2023-08-21 01:56:54
A newcomer to newsstands on Sunday: “La Tribune Dimanche”. The business daily, recently bought by billionaire Rodolphe Saadé’s shipowner CMA-CGM, will launch a generalist Sunday edition on October 8 with a print run of 120,000 copies. It will appear in paper and digital version and will be directed by Bruno Jeudy, former JDD who left the Paris Match hierarchy in August 2022 amid disagreements with his management.
It will be the fourth national newspaper to be published on Sundays. Two will be direct competitors: the Journal Du Dimanche (JDD) and Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui en France. The last is the sports daily L’Équipe. “There is room for a new Sunday daily,” assured AFP the president of La Tribune, Jean-Christophe Tortora. He points to the “paradox” of this day: it is the day when the French have “the most time to read” but where there are “the fewest national dailies” and where “the distribution network is the least important” .
Little competition on Sunday
The JDD experienced a historic 40-day strike between the end of June and the beginning of August after the announcement of the arrival at its head of Geoffroy Lejeune, former editor-in-chief of the far-right weekly Valeurs Actuelles. Many have seen behind this appointment the hand of billionaire Vincent Bolloré, whose Vivendi group is in the process of swallowing Lagardère, owner of the JDD. Worried that the title will take a sharp turn to the right, many journalists have decided to leave.
According to Jean-Christophe Tortola, the project goes back several months, before the turmoil at the JDD, and was not set up to compete with the latter. “I have never seen a project succeed by going on a crusade against another,” he insisted. “Our idea is to do a project for something rather than against it”. says Jean-Christophe Tortola.
Half of the newspaper will deal with “major societal issues” (politics, education, climate, etc.) and half with “culture and the art of living”, according to its president. He also affirms that the political line will be “neither right nor left, representative of editorial pluralism”.
JDD defectors?
For the launch of the weekly extended to new themes, “external recruitment” will be necessary. La Tribune currently has 40 journalists, half of whom are from the regions. Among the new recruits, Soazig Quéméner (of Marianne magazine) will be editor-in-chief and political journalist Ludovic Vigogne (L’Opinion) will join the editorial staff. Moreover, this new title seems to be a logical base for some JDD defectors.
Created in 1985, La Tribune is today an exclusively digital weekday daily, after having abandoned its daily paper format in 2012 and then weekly in 2020. Based in Marseilles, the powerful shipowner CMA CGM, which he heads, took control of La Tribune at the end of May via the takeover of the Hima group of Jean-Christophe Tortora. In October, the shipowner, which recorded a record net profit of more than 23 billion euros in 2022, had already become the owner of the La Provence group. He then invited himself, at the end of 2022, to the capital of the audiovisual group M 6, then, at the beginning of April, to that of the online video media Brut.
#Tribune #compete #JDD #newspaper #Sundays