1. Why did Les Echos decide to change its traditional formula?

Jacques Barraux:
The readership of our newspaper was highly affected by the “Internet bubble”. Traditionally, our audience was mostly made up of professionals from the world of finance. However, starting in late 1997, all of a sudden non-expert readers started buying Les Echos to learn about the stock market. These new readers disappeared at the end of the bubble. In the meantime, the crisis amongst general interest newspapers became evident. That is when we decided that there was room for us in the market, and that we needed to broaden the subjects we cover, in order to gain a stable increase in readership.

2. Does the change in content put you in direct competition with the general interest newspapers in France; did the increase in subjects covered affect the structure and the style of the newspaper?

Jacques Barraux:
We do not intend to be an alternative to general interest newspapers, in fact our main subject areas still remain economics and finance. First of all we expanded our coverage to areas that are related to our traditional topics. For example, our Section 1, dedicated to macroeconomics, covers now national and international news, but always from a financial/economic perspective. Additionally, we organized the newspaper in sections, and assigned each section to a team of journalists; every team has an editor in chief and a deputy who are responsible for accuracy. The section “Companies & Markets, is devoted to extensive reporting on financial and stock market news, supplemented by in-depth market analysis. Starting in 2003 we added other sections that cover industry, immigration, demography, culture, leisure etc. Some of the subjects treated in our columns and sections are suggested by readers themselves, with whom we keep in contact daily via our website. This is just one example of our efforts to achieve full integration between lesechos.fr and Les Echos in print. I strongly believe this is the correct path to follow in the future, and it is for this reason that Les Echos has a single newsroom, where journalists belonging to the different teams write for both platforms; print and online. We simplified the content of our articles in order to appeal to a wider not-expert audience. The concepts we now take for granted as being part of the readers’ knowledge base are fewer in number, and the style of the articles is more reader friendly.

3. When you decided to adopt the new formula you made a choice that is unusual nowadays in the newspaper industry: you hired twenty new journalists. Have you maintained this enlarged newsroom? Is your staff exclusively made of specialized journalists? What about your policy on hiring young journalists who are just starting out?

Jacques Barraux: We kept our enlarged newsroom; actually the number of our journalists is now 160, more than in 2003. Among them there are, evidently, a few experts, but in general we believe that a journalist should be able to write about diverse topics. That is why we encourage our staff to change section every three years; it is also a means to keep motivation high in the newsroom. Our staffing policy in this respect has not changed. In fact when we needed to cover the new topics well and thus we hired good professionals, specialized in the different areas. Nevertheless, I personally prefer dealing with young journalists, to be trained internally. It is for this reason that every summer Les Echos takes in about 15 interns. The choice among the more than 150 applications a year is made directly by the different teams, and the students are expected to have a professional approach to the work they are assigned, this is why we choose to pay them. At the moment, at least 7 of our journalists are former interns.

4. What are the results of your new formula in terms of circulation?

Jacques Barraux:
Les Echos sells about 140000 copies a day, and in the first trimester of 2006 our circulation grew by 7%.

Source: Interview with Editor in Chief Jacques Barraux.