In early 1999, a group of financial journalists left their newspapers and went online. At the time, they just wanted to make an online press review to be used by journalists. Their website, revistapresei.ro, republished articles from different Romanian newspapers. A Drudge Report of sorts, with copy/pasting instead of links.

I met in December with Cristian Pantazi, editor-in-chief, in their Bucharest offices.

Fighting corruption with networked journalism

In 2001, the Hotnews team started a side project, anchete.ro (enquetes.ro). The aim was to set up a place where Romanian could expose the corruption of their politicians. The main contributors were journalists who could not publish all the information they knew of because of the political affiliations of their newspaper’s owner. Put in a more romantic way, Hotnews was giving truth a voice when evil forces (political and financial interests) tried to mute it.

Hosting articles by guest journalists soon proved to be too shallow. The real information came from insiders, who needed a place to safely make public what they knew about some politicians’ wrongdoings. Anchete.ro opened up and created a back-office to easily share bits of information. Collaborative journalism at its finest.

The best part? The Hotnews team didn’t even do it to increase pageviews or user engagement. They did it because “it felt normal at the time”, says Pantazi.

The anchete.ro project was 2-sided:

• A moral cause cemented a liberal image and a solid reputation among journalists.
• Innovative approaches at solving the problem of sources protection allowed them to softly (and before time) enter the era of networked news production.

Anchete.ro has now been gobbled up by the Hotnews brand. Not that corruption disappeared, of course But Romanian media gave for freedom to their journalists, so that a politician’s misbehaviors can be exposed by traditional outlets.

On the other hand, the culture of user participation has remained. Take comments, for instance. A special team of 3 persons work in-house to read and edit comments before they are published. Even though Pantazi readily admits that “0.5% of all comments lead to another story” (read: 99.5% of them are useless), it happens that outstanding commentators are spotted and invited to join the team of VIP bloggers.

Pure-player and market leader

Today, Hotnews is the #1 website on the Romanian market for online news, with 90,000 visitors per day during the elections (expect 85,000 daily for calmer times).

More importantly, they say they are profitable. With ad sales between €600,000 and €700,000 for 2007, they can afford 50 journalists and huge investments such as a proprietary CMS (€100k) and brand-new offices, fully-equipped with a sound and video studio.

Another sign of their success lies in the many copycats that emerged in recent years. 9am, ziare.ro or Daily Business launched in the mid-2000s and all try to make a living out of online news. Along with Hotnews, they created a new market and such competition “helps [Hotnews] progress”.

Visitors’ demographics are another reason for Hotnews to smile. 75% of them have completed higher education, 70% are full-time employed and 27% are top or middle management. An advertiser’s dreamland.

To put a glossy finish on such a rosy picture, a recent survey by INSITEs showed that more than 90% of the audience trusted the Hotnews brand to be reliable, fast and relevant.

Epitomizing the troubles of the Romanian web

That said, all my Romanian friends (a largely unrepresentative sample) told me that Hotnews still rhymed with copy/pasting. Many Romanians even call it Hoţnews, pronounced [hotznews] (Hoţ meaning thief in Romanian), and the local blogosphere just loves Hotnews-bashing.

When forced to admit that Hotnews does publish original content (90% of all content is produced in-house, according to Pantazi), they snag and say “it’s evolved copy/pasting: they take bits from newspapers, bits from Wikipedia and rearrange it”. They visit the website just because it’s more frequently updated than its competitors from traditional media outlets.

Hotnews has an image problem. So does the whole Romanian internet. Online ventures used to pay little attention to copyrights. A website even developed a business model where they’d buy magazines, type in the articles and publish them online!

As a result, credibility has been shackled, both for readers and advertisers. That’s one of the reasons why Romanian advertisers spend so little online. Only €2 per user per year. 12 times less than in the Czech Republic and 60 times less than in Western Europe.

When asked about the bleak years ahead, Pantazi can only “hope that it’ll be OK”. He says online ad budgets will not shrink at all. But, in countries where contextual, text-based advertising is not an option, there is little chance that banners at 2009 rates will feed a 50-strong newsroom.