Owni – Online Journalism Parisian Style

Glen Hellman March 9, 2011 Tweet

Paris, France-based Owni is a collaborative media platform focused on the future of journalism, society, tech and digital news sourced from an alliance of almost 1,000 influential bloggers. Open source and published under a creative commons license, OWNI is a pioneer in augmented and data-journalism.

Owni got its start when founder Nicolas Voisin created the French web agency 22 Mars in 2006 in anticipation of the 2007 presidential election. He then launched the first ever WebTV in France, a civic initiative that received overwhelmingly positive feedback.  With that success, 22 Mars founders began focusing on promoting freedom of expression through different projects in France. They launched Owni when the French government passed a law (later used as a starting point for the ACTA treaty) that infuriated the Internet community.

With declining advertising revenues, many media outlets in France depend on government subsidies or corporate acquisitions to stay afloat.   Owni’s business model mixes profit and non-profit operations. Most of the innovative data-journalism and visualization processes that underpin the company’s newsroom are also offered as monetized services to both media and non-media clients.

If you’ll be at SXSW, come by and meet the OWNI team at our SXSW Accelerator Kickoff on Sunday.