Agora's new internet portal sure to generate chatter
Helena Luczywo has stopped doing the day-to-day editing of Gazeta Wyborcza and is working full time on developing Agora's internet portal, due to be launched later this year.
She heads a team of 40, some of whom began working two years ago to develop Gazeta Wyborcza online, which had 650,000 visitors in February, Luczywo said.
"We haven't really done any marketing to speak of," she said, but the daily paper is updated online by a separate staff and after some reluctance, "everyone wants to cooperate."
There's no name yet for Agora's internet portal. Agora stock has more than tripled since November, with a big spurt upward this winter when CEO Wanda Rapaczynski announced the internet plans.
And the thinking behind it? "That it was the right time to start," Luczywo said. "Everything is moving in the Polish internet world. A lot of companies are making payments online, people are working on easy and cheap access to the internet and to doing transactions online. It's as if it suddenly burst into Poland," she said.
Wyborcza brings many assets to the internet table, including a brand name, an experienced sales network, and a local and national company and technology structure. "We have very advanced technology," she said, which includes new printing plants and company-wide computerization of nearly all functions.
Some of the newspaper's classifieds may be adapted to the internet. A few years ago, Wyborcza offered one-time free classified ads to people buying or selling flats. It was an impromptu "swap" market that helped people in different circumstances, from young families needing more space to older couples wanting less space.
Online, classifieds might be about cars rather than apartments. "We have huge national and international coverage of cars and, locally, we have information about what is what, for people to be able to exchange information about their cars, to exchange information about which repair shops are good or bad," Luczywo said. She added that Wyborcza already does some online classifieds, but these are not properly searchable.
Whether it's cars or sports or women's health issues, online chat lines will be a feature of the Agora portal. This part of the portal will extend the newspaper's interactivity, she said, adding that "people relate to us, interact with us. So we are starting to do more of that online."
Last month when the Academy Awards announced that Andrzej Wajda would receive a lifetime achievement award, Luczywo said that, "you could get the story from the newspaper but you could (also) go to Wyborcza's web site where we had put up fragments of Wajda movies. It was great."
Agora hired Arthur Andersen to do a first-stage analysis of the global internet phenomena and the technology aspects. "We will be looking for advisers but not 'strategic' advisers," Luczywo said. "We have the content, the people and a very strong position on the Polish market. We are doing it on our own and we will have alliances with other companies."
And is she nostalgic for the newsroom? After all, for much of the 1980s, she stayed one step ahead of the cops as the editor of the underground Solidarity newspaper that kept information flowing to the movement. She and Adam Michnik founded Wyborcza three months before the first partly free elections in mid-1989, and then gave the paper the institutional structure that keeps it solvent as well as the credibility and "voice" that connects with nearly all Poles.
Yes, Luczywo conceded, she had some qualms about leaving the newsroom. She remains passionately interested "in what's happening in Poland, in the United States, in Russia. That's what interests me most and I'm farther from that," she said.
On the other hand yep, you guessed it. She's challenged by the internet and the new world it implies. And she is learning on the job, just as she learned the intricacies of putting out a world-class daily newspaper.
More on last week's firestorm in the Polish-American community about the Polish-American Congress' (PAC) speaking invitation to Gdansk priest Henryk Jankowski. PAC President Edward J. Moskal, reacting to a petition against Jankowski, blamed "foreign interests" for trying to "unduly influence" Polish and Polish-American opinion, especially on "Polish-Jewish relations." And then came this zinger: "Although the vast majority of our members may favor improved relations, they would not wish Poland to be regarded as a suburb of Israel."
That was too much for Polish-American activist Marilyn Piurek, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee. "Most Polish Americans are people of honesty, integrity, tolerance and character," she wrote to Moskal. "Your actions, as head of the largest Polish-American organization, run against the grain of these character traits. Perhaps Father Jankowski was once known as a hero of Solidarity. He is now known as a virulent anti-Semite. Polish Americans are not anti-Semitic. So why embarrass us by extending an invitation?"
And, as far as his "suburb of Israel" statement was concerned, she wrote that he "seem(s) to be suffering from paranoid delusions" and suggested he resign.
