In a small office in northern Paris, journalists are preparing for an extremely rare and somewhat risky event: the launch of the first new print newspaper in France for 10 years.
“With the Covid crisis, people rediscovered long-form articles and books – they want a special moment of reading time at the weekend, which is what we’re appealing to,” said Jean-Christophe Tortora, president of La Tribune Dimanche, a new Sunday paper that goes on sale this weekend.
The launch of the paper, a mix of news, regional reporting, culture and lifestyle content, flies in the face of declining print sales across Europe and France’s shrinking press distribution network. Many news kiosks are closed on Sunday and some papers rely on vendors who set up stands in town centres.
But the paper’s sales will be scrutinised by politicians and commentators because France is in the midst of a furious row over Sunday newspapers, far-right culture wars and the role of billionaire industrialists in media ownership.
Tortora stressed that the launch of La Tribune Dimanche was a longstanding project and was not about going to war with rival papers, but it enters the market at the moment when France’s only standalone Sunday paper, Le Journal du Dimanche, has been radically overhauled as a showcase of identity politics and far-right ideas after a takeover by the conservative Catholic billionnaire Vincent Bolloré.
The Breton industrialist, who is consolidating a media empire of TV, radio and print, was described by the former education minister Pap Ndiaye over the summer as “very close to the most radical far-right”, and Ndiaye added that his media was doing harm to democracy. Pascal Praud, a star of Bolloré’s CNews TV channel and columnist in Le Journal de Dimanche, said this week that leftwing media were simply jealous of the media group’s success.
Le Journal du Dimanche saw the longest newspaper strike since the 1970s this summer over the appointment of an editor on the far right. In the past month, 90% of its staff have left and the editor, Geoffroy Lejeune, has kept the paper’s design but moved it from a broadly centrist position close to government to a radical opposition stance, focusing on identity politics, crime, immigration and Islam.
Sales figures for Le Journal du Dimanche have been kept closely guarded. It lost €1.5m through the 40-day strike and was already considered in difficulty before the takeover. Sales for the first issue under the new regime in August were reported by Le Figaro as about 61,000 – considered respectable and put down to an element of curiosity. The satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reported this week that sales were down to about 49,000 but this figure was not confirmed.
La Tribune Dimanche could win over readers feeling orphaned by the radical transformation of the Journal du Dimanche. Indeed, La Tribune Dimanche’s editorial director, Bruno Jeudy, left the weekly magazine Paris Match, another recent addition to Bolloré’s stable, after contesting a frontpage dedicated to an ultra-reactionary Catholic cardinal.
The new Sunday paper, which hopes to break even within two years, is a reinvention of La Tribune, which was founded in 1985 as a financial daily before shrinking to a Friday edition, then going fully digital in 2020. It never previously had a Sunday edition. The new paper enters a crowded Sunday market where leading regional titles such as Ouest-France have a large readership, as well as the sports paper L’Équipe and the paper, Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France.
Tortora had just finished a tour of France, meeting readers in bistros and bars from Toulouse to Saint Malo. “We found there’s a demand for a paper whose tone is calm and not anxiety inducing, which is not an opinion paper, which is not courting voters, doesn’t play on fears and is sincere and independent. On a Sunday, French people eat with family and friends, they don’t want us to divide the nation. The issue of independence was mentioned a lot. There is a mistrust in France towards the political class and the media. We were engaging with readers and defending our profession.”
Soazig Quéméner, the paper’s editor, said: “Our aim is to produce journalism on a Sunday which is still being talked about on Monday, to set the agenda for the week.”
At the heart of the new battle for Sunday readership is the long tradition of rich French industrialists buying newspapers in France. La Tribune Dimanche gained a new shareholder this year, the Marseille shipping billionare, Rodolphe Saadé, who is one of France’s richest men. His global container shipping company, CMA CGM, was founded by his father in Marseille with one ship after leaving Lebanon during the civil war. It is now the third-largest container line in the world, boosted by the super-profits of the post-lockdown boom. Saadé is Marseille’s richest man and has begun branching into media, acquiring the Marseille paper La Provence and the regional Corse Matin. He has so far been seen as a non-interventionist figure in the newspapers and is yet to visit La Tribune Dimanche’s Paris offices.
But it was Saadé’s presence at King Charles’s opulent state banquet at the Palace of Versailles last month that showed how owning a newspaper is a key part of status in the French establishment. Also seated at the 60-metre table for the king, were other billionaire media owners: Bernard Arnault, owner of the luxury goods group LVMH and one of the world’s richest men, who owns the financial daily Les Echos as well as the daily Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France, and the telecoms figure, Xavier Niel, a shareholder in Le Monde group.
Billionaires do not invest in French newspapers for a strong return on their money, as most are loss-making, said Nicolas Kaciaf, a media sociologist at Sciences Po Lille university. Instead acquiring newspapers could be seen as a form of prestige or leverage. “Owning a media when you become one of the biggest fortunes in France is a bit like an entry ticket to a club – it’s like entering the establishment and saying we’re not just rich, we belong to this world of influential personalities,” he said.
But Bolloré is seen as bucking this tradition of billionaires who stay relatively close to those in power. Although Bolloré told a senate hearing last year that his interest in media “is not political, not ideological, it’s purely economic”, the flagship parts of his growing empire, CNews TV, Europe 1 radio and Le Journal du Dimanche, are seen as being overhauled to focus on opinion and identity politics.
Alexis Lévrier, a media historian at the University of Rheims, said: “It’s clear in his media that his aim is a culture war, an ideological battle … it’s more a cultural, religious and political crusade to defend a Catholic France which would close its borders and turn in on itself.” He said it was the first time an industrialist had pushed against the president and power in place.
When France launched a consultation this week on the future of the media, there were demands from journalists’ unions to address media ownership and press freedom as well as the protection of journalists and sources. Lévrier said he hoped it would not simply lead once again to “lots of grand speeches and accolades on the freedom of the press, but nothing concrete at all”.
