Le Monde looks to Washington (.com)
It's shaping up to be a turbulent year for France's heavyweight newspaper, Le Monde. In order of importance, here are the upcoming makeovers: an editorial redefinition and a major redesign. Although the paper's situation is grave, there's no point in rushing things, so the changes won't take place until September, but because cyberspace is a more flexible dimension, the virtual paper has just relaunched itself there. We've got horizontal top navigation with roll-down menus, which is practical, but the right-hand side is a mess of boxes with all kinds of coloured frames and the main content area feels squashed as a result. Navigation within the main body of the site uses headlines as links and story teasers as links and most are followed by an odd meta language rich in terms such as "Zoom", "Verbatim" and "Dossier". Overkill.
Compare this with the Washington Post, which relaunched its site just one month ago. In a welcome move, the WaPo got rid of its left navigation (homepage real estate is too valuable for that kind of thing these days) and moved to a top navigation bar, featuring drop-down menus for the sub pages. The background for this bar runs from black to light blue across the screen, suggesting a change of weight as one moves from left to right. Le Monde "borrows" this idea but for some bizarre reason switches to a cheap gold effect half-way through. Overall, the WaPo is uncluttered and clean, at least the top half is, but Le Monde appears dense and heavy throughout.
And all this is going on under the supervision of the paper's new Redacteur-en-Chef, Gerard Courtois, who took over from the hapless Edwy Plenel, who resigned in November. But regardless of who's in the editor's chair, the changes at Le Monde cannot disguise the fact that France's paper of record is losing readers, bleeding huge amounts of money and casting about for a new role.
Despite its imperious stance on everything from literature to politics to sport, the harsh fact of life is that Le Monde is now perceived as being more Parisian and elite than French and popular. Contrast its 360,000 daily circulation with the 800,000 of Ouest France, which is published in Rennes. The Ouest France blend of regional, national and international news is much more appealing to today's readers. Le Monde, on the other hand, has stodgy writing, a costly product, a Byzantine ownership structure, a shrinking revenue base, no viable business plan and now, a poorly redesigned website. Not very good news at all, mes amis. Note: If you would like to get an idea of the Le Monde line in hatred, le monde watch has some shocking stuff.
