Ahead of next year’s presidential election, Stéphane Albouy, who heads Le Parisien and its sister publication Aujourd’hui en France cited the glaring failure of pollsters to predict Brexit or Trump’s victory.
Albouy says journalists ought to be doing “on the ground reporting” instead of relying on surveys. “We have been thinking about it for some time now, especially since Brexit and the election of Donald Trump,” he told AFP.
“It is not a question of defying the pollsters so much as experimenting with a different way of working ahead of the elections,” he explained. Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui en France spend tens of thousands of euros a year on commissioning opinion polls.
Both his newspapers are quite similar although Le Parisien provides local Paris news.
While he would still be commenting on polls commissioned by other titles, he said that only focusing on who might be leading the race, is a bit like describing a horse race.
“We want to avoid giving the sort of commentary that accompanies a horse race, always focusing on who is in the lead,” he said. “We want to concentrate, in depth, on the candidates and their manifestos.”
“The media has come under a lot of criticism for being cut off from reality,” he said. “So we are going to prioritise actual reporting. It will cost more than commissioning polls, and it will make us work harder.”
Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui en France sell over 300 000 copies daily.
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