Kim Hollamby - the professional online journalist

[Marine Girot]

Kim Hollamby, head of IPC Media, is a magazine journalist and IPC media is a media company which owns all sorts of magazines, from Marie Claire, to Country Life, Housetohome, or What’s on TV. For Kim Hollamby, the media are experiencing a new big change after the boom-bust cycle of 1999-2004. The conclusion drawn from this crisis is that the digital is here to stay. Websites are more interactive tools than paper magazines. Thus, the Internet can create a much bigger impact, reaching people who would not have been interested in a paper magazine but fancy the online one because of its interactivity.

This comes to the 1% rule stating that if 100 persons are using the Internet, 1 is creating something, 10 are interacting with it and the 89 remaining are only using it. A lot of people say that with the Internet, the user-generated content has boomed. This is true and the BBC for instance has now its own dedicated department for user-generated content. The journalists check the information in order to avoid such embarrassing problems as fakes and wrong information.

So, the Internet is not free and instant as some people pretend it. It has a cost and media enterprises have to invest properly and it takes them time to load texts, pictures, audio and videos, especially when they have to go through a checking process.

The journalist has then still his place in the digital age and “the quality, as Kim Hollamby said, is the key to rising above the crowd”.