French Media:
Can Crowdfunding
Serve Pluralism?

News Media on a Quest for “Clean Money”

Loïc Ballarini
Université de Lorraine
Crem

Emmanuel Marty
U. Grenoble Alpes
GRESEC

Nikos Smyrnaios
Université Toulouse III
LERASS

Research funded by the ANR (Collab, le crowdfunding et le crowdsourcing dans les industries culturelles)
Find the slides on: ballarini.fr/loic/c/2019ica
Soon to be published in Ballarini (ed), The Independence of the News Media. Francophone Research on Media, Economics and Politics, Palgrave

Good morning, and thanks to the organizers and the participants of the conference.
I am very glad to be here to present the results of our research. I will be saying “we” and “our” and not “I” and “my”, because we were 3 to work on this research — and I was unfortunately the only one available to travel to Washington, which may be not so good for discussion, but is better for our collective carbon footprint.
The three of us work in different French universities, and this research took place in the framework of a research program called Collab, which was funded by the French National Research Agency and was about CF practices in the field of culture. Here I will present a summary of the results concerning French media. The whole paper will be published later this year in a book that I am currently editing for Palgrave.
So: I am Loïc Ballarini, and my colleagues are Emmanuel Marty, and Nikos Smyrnaios. You may know him already, because he recently published an excellent book called Internet Oligopoly: The Corporate Takeover of Our Digital World.