The website's founder, Arianna Huffington, is slated to be in the French capital on Monday to inaugurate the site under the brand "Le Huffington Post," the group said in a statement. For Ms. Sinclair, who not so long ago looked as if she might be the next first lady of France, the move represents a return to her journalism roots.
The website's success will depend largely on her ability to attract high-profile contributors to the site. To this end, Ms. Sinclair has already been contacting well-known personalities in France to gauge their interest, said a person familiar with the project.
Ms. Sinclair, who is a well-known television and print journalist in France, will head a team of around eight journalists housed in the headquarters of French newspaper Le Monde. The site is a joint venture between Le Monde, the Huffington Post's owner AOL Inc., and Lazard investment banker Matthieu Pigasse's holding company, Les Nouvelles Editions Indépendantes.
France is not the Huffington Post's only foreign-language project. In December Promotora de Informaciones SA, Spain's largest media group by sales, said its flagship newspaper, El Pais, will join AOL to launch a Spanish-language version of the Huffington Post.
But reproducing the success of the U.S. Huffington Post site in French will be a challenge, analysts say. So far, news and commentary websites have struggled to generate steady profits in France, hampered in part by weaker ad revenues than their English or U.S. counterparts and a smaller online following.
France has fewer news publications than its English-speaking counterparts, making aggregating original French content harder. The Huffington Post brand will also have to work hard to carve out a political niche, as it has done in the U.S.
Other American online news brands have already blazed the French-language trail. Slate.fr, which is 15% owned by the Washington Post Co., generated €1.3 million ($1.66 million) in 2011 and expects to turn a profit in 2012, says its managing director, Eric Leser. Part of the reason for its growing revenue is that French print magazines tend to put breaking news online as opposed to trying to create a digital magazine, he says. "This leaves a gap in the market," Mr. Leser says.
Le Huffington Post will have to go up against five established French online-only news sites, the largest of which is Rue 89, which attracted 1.845 million unique users in November, according to Mediametrie, a company which measures online audience.
For Ms. Sinclair the new job will mark a fresh challenge in journalism after a year in which her husband featured as a major international news story following his spectacular arrest and imprisonment in New York on charges of attempted rape of a hotel maid. The criminal case against him was subsequently dismissed after New York prosecutors have said they couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt it was an attack, and he and his wife moved back to France. U.S. lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn have said it was consensual.
Between 1984 and 1997 Ms. Sinclair gained prominence in France as the TV anchor of a popular weekly political show called 7/7. In 1997, when her husband became the French finance minister, she quit her job to avoid any conflicts of interest, and went to work in radio. When Mr. Strauss-Kahn moved to the U.S. as IMF director, Ms. Sinclair wrote articles for a French Sunday newspaper and also penned a blog called, "Two or three things seen from America."
read more: Olympus Wealth Management
No comments:
Post a Comment