The death of Roland Faure, co-founder of France Info, “a visionary with thirty years in advance”

With his enthusiasm and his diplomacy, Roland Faure will have participated in the transformations of journalism in the XXe century. The journalist died on Saturday, February 25, at the age of 96, in Paris, from a long illness. Son of a couple of pharmacists, he was born on October 10, 1926 in Montélimar, in the Drôme, where he grew up, before living his adolescence at the boarding school of L’Enclos Saint-François, in Montpellier, and studying law. at the University of Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône).

Self-taught, he began his career in journalism in 1947 at Southern-France in Marseille, and received the prize for the best young journalist in France in 1950, at the age of 24. Passionate about international news and major reporting, he founded and directed the French Journal of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro in 1952 and 1953. The following year, he joined the newspaper Dawn as editor, then was successively head of the diplomatic service in 1959, editor-in-chief in 1962, before being director of the daily from 1968.

Ten years later, Roland Faure slams the door of the newspaper after it was bought by press boss Robert Hersant. After a few months of crossing the desert, the president of Radio France, Jacqueline Baudrier, offered him the direction of information for the public radio group in 1979. He accepted, remained there for two years, and resigned on the arrival of François Mitterrand in power.

Project Creator

Beyond his career as a reporter, Robert Faure is an entrepreneur who likes to develop projects. parallel to Dawn then at Radio France, he directed for more than thirty years the weekly All the news from Versailleswhich he transformed into a media group by founding the local radio station Canal Versailles Stéréo in 1982.

In December 1986, he succeeded Jean-Noël Jeanneney as CEO of Radio France. Particularly inspired by the local New York radio station 1010 WINS, journalists Roland Faure and Jérôme Bellay then imagine together the first continuous news radio station in Europe to provide general news, but also economic and sports news at all times. , cultural.

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If Roland Faure works to convince in particular Jacques Chirac, then Prime Minister of cohabitation, it is Jérôme Bellay who puts the project in music, by inventing his rhythmic antenna. France Info is launched on 1er June 1987, not without internal criticism. “The famous slogan”Give me 20 minutes and I’ll give you the world” can be revised in “Seven minutes will be enough to pack the peelings” »then mocks a leaflet from the National Union of Journalists, recalled journalist Thomas Snégaroff in 2017.

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