Made in Perpignan

Perpignan is a Southern French city near the border of Spain and the Mediterranean coast. The city is home to the renowned Visa Pour l’Image photography festival that see an annual flock of press photographers descend upon the historic city center for portfolio reviews and exhibitions. But the city is also known to have one of the highest poverty rates in France. Roughly one-third of its residents live below the poverty line, about double the national average. Unemployment rates are also well above the national average. The broader Pyrénées-Orientales region, of which Perpignan is the capital, is among the poorest in the country.

Here, the French-language outlet Made in Perpignan has its roots. The media started ten years ago in 2016. Stories were distributed online and the media quickly managed to carve out a niche of their own.

“We do not cover court trials, road accidents and sport results, but focus on people, local initiatives, and social issues instead – and we must have filled a gap because we’ve kept growing,” says co-founder Arnaud Le Vu.

He worked as a nurse at the time of the launch and had no formal journalism education. He volunteered to do website maintenance and other administrative tasks.

“I did not shy away from picking up the occasional camera too, when needed,” he laughs.

In fact, the entire operation was fuelled by entrepreneurial will and for the first eight years everyone worked from home. It has only been two years since the Made in Perpignan team moved into a prober office. Today, the newsroom consists of five full time staff.

One of them is Mona Bru. She joined right after graduating. She had previously interned with a local radio and finds working at a local media interesting.

“You have a real link with people and the stories you report on, often you also have more time to do your stories,” she says.

Mona Bru oversees Perpignan Stories – Made in Perpignan’s project with funds from the Pluralistic Media for Democracy programme, implemented by JournalismFund Europe and IMS.

The project centres on building a community of young people from disadvantaged groups and poorer neighbourhoods who could contribute to information sharing, journalistic production and public debate. And help Made in Perpignan grow their younger audience.

“We’ve dabbled in junior newsrooms and editorial collaborations with schools before, but it was start and stop and a challenge to maintain, so we still had a need to bridge our content to what younger people would want to engage with,” says Mona Bru.  

Replacing remoteness and poverty statistics with initiatives and inspiring personalities

A collaboration with a few locally rooted organisations let to a dozen sign-ups for the six weeks long training course that Mona and her colleagues had developed as part of the project.

The participants came from places that is generally thought of as fringe and far from everything.

“The project highlighted differences between our editorial perspective and that of the young participants. It offered an opportunity to show our audiences areas such as Saint-Jacques (poorest neighbourhood in France) or Saint-Paul de Fenouillet (rural and poor village) through more nuanced and human-centered narratives.

Some of the subjects chosen by the participants were linked to discrimination (gender equality in a mixed football team, menstrual precarity in an isolated village, school drop-out supports, the question of cultural appropriation among hip-hop). Letting the participants choose their interviewee led to more ethnic and cultural diversity in the reporting – an aspect the newsroom aims to learn from and strengthen in their reporting going forward.

“The young people felt valued and proud of their work, and our media gained visibility in these communities,” Mona says. For her it really matters that not only were the young appearing not as the story, but as reporters –their journalism often showcased individuals in roles outside the regular and predictable ones normally used by media.

For the team at Made in Perpignan there was another lesson too: While neighbourhoods such as Saint-Jacques are not lacking in media coverage in quantitative terms, the perspectives brought by participants offered alternative narratives and encouraged a broader questioning of their editorial treatment of disadvantaged areas.

“The poverty and remoteness remain a fact, but just going there with the young trainees gave us new ideas and revealed that there are other non-poverty related stories to report on from those parts of our district,” says Mona.

Perpignan Stories published a story about a group of young helping their own community with food distribution. A local mayor saw the video on Facebook and reached out to one of the girls and told her, ‘I need to work with you’. He is 70 years old, but now she is part of his team.

Made in Perpignan launched their TikTok presence with the 14 videos produced as part of the project by the young trainees.

“Our job now is to continue publishing on TikTok and Youtube, explains Arnaud. He is confident that the staff now have tools and practise. Their TikTok profile has grown 10 times since September 2025, when the project launched – perhaps also boosted by local elections in March 2026, when Made in Perpignan made special short video format interviews with all four mayor candidates, he adds.

“The young people’s way of telling stories is very dynamic, and we will do more of that in our newsroom,” both Arnaud and Mona agree. They want to show young people that they are able to add their preferred format to the way Made in Perpignan present journalistic content.

Both Arnaud and Mona were also surprised to see a story about hip-hop perform well on the outlet’s more established Facebook and Instagram platforms as well. “It proves that our older audience present on those platforms are also interested in this type of content,” Arnaud says.

Made in Perpignan have submitted an application to French educational authorities, hoping for funding to continue the training courses and deepening their relations with young people in the region.

“We are a free access media – a real social media if you will. We have an obligation to be interested in the next generations and their issues. This media is not here to sell subscriptions; we have a role in the community and this kind of project is important as it allows us to experiment with new ways of connecting to and collaborating with the local community we are here to serve,” says Arnaud.

The response to their application is expected late summer 2026.

We’ve asked newsrooms to highlight any change or achievements resulting from interventions, activities or news articles that have been part of the PM4D programme.

Why do we not just report on how many media outlets we supported, how many received a training in AI and in advertising? When impact is documented, shared and celebrated, journalism becomes easier to fund, easier to defend, and harder to ignore.

The Media Pluralism Fund is operated by Journalismfund Europe and the Capacity Building and Mentorship is run by IMS (International Media Support).

This project is co-funded by the European Commission and the King Baudouin Foundation.