As Le Monde turns

PARIS – Sitting at a big rectangular table in a room decorated with an iconic Andy Warhol portrait of Yves Saint-Laurent, Le Monde editors “felt like being in a dentist chair.”

At least, that’s how one of them describes the mood five years ago when the top three editors of France’s most influential daily were regularly called in and grilled by their paper’s new owners.

The contentious tone of these monthly meetings, even the fact that they took place, help explain why Le Monde is looking for its sixth top editor in five years.

The apparent state of permanent crisis in part reflects turmoil within a famously independent newsroom, which has a difficult relationship with the unusual trio of shareholders who bailed Le Monde out in 2010. The bigger story is of the anxieties and misunderstandings about how the storied institution is struggling to adapt to new economic and political realities.

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Last month at Le Monde’s modern headquarters in the 13^th arrondissement, the editorial staff rejected the latest candidate the shareholders put forward to lead the newsroom. The paper’s bylaws give journalists a say over who their boss will be. The candidate under consideration was Jerome Fenoglio, 46, who became Le Monde’s editorial director (number two in the pecking order) a year ago. He only garnered 55 percent of the vote, short of the 60 percent needed to be confirmed.

No one questioned his professional credentials. “And no one thought he wouldn’t make it,” says Alain Beuve Mery, an arts writer who chairs the reporters’ association and represents the staff to management. Fenoglio has spent almost 25 years at Le Monde, and worked three years as editor of online operations before taking over the newsroom’s daily management.

The first reason he failed to get the journalists’ nod, according to several editors and reporters, grows out of the newsroom’s deep mistrust of the paper’s shareholding trio. Fenoglio was a last-minute, compromise choice. He wasn’t among the three internal candidates who raised their hands during the formal recruitment process initiated — and then ditched — by the owners.

Some of the staff was also scared off, journalists at Le Monde say, by Fenoglio’s insistence on accelerating the transition from print to online. Even though the paper has broadened its digital footprint of late, its print and web operations remain distinct, to the point that the online edition at times bears little resemblance to the newspaper.

The existential malaise can be dated precisely back to 2010. Saddled with debt and unable to finance its plans for development, the paper had to bring in proper shareholders, and the newsroom had to surrender the majority control it had exercised since Le Monde’s founding at the end of World War II.

It was a governing structure it got at birth: The staff owned most of the shares but didn’t fork over money to cover investments or losses. Over the years, the French bank BNP, the Publicis group and the media conglomerate Lagardere, among others, were brought in as minority shareholders. At times the paper’s creditors were asked, or forced, to convert their loans into shares. Le Monde’s power and influence was such that no one ever bickered over the terms. Private shareholders remained a minority and never dared ask for anything more than the privilege of joining the ever-expanding club of Le Monde benefactors.

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That changed five years ago when Le Monde’s financial crisis proved too deep to be addressed with the usual tricks. Le Monde had to take on real shareholders, who would behave like owners. The new trio invested in Le Monde for a mixture of mostly political or personal reasons. They now look ill-equiped to steer  a newspaper fighting for its life in the digital era.

Theirs was an unlikely trio from the start. Pierre Bergé, 84, the long-time partner of Yves Saint Laurent, was the driving force behind the corporate empire built over the years around the Saint Laurent brand. Xavier Niel, 47, is the billionaire founder and controlling owner of telecoms group Iliad. And Matthieu Pigasse, 47, chief executive of Lazard’s French operations, recently became the head of global mergers & acquisitions at the US-based investment bank.

Matthieu Pigasse, Pierre Bergé, and Xavier Niel

Bergé chairs Le Monde’s supervisory board. The board’s meetings, as well as those between the shareholders and Le Monde’s top editors, take place in his Warhol-decorated office at the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent foundation on Avenue Marceau in the center of Paris, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower.

The trio bailed out Le Monde to the tune of €100 million, acquired 60 percent of the share capital, promised to invest in its future, and appointed their own man, Louis Dreyfus, as the newspaper’s chief executive. Dreyfus didn’t make himself available for a requested interview.

