The dormant publisher plans a fresh start in the post-XO era.
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Lazia, 22 June 2019 — Bleu Ultramarine SM has announced plans to relaunch its eight online newspapers for a new audience in the post-XO era, with the stated aim of “providing truthful news about Mahuset and the rest of the micronational community”.
The announcement comes against a bleak backdrop for the trade at large, with hundreds of jobs shed at publishers such as BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Gannett, and the axe falling hardest on the smaller markets already short of decent coverage. Newspapers are dying, or so the familiar narrative runs.
Bleu Ultramarine SM had originally set out to found an independent Mahusetan newspaper industry, its first article announcing the venture and its second an editorial by President Emiel van der Huijsen, who cast the enterprise as an attempt to emulate the success of L’Sydunche, the Abeldane Telegraph and similar titles. In the event those two pieces proved to be the only articles it ever published; most of its newspapers never launched, and the project fell dormant shortly after its start — hard to call a success by any measure.
Yet what the venture grasped at its launch remains as valid now as it was then. The two articles brought a short burst of new activity to Mahuset and inspired the short-lived left-wing title The Matsian Telegraph. Now, several months on, Bleu Ultramarine SM proposes to try again, promising a relatively large roster of journalists to report the stories other outlets either overlook or decline to cover in depth.
Edited for the relaunch of the Courant van Lazia.
