L’Equipe is currently France’s most-read paid-for national. It is second in total readership after freesheet 20 Minutes.

In the past, L’Equipe has tried a few strategies to boost its young readership, including a newspaper-making contest, special issues for the soccer World Cup, or health information programs for the youth.

Faced with a structural ageing of its readership though, L’Equipe is readying to launch a free, 8-page, online publication for young people. The goal is to be “the first sports newspaper readable online,” says Hellard.

L’Equipe Junior will have a five-person staff and be published on Wednesdays and Saturdays – two key days for children in France - at 3pm. "It will be interesting to see if the choice to respect a print-like design and the deadlines that come with it (the decision was tied to the available resources) will be effective for a readership already used to continuous news and watching sports updates on TV," says Aralynn McMane, Director of Young Readership at the World Association of Newspapers.

Positioned as ‘edutainment,’ L’Equipe Junior combines online characteristics with a print look and feel. The online articles will be presented in a print-like design, alongside L’Equipe’s traditional emphasis on sports pictures. But when the mouse cursor moves over an article, the content is blown up to make it readable.

Content will be geared to the young audience. Sports news will include traditional sports covered in the ‘adult’ version, as well as ‘fun’ sports. L’Equipe Junior will provide news about young athletes and rising stars.

L’Equipe Junior also enables a certain share of interactivity. A daily poll, quizzes, and a selection of sports-centered wallpapers engage the readers. Readers have the possibility to store and archive pictures, text and more, by clicking on a specially designed button. An option that can be used for educational purposes too, whether by students or teachers. Other built-in options include a glossary button and a Google-powered localization button.

L’Equipe Junior will also feature now-standard multimedia content, such as podcasts, videos and slideshows.

L’Equipe Junior hopes to make profit within three years, but Hellard emphasizes that the online paper’s benefits fit in the parent paper’s long-term strategy, namely to build a readership of young sports fans who will continue to read the paper when they get older.

If the readers are used to an online-only edition, does this not risk turning them away from the print version of L’Equipe? “The young are used to being linked with different media,” says Hellard. The launch is on Oct. 17, wait and see.

Source: Olivier Hellard, Marketing Director of L’Equipe