Carine Fouteau becomes president and publishing director of Mediapart

2024-03-14 05:52:06

At the end of an internal process which lasted two years and which gave this choice the strength of evidence, I proposed to the board of directors of Mediapart that Carine Fouteau take over as president of our company editor and publishing director of our newspaper. On February 27, his name was unanimously adopted by this body where Mediapart employees are in the majority.

Carine Fouteau has been part of the Mediapart adventure since the beginning, in 2008. Sharing the ideals of independence that animated the co-founders (watch the video from February 2008 in which she explains why she joined Mediapart), she then took her risk, leaving Les Échos where she had worked since 1999 when the economic daily had just been bought by billionaire Bernard Arnault. She followed working conditions there, then social issues, while contributing to the excellent Vacarme magazine, which has unfortunately disappeared.

At Mediapart, she covered migration issues for ten years, demonstrating a generous curiosity for the world and others which echoes her life path – she spent part of her childhood and youth abroad. , in Iran and Norway, and chose, after a degree in history at Paris I University and then his degree from Sciences Po Paris, to do a master’s degree in journalism at New York University. His reports – notably in Ukraine a year ago but also in Seine-Saint-Denis during the 2012 presidential election – bear witness to this insatiable curiosity, as does his investment during our #OpenEurope campaign.

Edwy Plenel and Carine Fouteau during the Mediapart board of directors meeting on February 27, 2024. © Photo Sébastien Calvet / Mediapart Enlarge the image: Illustration 1

Carine Fouteau’s constant professional investment in issues of migration, hospitality and discrimination has been at the heart of Mediapart’s commitments since its birth. Very recently, she was the one who took a stand, in our collective name, against the immigration law and the xenophobia that inspired it. She was also asked to cover the persistence of French colonialism for Mediapart, notably in a series of reports in New Caledonia in 2018.

Ten years after the launch of Mediapart, she will naturally take on the succession of our co-founder François Bonnet at the head of the editorial team in tandem: from March 2018 to June 2023, she will be the editorial co-director of Mediapart with Stéphane Alliès, now responsible from our publishing center. Under their co-direction, combining attentiveness and efficiency, our newspaper will experience spectacular progress in five years until passing the milestone of 200,000 subscribers – and, now, that of 220,000 –, accompanied by strong growth in team which today approaches 140 employees, half of whom are journalists.

A collective story

The choice of Carine Fouteau to succeed me was therefore logical. This orderly passing of the baton marks the completion of a process long matured by the co-founders, determined to pass the torch to the generation who joined and accompanied us. Carine is emblematic of this, having proven for sixteen years her ability to unite, inspire and train the entire team, with as much kindness as rigor, around our strategic issues, both editorial and entrepreneurial, as evidenced by her first proclamation of faith as president.

An exception in the media landscape, where most companies are headed by non-journalists, Mediapart requires through its statutes not only that the president of its publishing company also assumes management of the publication, but above all that he must be , a journalist. Beyond the symbol, it is the affirmation of a commitment: no interest external to the work of information, in the service of the right to know and the public interest, must interfere in the operation of our newspaper and of his professional collective.

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Whatever the notoriety acquired by some of us, Mediapart is first and foremost a collective story which has transformed and changed us all. It is also the meaning of this quiet succession at the head of our newspaper which frees it from a sometimes cumbersome personalization around my person: not reducing a profession, a company, a team, to a single personality who would embody it. , at the risk of shielding the richness and diversity of a collective of individuals. From this, Carine will be the host and spokesperson.

After the conquest, then the success, transmission was the challenge that awaited us. If there are certainly young people who are very old in their heads, conformists or conservatives, particularly at the top of current power, our public life, that of the political world as well as the economic universe, confirms that there are above all very old people. clinging to their posts, unable to imagine a world that survives them. It was unthinkable that Mediapart would reproduce these archaic patterns which hinder the future.

