Le Monde has reached a new milestone in its history. Thursday, April 7, sees the birth of Le Monde in English, a digital edition that offers English-speaking readers translated versions of many of the articles published each day on Le Monde.fr. There are two central objectives with this project. The first is to offer a French and European vision of current events to the English-speaking world. The second is to provide a new platform to showcase the work of Le Monde's editorial staff and, in so doing, to broaden the range of our subscribers.
The idea of developing a digital version of Le Monde in English was first raised a few years ago. But another option was chosen at the time: to become more established in the French-speaking world and position Le Monde as a reference media. This is how Le Monde Afrique was launched in early 2015 and it has continued to develop ever since. This particular editorial effort toward the French-speaking world remains high on Le Monde's agenda. Two new correspondent positions in Brussels and Montreal will be created in coming months.
But as early as February 2015, two articles translated into English were also published on Le Monde.fr, on the occasion of the release of "SwissLeaks," an international investigation undertaken by Le Monde into an international tax evasion scheme set up by the Swiss subsidiary of the HSBC bank.
Following this, a varied selection of editorial content in English started to appear on Le Monde's website: a video about the first seasons of the Game of Thrones series, a newspaper editorial warning about the effects of Brexit, entitled "Britain beware, Brexit could be your Waterloo!," an appeal by Le Monde's journalists and prominent personalities to guarantee the editorial independence of the newsroom by granting it right of approval in the event of a change in the controlling shareholder of the publishing company...
Change of pace
There was a dramatic change of pace in Le Monde's English ambitions on January 8, 2022. Gilles Paris, who has been head of the paper's international department and Washington correspondent from 2014 to 2021, wrote the first of his new columns called "The French Test." Appearing daily from Monday to Saturday, this English language column untangles the complicated world of French politics in the build-up to the presidential election. At the same time, the Le Monde in English project was starting to take shape. A team was put together to prepare for the launch of the English language site before the first round of the election.
The team is composed of eight journalists, six at Le Monde's Paris office and two at the newspaper's Los Angeles office. Together, they are responsible for selecting articles for translation, editing the translated versions and managing the English home page of the site. The translation is done by international agencies, with the help of an artificial intelligence tool. The selection and editing of the articles is done by native English-speaking journalists.
Le Monde in English will not publish original content. It will present the translated versions of a large selection of articles proposed by Le Monde, as well as some agency wires, in order to stay up-to-date with the news. All of Le Monde's popular sections and themes will feature in the project, with the exception of a few specific subjects that are too "French." The publication of the English version of articles will naturally be delayed until the original French version has been translated and edited.
This project will enable extensive editorial content produced daily by Le Monde's editorial staff of about 500 journalists to reach new audiences, potentially interested in the "singular, independent and balanced view" it takes on major international and social issues, the climate crisis and geopolitics, in the words of Le Monde's director, Jérôme Fenoglio. The challenge is an ambitious one: to carve out a place for Le Monde in an English-speaking world where there is no shortage of quality media.
A newsletter featuring a selection of articles from Le Monde in English will be published every day, with three different delivery times to allow readers in each geographical zone (Americas, Europe-Africa, Asia-Oceania) to receive it in the morning. Le Monde in English will offer free access to some articles, but the entire range will only be available by subscription, with rates varying according to geographical zones. Subscribers to the Intégrale, Famille or print edition of Le Monde have automatic access as part of their subscription.
The objective is also commercial, as Le Monde has set itself the goal of reaching one million subscribers (all media combined) by 2025. "With this investment, our ambition is to extend the growth of our digital subscriber portfolio and to ensure that our international audience will eventually reach nearly a quarter of all our subscribers," explains Louis Dreyfus, chairman of Le Monde's board of directors. Le Monde passed the half-million subscriber mark for the first time in its history in December 2021.