07 July 2026

AgriMedia’s Jean-Paul Reparon: Dare to be different, create added value

AgriMedia’s Jean-Paul Reparon on turning a 500-copy hobbyist magazine into a cross-selling engine – and a sector in crisis into a community worth serving.

For six or seven years, Dutch agriculture has been locked in political paralysis. Emission reduction targets have put the sector under enormous pressure – too many farms, too many animals, a government talking about halving livestock and buying out farmers. “For a farmer,” he says, “it’s quite difficult to recognise if there is any future.”

For a publisher serving that audience, the temptation would be to wait. Jean-Paul, Managing Director of AgriMedia BV, did the opposite. When the sector his titles have served for more than 20 years began searching for new futures, AgriMedia decided to search alongside them.

With a team of 20 and a portfolio of highly specialised titles – from arable farming machinery to dairy goat health – AgriMedia has always operated at pace. “We compare ourselves with a little speedboat instead of a big old anchor,” he says. “When I have an idea today, I can act tomorrow.”

Jean-Paul Reparon will be speaking at the FIPP World Media Congress in Madrid, 13–15 October 2026.

Just a brand and a list

That instinct is being tested most acutely with Wijn en Wijngaard, the wine and viticulture title AgriMedia acquired a little over a year ago. The magazine was small – 500 or 600 copies, published for a community that was part hobby, part livelihood, with around 200 to 250 commercial vineyard operators in the Netherlands and Belgium.

What Jean-Paul bought was a brand name and a subscription list. Everything else – content, journalism, events – he had to build. “I didn’t have knowledge about wine, so I’ve been searching for journalists from the wine sector.”

Eighteen months in, the results are taking shape. Two congresses, each drawing 150 to 170 attendees at around €135 a head. And the week after FIPP Congress in Madrid, AgriMedia will host the first-ever trade show for Dutch viticulture – a 2,500 square metre hall of machinery and suppliers, combined with an evening consumer wine festival open to the public. “It’s not a success story yet,” he says, “it’s still a young story!”

Why the timing is right

For this publication, context matters. Climate change, while devastating for traditional wine regions further south, is transforming the Netherlands. More sunshine hours, warmer summers, and two decades of accumulated knowledge with cold-climate grape varieties have built a credible Dutch wine industry that is steadily improving in quality. Political pressure on Dutch farmers – to reduce livestock and diversify – has given many of them both the motivation and the land to try something new.

For AgriMedia, that convergence is an editorial opportunity as much as an agricultural one. “The agricultural landscape is changing, it’s evolving,” Jean-Paul says. “So we have to help our clients with our need-to-know content in that transformation.”

Turning one audience into two

AgriMedia’s approach to building this new community draws directly on its existing relationships. Last month the team sent an email to 12,000 dairy and arable farmers, inviting them to a webinar on starting a vineyard. Existing subscribers of other AgriMedia titles receive a free digital subscription to Wijn en Wijngaard – and the data is already revealing which ones are paying attention.

“We can see which arable farmers or dairy farmers are interested in the wine title. So we can target those people.” It is, he says, a first-party data strategy that turns a diversification problem in one community into a prospecting opportunity for another.

The education pipeline extends this further. A Dutch agricultural school is launching a Vineyard Academy for aspiring vineyard owners. AgriMedia has partnered with them: students who enrol receive a magazine subscription as part of the package. “When you’ve been to school, you’re done,” Jean-Paul says. “But we include our magazine so people get the opportunity for lifelong learning.”

Storytelling as community-building

Events are central to AgriMedia’s model of editorial storytelling as community-building, and the Landbouwmechanisatie Zomertour is the most vivid example of this: each summer, two editors spend six days driving 600 kilometres across the Netherlands in a borrowed tractor, sleeping at farms along the way, recording podcasts each evening and producing a full magazine issue from the journey.

Jean-Paul admits not every experiment has worked. AgriMedia ran a full festival around the Zomertour twice, with food trucks and live music. There was capacity for 2,000 people, but they only got around 500. “Financially it was okay, but it didn’t reach our goals,” he says, “but what was good were the knowledge sessions.” The team took what worked and stripped away the rest, and recently launched a new format: 25 people in a seminar room, TED-style talks, with cameras running and content going online.

He says their range – and agility – is the point. “Sometimes it’s 25 people in a room. Sometimes it’s a trade show. Sometimes we have events with 1,000 people and 200 goats.”

The lighthouse

Speaking at a congress in India in 2023, Jean-Paul shared a framework for building sustainable niche communities – brand ecosystems, daily reader relevance, first-party data and real-time service. Three years on, he says most of it still holds. But now he would add trust –”Be trustworthy to readers on a daily basis, because that’s your only proof of who you are” and technology, to smooth the reader journey.

Jean-Paul wants AgriMedia’s brands to be a fixed point for its communities. “We want to be the landmark,” he says. “the trustworthy landmark they can come to. We can be the lighthouse, showing them the way to move forward.”

Jean-Paul traces his own approach back to a phrase he’s kept printed on his office wall ever since college: “Dare to be different, create added value.” But watching business models shift faster than they used to, he says being different isn’t enough: “You have to combine it with change… you have to be willing to change.”