In other words, they behaved like shareholders do the world over. But they also accepted that the staff would keep a say in the appointment of the newspaper’s top editor — called le directeur in the old Le Monde lingo.

That’s when the misunderstandings started about the job description of the director and the nature of the newsroom’s powers.

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Ever since its early days, Le Monde’s director — always a journalist — has held a peculiar position in French society. In a country that in some respects lacks proper checks and balances, Le Monde was seen as an institution speaking truth to power. Its center-left editorial line exasperated conservative and socialist governments alike: the former because of Le Monde’s opposition, the latter because they found its support too distant. The directors’ regular lunches with French presidents were considered summits of equals.

From time to time, rarely more than once or twice a year, the director weighed in on (really) important matters with long and solemn editorial pieces, by tradition simply and immodestly initialed. Le Monde’s directors kept their media presence rare, didn’t go on television talk shows, and stayed away from the bling of the Parisian dinner circuit. There was pride and happiness in distance and discretion.

Le directeur was Le Monde’s chairman and its CEO, to whom the paper’s management duly reported. At its apex in the early ’80s, the paper’s paid circulation topped 450,000 copies. It is now at less than 300,000 and boasts 80,000 online subscribers.

Being a directeur today has nothing to do with what it was 20 years ago

The editor-as-top-man is no more. “Being a directeur today has nothing to do with what it was 20 years ago,” says Gilles Van Kote, who became the paper’s interim boss after the previous director, Natalie Nougayrède, resigned a year ago.

Dreyfus is now the one whose name comes first on the masthead: He’s both chairman of the two-person management board (along with the director) and publication director, the person deemed legally responsible for all the newspaper’s content.

The paper’s old guard resents the presence of Dreyfus, a non-journalist, atop the paper’s masthead with de facto veto power over hiring in the newsroom and evidently keen to represent Le Monde in French power circles.

Nougayrède, who now is a columnist at the Guardian, recently sent a letter to the staff reflecting on the reasons for her ouster and denouncing the “weakening of the director’s post.” Editorial independence, she observed, cannot be guaranteed by a representative of shareholders.

In the last five years, Le Monde’s staff has been left to behave “like those impoverished aristocrats who have to sell the family castle but still think they are the masters of the domain,” says the editor of one of the paper’s main sections.

As for choosing the director, some in the staff seem to “have forgotten that since then we don’t elect the editor, but we only have the right to oppose someone we wouldn’t like,” says Alain Frachon, the paper’s foreign affairs columnist and a former editorial director.

Even when it had confirmed the choice of a director, the newsroom has had trouble keeping them in the job. Eric Fottorino, who was running the paper when it was sold to the new owners, resigned acrimoniously a few months later, partly pushed out by a staff petition protesting one of his editorials. His successor Erik Izraelewicz died in office from a heart attack in November 2012.

Nougayrède, who was the paper’s diplomatic correspondent and succeeded him, resigned 11 months into the job after her style of management — of which she had no experience before being appointed — sparked a backlash from the newsroom. Finally Van Kote, the interim director, resigned last month after the vote against Fenoglio. Van Kote had also raised his hand to take on the job permanently but was one of the three who the owners couldn’t agree on.

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In turn, journalists at Le Monde say the three owners are more dysfunctional than the newsroom.

The tacit understanding among the trio is that they must agree on nominations. But they plainly had different agendas when they invested in Le Monde.

Pierre Bergé seems most interested in restoring the paper’s former glory and forcing it to toe his socialist left politics. He takes to social media to decry the paper’s coverage of virtually anything, from long-deceased socialist president François Mitterrand to his writer-friends in the book section.

Lazard’s Matthieu Pigasse, who has never hidden that he might want to have a political career, was suspected to want to throw the paper’s support behind Dominique Strauss-Kahn, back when the former IMF director was considered as a favorite presidential Socialist contender for the 2012 election. Strauss Kahn’s sex life and legal troubles killed those ambitions.

