Paul Salvanès (E06): "Voxeurop Offers Local European Journalism"

After 10 years in the humanitarian sector, Paul Salvanès (E06) took over the general management of Voxeurop, the online media source for independent journalism on a European scale, which explores the continent’s challenges and prospects. We take a closer look.  

ESSEC Alumni: Tell us about Voxeurop.

Paul Salvanès: Founded in 2014 by former Courrier International journalists, Voxeurop is an independent, multilingual online medium geared towards a European audience. It explores issues which go beyond national borders, such as climate change, democracy, asylum and migration, or the war in Ukraine. We publish both articles from 400 European sources, translated and edited in-house, and our own original content, including investigations, analyses and reports. The paper is produced by a multinational team and an extensive network of journalists, correspondents and press translators. 

EA: You claim to offer ‘local European journalism’. What do you mean by that? 

P. Salvanès: Our ‘playground’ is Europe in its broadest sense, Council of Europe countries, Russia and Belarus. We are therefore not a soap box for EU institutions or more generally European affairs for a policymaking audience; other media do that much better than us. We write for a European audience, with European sources, writers and journalists, from angles which appeal to a French readership as much as, say, an Italian readership. And as the majority of our continent’s citizens prefer to read in their native language, we translate all our articles into at least five languages, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Translation also enables us to adapt content to the target audience. 

EA: Where does Voxeurop stand on the French and European media scene? 

P. Salvanès: Our strength lies firstly in the fact that our audience is very European; just 20% of our readership is French. Voxeurop is still little known to the general public, however, despite the encouraging rise in the number of views. It takes time to carve a place among the major press group platforms, in a generalised context of declining trust in journalism and changes in the way we consume information. We bank on our collaboration with some sixty European media players. We participate in several investigative networks, which allows us to pool resources and publish appealing papers for our European audience. This ‘consortium journalism’ constitutes one of the interesting developments in the sector in recent years. Our articles are also regularly taken up by the continent’s flagship newspapers, from the Guardian to Domani, the Kiev Independent to the Times of Malta, or the Telex to Efimerida ton Syntakton, etc. To give you another example of our collaboration, in association with Mediapart, renowned for its investigative work, and the American media outlet Mongabay, which specialises in environmental issues, we’re currently publishing the fifth chapter of a 3-year investigation into a project funded by green bonds in Indonesia and involving Michelin and BNP Paribas. 

EA: What is your business model? 

P. Salvanès: We opted for a mixed business model. Above all, we offer a subscription to our readers, who can also support us with tax-free donations. We receive funding via journalism grants, foundations, and partly by the EU as part of European media consortia. Lastly, our operation is backed by a translation agency specialised in European languages which currently offers more than 160 language combinations. As editorial independence is a function of economic independence, we’re building our project with this objective in mind. 

EA: How does your governance work? 

P. Salvanès: We’ve been a European cooperative company since 2017, a first in the media world. Our capital is based on our whole ecosystem, i.e. readers, journalists, translators, partners and financial backers, which amounts to more than 200 stakeholders from some 30 nationalities. Like our business model, this form of governance helps to protect our editorial independence. Each stakeholder has a voice, regardless of their number of shares, which avoids the risk of takeover, censorship or journalistic self-censorship. This operating mode obviously does not appeal to all shareholder profiles and thus limits our investment capacities, but we fully accept this. Furthermore, we don’t pay dividends, at least not at present. All our profits are reinvested in independent journalism. 

EA: How did you cover the European elections? 

P. Salvanès: Our added-value compared to media groups who cover these elections with far more resources than us, is that we don’t adopt a national prism, we take a look at what’s happening on the other side of the border. We thus asked 27 renowned papers, one for each Member State, to provide us with the key aspects of polling in their country: The Irish Times, Eldiario.es, Libération, Internazionale, Delfi, Expresso, Der Tagesspiegel, and so on. Coordinating 27 papers is a feat which few are capable of pulling off. This results in 27 articles that each partner republishes in their language, and therefore millions of Europeans who learn more about the issues around these elections in other countries. 

EA: What are your plans for Voxeurop in the years to come? 

P. Salvanès: We must strengthen our business model and pursue our growth while offering attractive remuneration to journalists who have a vital yet undermined profession. We also need to find new investment capacities to broaden our themes, format and publishing languages. In short, we need means to continue fighting the war on information. 

EA: How can the ESSEC community support your actions?

P. Salvanès: In this order: sign up to the newsletter to discover our work, subscribe to read our articles and support us, then possibly invest in the project by purchasing shares. The ESSEC community is already well represented among the cooperative’s shareholders! And if any of you have translation needs, don’t hesitate to contact us for a quote. More generally, I obviously encourage everyone to read and support independent media, whether ours or another.

Find out more: 

voxeurop.eu

Interview by Louis Armengaud Wurmser  (E10), Content Manager at ESSEC Alumni 

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