The economic newspaper La Tribune, recently bought by the CMA-CGM shipowner of billionaire Rodolphe Saadé, will launch a general Sunday edition on October 8, announced its president, Jean-Christophe Tortora, Sunday at Le Figaro. La Tribune Sunday will be led by journalist Bruno Jeudy. It will compete with the two other national generalist Sunday newspapers, Le Journal du Dimanche (now run by far-right journalist Geoffroy Lejeune) and the Sunday edition of the daily Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui en France.
The fourth national newspaper to be published on Sundays in France is the sports daily L’Équipe. “We want to be the Sunday daily, without political color, which brings together all French people,” said Jean-Christophe Tortora. Created in 1985, La Tribune is now an exclusively digital weekday newspaper, after having abandoned its daily paper format in 2012, then weekly in 2020.
This announcement comes as the JDD experienced a historic 40-day strike between the end of June and the beginning of August after the announcement of the arrival of Lejeune at its head. Many have seen behind this appointment the hand of billionaire Vincent Bolloré, whose Vivendi group is in the process of swallowing Lagardère, owner of the JDD. Worried that the title will take a sharp turn to the right, many journalists have decided to leave.
According to Mr. Tortora, the La Tribune Dimanche project dates back several months and was not set up to compete with the JDD. “I am not taking advantage of a market opportunity linked to the situation at the JDD, because the discussions around our Sunday daily project were initiated with Rodolphe Saadé as early as February”, he assured.
This launch is further proof of Rodolphe Saadé’s ambitions in the media sector, where he is very active. Based in Marseilles, the powerful shipowner CMA-CGM, which he heads, took control of La Tribune at the end of May via the takeover of the HIMA group of Jean-Christophe Tortora.
In October, CMA-CGM, which recorded a record net profit of more than 23 billion euros in 2022, had already become the owner of the La Provence group (the regional daily newspapers La Provence and Corse Matin). He then invited himself, at the end of 2022, to the capital of the audiovisual group M6, then, at the beginning of April, to that of the online video media Brut.
