The economic newspaper The galleryrecently acquired by billionaire Rodolphe Saadé’s shipowner CMA CGM, will launch a general-interest weekly on October 8, which will be published on Sundays, announced its president, Jean-Christophe Tortora, on Sunday August 20, At Figaro.
The Tribune on Sunday will be headed by journalist Bruno Jeudy and will compete with the two generalist national Sunday newspapers, THE Sunday newspaper (JDD) – now run by far-right journalist Geoffroy Lejeune – and the Sunday edition of the daily Le Parisien/Today in France. The fourth national newspaper to appear on Sundays in France is the sports daily The Team.
“We want to be the Sunday daily, without political color, which brings together all French people”, Mr. Tortora said. Created in 1985, The gallery is now a weekday daily which, after having abandoned its daily paper format in 2012, then weekly in 2020, now only appears on a digital platform.
Announcement against the background of the crisis at the “JDD”
This announcement is made as the JDD experienced a historic forty-day strike between the end of June and the beginning of August after the announcement of the arrival of Mr. Lejeune at its head, when the newspaper was about to be taken over by Vivendi, controlled by billionaire Vincent Bolloré. A large number of journalists, worried about the direction that the title could take, decided to leave the editorial staff of the weekly.
According to Mr. Tortora, the draft The Tribune on Sunday is several months old and has not been set up to compete with the JDD. “I am not taking advantage of a market opportunity linked to the situation at JDDbecause the discussions around our Sunday daily project were launched with Rodolphe Saadé in February”, he assured. This launch is further proof of Mr. Saadé’s ambitions in the media sector, where he is very active.
The powerful CMA CGM group, which he heads, took control of The gallery at the end of May by buying the Hima group from Mr. Tortora. In October, CMA CGM, which recorded a net profit of more than 23 billion euros in 2022, had already become the owner of the La Provence group (the regional daily newspapers Provence And Corsica Morning). He then entered, at the end of 2022, the capital of the audiovisual group M6, then, at the beginning of April, that of the online video media Brut.