Which photo deserves its place and on which page? How to highlight it without depriving words of their rightful place? How to sum it all up in a title? And what to keep on the front page? So many questions decided by the editor-in-chief, sometimes at a late hour, to stick as closely as possible to the elements brought back from the field. It is 11 p.m., the last page of the newspaper has been sent electronically to the editorial technical services in Clermont-Ferrand, the last link in the chain before the printing center.
And the rest of the pages? Because yes, even if one piece of news seems to overwhelm all the others, publishing cannot be based solely on one subject, however strong and concerning it may be. Nor even the day on the website, which continues to offer content in parallel with the treatment of this snowy episode.
While part of the editorial staff was in turmoil to deal with the emergency, certain journalists worked to make the best use of the remaining pages to, here, paint the portrait of an association president met a few days ago, before the highlight of the year planned in a few days. To summarize a legal case which ended with a conviction pronounced today and tomorrow in our columns. To further study a whole very active agricultural sector between Haute-Loire and Ardèche or to the north of Lozère, territories where L’Éveil is required to go, in particular for its Weekly edited from A to Z in Le Puy, even if its heart of the area remains Haute-Loire, historically anchored in Velay and for several months as far as Brivadois.
A daily newspaper that knows how to cross borders
And we must not forget this multi-million euro project of which we have obtained, through negotiations, the first sketches and which will leave its mark on the Puy basin: it must also have its place. Maybe he’ll have to wait for the next edition. The texts submitted by our press correspondents then reread and formatted by our editorial secretaries, journalists in direct and daily contact with these precious relays, will not wait.
Nor the sports pages, part of which, the least local, is produced in Clermont-Ferrand, by journalists from the Centre-France group of which L’Éveil is a part. This also allows the Puy Basin title to be enriched with articles on social, economic and even political news in France and around the world. Files which sometimes open the newspaper, as they touch on the concerns of its readers.
Everything is a matter of choice, to offer our readers, day after day, the result of our look at your daily life.
Nora Gutting
The rise of L’Éveil on the web
Like its competitors, L’Éveil de la Haute-Loire set out to conquer Internet users in the 2000s. In addition to the paper edition available in PDF, the leveil.fr website brings together a multitude of articles, some of which are produced by the writing of the title, split in two between Le Puy-en-Velay and Brioude. Every day, at least ten publications punctuate the day, always at dawn and when current events require it, until late at night. In a department with just over 227,000 inhabitants, leveil.fr has nearly 2,000 followers on its recent Instagram account, 4,530 subscribers on videos (more than thirty this year, some of which have hundreds of thousands of views) and other new photo slideshows are often broadcast. The website alone was able to record 811,000 connections, 2.3 million visits and 4.3 million page views last month. Figures up, sometimes by +76%, compared to September 2023.