As for Niel, one of France’s most successful, up-by-the-bootstrap entrepreneurs, he is said to have sought the type of Parisian respectability that long eluded him. He is also the richest of the three: His 55 percent holding in Iliad is worth almost €7 billion at current market prices. Bergé, Niel and Pigasse didn’t reply to requests for an interview.

Very often they don’t like what’s in the paper, but I’ve never seen outright intervention in editorial matters

“Very often they don’t like what’s in the paper, but I’ve never seen outright intervention in editorial matters,” says Vincent Giret, a former Nougayrede deputy. “Bergé may be quick on the tweet, but it doesn’t really impact the way the newsroom works.”

Another senior editor says Dreyfus and the shareholders regularly call reporters directly by phone. Ostensibly to shoot the breeze, but even that can look like an unhealthy habit, opening the flank to accusations they might want to shape the paper’s coverage .

In meetings with the paper’s editors over the years, the owners have played to type. According to several participants, Bergé tends to criticize the content. Pigasse pretends he doesn’t read or like Le Monde because he prefers reading the New York Times. And Niel is more focused on the business side of the operation after devoting the first months to cleaning up the accounts and cutting costs.

They found it easy to appoint Dreyfus, a long-time associate of Pigasse, to manage Le Monde. Maybe they can’t agree on an editor because, as Sylvie Kauffmann, a former editorial director, says, “They have never come up with a real job description for the post. Willing to list the qualities requested from the candidates, but reluctant to be specific about the director’s powers in the new system of governance.”

Almost as if by miracle, throughout its crises Le Monde has managed to broaden its coverage and improve its business. Long exclusively focused on “serious” matters such as politics or world affairs, it now publishes long-form reporting and serious investigative pieces, on anything from sport to pop culture. It has covered better French social problems from life in the troubled housing projects in the banlieues (suburbs) to unemployment. After the new owners took over, they agreed on the launch of a long overdue business section (disclosure: I was an economics columnist for them in 2013 and 2014). The paper’s weekend magazine has developed a serious following.

Among the staff, there’s broad consensus that the shareholders kept their financial end of the bargain. They spent the money they’d pledged to clean up the books, help Le Monde shed its money-losing print operation, and develop its online presence. According to the 2014 results it published in February, it would have balanced its books last year if the write-off on the print operation isn’t included, and might turn an operational profit this year.

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Le Monde’s new ownership structure is part of a trend. Every single one of France’s major dailies and weeklies is now in the hands of an oligarch without previous media experience. Le Monde’s trio has since acquired Le Nouvel Observateur, a left-leaning weekly. Patrick Drahi, the French cable and telecoms mogul, recently bought the leftist daily Liberation and L’Express, once France’s most influential weekly. François Pinault, the billionaire owner of the Kering/Gucci group, owns Le Point. And his long-time rival Bernard Arnault, head of  luxury empire LVMH, acquired business daily Les Echos from the Financial Times in 2007.

Last week, Arnault entered exclusive negotiations to buy Le Parisien, a French popular daily, from its founding family. That promises interesting dinner-table conversations with Niel, the partner of Arnault’s daughter Delphine.

For all those buyers, newspapers and magazines are neither business nor pleasure. In a country where the state has more fingers than there are pies in the economy, owning a newspaper that’s considered influential — even if that influence is waning — is seen as an insurance policy against government hostility. They don’t even need to meddle in their own papers’ editorial affairs: They’re happy enough if politicians think they could if they wanted to.

Le Monde is rudderless, but last week the staff and the paper’s backers did manage to come to an uneasy truce, agreeing on a process to select someone for the top job. After the three shareholders pick their candidate from those who raise their hand, the next staff vote will take place June 30. Fenoglio might run again, but he has kept his plans to himself for now. The owners are clear on the exceptional qualities, both human and professional, the director should have. They just haven’t come up with a proper job description.