RendezView writers not fazed by readers’ feedback

RendezView editor Sarrah Le Marquand isn’t fazed if you tell her where to go.

Journalist Sarrah Le Marquand isn’t fazed if you tell her where to go. The editor of controversial opinion website RendezView and her team have copped so much flak since the News Corp Aust­ralia-backed site was launched into cyber space in March last year that they have developed thick skins and a well-honed sense of humour.

“We survived the first year,” Le Marquand jokes of RendezView’s inaugural 12 months.

Since its launch, RendezView, which amalgamates opinion ­pieces from across News’s metro daily mastheads as well as commissioning other original content, has had almost seven million unique users to its site.

The relatively high level of engagement by readers, which averages 3.87 minutes per article per visit (compared with about 2 minutes for the metros), means that RendezView is likely to commercialised in its own right in the coming 12 months.

Le Marquand says more staff will also be added to fine tune the offering and further grow the website’s audience. “This year will be about growth, growing the audience we have built and finding new voices,” she says.

Le Marquand is a former opinion editor at Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph. Having been drawn to the impact that sites like Mia Freedman’s Mamamia and Fairfax Media’s Daily Life, and Jezebel in the United States, were having on the marketplace, she took the idea for a stand-alone website capitalising on the female-generated opinion content of the News group to then boss Campbell Reid. A year since launch Le Marquand’s model had morphed to offer a 50-50 gender balance of content.

“We are in no ghetto and there is nothing pink about it,” she says. “If an article happens to be written by a woman so be it (but) ... we have high engagement from female and male readerships.”

But the most dramatic feature of Le Marquand’s launch year has been the emergence of the moderated comments forum attached to each piece, where readers are variously forthright, poignant, brutal and sometimes defamatory (those ones gets junked) about the topic at hand.

“The comments emerged as a massive issue,” says Le Marquand, who prefers to view the online discourse (averaging more than 100 comments per article) as a “conversation”.

But it does take resilience to be part of the RendezView roster of writers.

“You don’t ever get a soft landing (as a writer) at RendezView,” she says. “But no-one has ever not come back because of the reception they got. We are all very supportive of each other.”

While many peers in the market have elected to switch comment forums off, Le Marquand is committed to the interaction.

“As inflammatory as some of the comments are, it’s important to have them out there, that ­readers have their right of reply,” she says. “Opinion is subjective and it’s about a conversation.”

Le Marquand says much of the online debate is fuelled by readers’ perceptions of RendezView’s political colours.

“Many of the forum’s writers are relentlessly bullied on social media,” she says. The site often sends social media into meltdown over a just a headline.

“We don’t have ideology and that drives people nuts, we aren’t left, right, feminist, we can’t be ­pigeonholed — every piece just has to start a conversation,” she says.

“You have to have a thick skin to be part of this. Our purpose is to ignite conversations and we don’t resile from that.”