Nougayrède is 46 years-old, speaks fluent English, and started her career in journalism as a freelancer for another national French daily, Libération, Radio France International and the BBC’s French service. She joined Le Monde in 1997 and has worked in Georgia, Azerbaidjan, Ukraine, Russia and Kosovo.

In 2005 she received the prestigious Albert Londres Prize and the French Diplomatic Press Prize for her coverage of the Beslan hostage crisis and the Chechen conflict. She has been Le Monde’s diplomatic correspondent since 2005.

Unusually for a new director, Nougayrède has never had management responsibilities. She was seen as an outsider in the contest to take the position freed by the sudden death of former director Erik Izraelewicz in November.

With almost 80 percent of the votes of the paper's general assembly, which consists of journalists from print and online versions of Le Monde, and of the magazine M, Nougayrède seems a popular choice. It will be interesting to see how the afternoon paper, which still has separate print and web operations, evolves under her leadership.

Google has extended a warning to France’s news publishers: quit trying to make us pay a tax on the snippets of your content displayed by Google News, or you will soon find yourselves un-Google-able. The word may sound like gobbledygook, but the danger is real: the exclusion of the country’s media from the search giant’s results is a worrisome prospect.

Google addressed its warning in the form of a letter to several French ministries earlier this month, AFP revealed yesterday. “I’m a bit surprised by the tone of this correspondence, which sounds like a threat,” replied Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti. “You don’t deal with a democratically-elected government by making threats.”

Two groups of France’s news publishers, who consider themselves insufficiently compensated for the traffic generated on Google News by bits of their own content, have been looking for a way to share in Google’s advertising revenues since the spring, according to Le Figaro.

Following its last highly controversial issue which featured cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed, satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has printed two editions this week, one "responsible" and one "irresponsible." Last week’s cartoons mocked the explosive reaction to the film "The Innocence of Muslims" by parodying a popular French film, "Untouchables," and portrayed Muhammad in a series of poses, in one of which he is naked.

In addition to the standard issue, this week’s "responsible" edition of Charlie Hebdo contains no pictures and very little text – the clear message being that to be "responsible" is extremely limiting and does not actually mean doing real journalism. Aside from an editorial from Stéphane Charbonnier, or Charb, the weekly’s publisher, the paper only contains headlines and blank spaces. The ironic headlines include “Tunisia – all is well,” “Morocco – all is well,” “Egypt – all is well” and “Libya – all is well,” following by “Mali – all is going very well.” Others include “Prudence is the mother of safety” and “Do you know how to plant cabbages?”

Another week, another royal photo scandal. The Duchess of Cambridge is the latest member of the British royal family to be captured in a compromising position. Topless photos of the duchess on holiday in the south of France with her husband Prince William were splashed across the cover of the French edition of Closer.

The couple are said to be both saddened and angered by the gossip magazine’s decision to publish the photos (seemingly taken with a long-lens camera) and the palace has issues a strongly worded statement comparing the intrusion to the press’s harassment of the late Princess of Wales.

Responding to what she called a “disproportionate reaction” to the images, French Closer’s editor in chief Laurence Pieau insisted that there was “nothing shocking” about the photos, which she describes as a “joyous” celebration of an attractive young couple in love. Pieau then dismisses the complaints of the British press as hypocritical, as certain sections of it published naked photos of the third in line to the throne barely two weeks ago.