France’s evening newspaper Le Monde has unveiled an initiative designed to broaden both its perspective and its reach. Le Monde Académie, launched Wednesday, is a two-part competition and training programme that will offer 68 aspiring journalists from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to be mentored by the newspaper's staff and published within its pages. It will culminate a year from now, with three ambitious young talents receiving a rare prize: jobs within one of France’s best-respected media companies.

“Me, a journalist?” reads an advertisement featuring a girl with asymmetrically cut hair, introduced in the caption as Léa, a 24-year-old educator from Montréal. The ad campaign, released in Thursday's newspaper with a front-page editorial from the publication's director Erik Izraelewicz, emphasizes that budding journalists aged between 18 and 25 from across the French-speaking world are invited to apply, regardless of their level of academic attainment. With the Monde académie, the 68-year-old daily is seeking new voices from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, which will attract new eyes to a publication that has traditionally been written by and for an educated elite.

Today, national French daily newspaper Le Monde launched a new format for its website Le Monde.fr.

The redesigned layout features a more visible header, with a centered logo and tabs for each section of the website, according to an email alert from Gorkana. Videos and other visual media are also more prominent under the new design.

The new website also includes a live-chat feature, in which users can ask journalists about news articles and receive answers almost immediately, as well as an alert window for news updates.

“Le Monde innovates with a live platform present on all website pages, offering coverage of various events under a chat format,” the email said. “Online users will have the possibility to question the editorial staff in real time.

The email said that the chat option is meant to increase interaction between Le Monde staff and online users, as well as demonstrate the recent integration of the print and online versions of the daily.

“The new design takes into account the publication’s strategic choice to unite its online and print editorial teams, which took effect last September with the creation of a political newsroom,” the email said.

Le Huffington Post, a French edition of AOL's popular news, blogging and aggregation site, The Huffington Post, was launched today in collaboration with Le Monde and Les Nouvelles Editions Independantes.

At a press conference held at Le Monde's headquarters in Paris this morning, Arianna Huffington, president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, promised that the new edition would offer the HuffPo's trademark mix of original reporting, aggregation, bloggers and commentators.

However, Huffington stated that although the "architecture" of Le Huffington Post would be imported, the site would be "rooted in French culture" and that it was "absolutely essential" that the local journalists set the agenda.

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Samuel Laurent, political journalist at LeMonde.fr talked about real-time fact checking today at "Les Nouvelles Pratiques du Journalisme" conference, hosted by the Ecole de Journalisme de Sciences Po, Paris, in collaboration with the Columbia Journalism School.

Fact-checking in real time - verifying the truth of statements made by politicians and public figures in real time during press conferences or public appearances - is becoming an important part of political communication nowadays, says Laurent.

The fact-checking in France, even if it's not completely developed, is growing. And it fits in with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of news watchdogging.

Real-time fact-checking has to be extremely fast to be effective. "You have to react immediately," Laurent says, "because a fact-check published one week after the statement doesn't have the same impact".

It's an ambitious job: it requires speed but, at the same time, enough knowledge to be able to contextualise statements. It demands the ability to provide the right link at the right moment. At lemonde.fr, a team of four journalists works on a real-time fact checking event: one's writing, one is dedicated to the community management and the other two to the contextualisation.