A renewed direction

From the beginning, if at least our bet succeeded, the four co-founders (François Bonnet, Laurent Mauduit, Marie-Hélène Smiejan and myself) intended to make Mediapart a media controlled by those who work there and who create it. value. Transmitting to our team a profitable business, over which they have control and whose capital is protected, was our initial ambition. This objective achieved in 2019, imposing ourselves beyond reason, under the pretext of success, would have been in contradiction with this desire.

This is how, after having invented and created the Fund for a Free Press (FPL) which, via the Society for the Protection of the Independence of Mediapart (SPIM), guarantees the economic independence of our newspaper, freed from all private shareholder, we made sure to gradually leave the positions of responsibility and management, one by one.

François Bonnet, after handing over editorial management to Stéphane Alliès and Carine Fouteau in 2018, has chaired the Fund for a Free Press (FPL) since 2022, while contributing regularly to our newspaper.

Likewise, while continuing to appear in our columns, Laurent Mauduit gave up his place on the Mediapart board of directors at the end of 2020 to Fabrice Arfi, co-responsible and emblematic figure of our investigations division.

Finally, a year ago, in 2023, our co-founder Marie-Hélène Smiejan handed over the general management of Mediapart to Cécile Sourd (see Marie-Hélène’s interview in March 2023 in our show “Abonnez-vous” and listen to this podcast with Cécile Sourd). Today she chairs the moral guarantor of our entire structure, the Association for the Right to Know (ADS) whose co-founders are ex officio members as well as Martine Orange, who chaired our Society of Employees.

We owe this success to you, to all of you who support us with your subscriptions.

It is now my turn to hand over the management of this press company like no other. Totally independent, totally digital, totally participatory, Mediapart has no equivalent in the media landscape. It has even less since its originality is added to its profitability, constant since 2011 and further confirmed by our results in 2023.

We owe this success to you, to all of you who support us through your subscriptions, our only recipe through which our initial battle on the price of freedom and the value of information comes to fruition. But beyond this economic guarantee of our independence, this unwavering link between this newspaper and its public also says that it lives with the times, supports its challenges, embraces its hopes.

The best proof of this is this final image that we did not arbitrarily decide on but which emerged naturally: that of a media now managed by a team of four women, with Carine Fouteau, president, Cécile Sourd, general director, Lénaïg Bredoux and Valentine Oberti, co-editorial directors for almost a year.

Cécile Sourd, Lénaïg Bredoux, Carine Fouteau and Valentine Oberti. © Photo Sébastien Calvet / Mediapart Enlarge the image: Illustration 2

This is no coincidence: Mediapart’s active role in the #MeToo revolution has also transformed us. In all latitudes and under all regimes, the cause of women takes the question of equality to its point of incandescence, by rejecting any supposedly natural hierarchy, based on sex or gender. From then on, it strengthens all other egalitarian causes, whether social or political, in the face of discrimination based on birth, origin, appearance, belief, etc.

In our worried and uncertain times, this equality of rights is an irreplaceable compass which unites both questions of domestic politics and international news. Mediapart claims this, like all those who call for emancipation, refusing to be placed under house arrest by chance of birth, condition, origin, gender, etc. . It is a battle that will always be unfinished, constantly under construction, eternally restarted, in the face of the confiscation of the common good by those who have and those who dominate, those who monopolize and those who abuse.

By joining, Mediapart is perpetuating a long tradition to which it is giving new life. Becoming the first French daily newspaper run by women, it invokes the memory of La Fronde, this aptly named newspaper from the end of the 19th century, created and run by the feminist Marguerite Durand, which only employed women, typographers included. One of its most famous signatures was the great Séverine (1855-1929), who wrote her Notes d’une refrondeuse, after having been introduced to journalism by Jules Vallès, the author of L’insurgé, of which she directed after his death The Cri du peuple, this daily newspaper inseparable from the memory of the Paris Commune.

Séverine, upright woman, free and libertarian, passionate and determined, refractory and indocile. As is the team which, with Carine Fouteau at its head, now has the destiny of Mediapart in its hands.