the JDD Magazine will be a monthly magazine, sold with the weekly, one Sunday a month. It is not a supplement, as there is for other newspapers. It’s a magazine in its own right since it will then remain on newsstands all month long. Its particularity is its common thread: the book, literature. A subject already covered in the JDD but perhaps not up to the important place it occupies in our time.
“The book will be at the heart of our project”
“The book is both something that is very close to us, that we have rediscovered recently, which is important from a journalistic point of view. We see a lot of shifts in society, strong phenomena or emerging which often come to crystallize in a book”, explains at the microphone of Europe 1 Stéphane Albouy, editorial director of the JDD. “The best recent example was The Gravediggers by Victor Castanet on what is happening in nursing homes. And then the book is also a cultural asset that has the particularity of awakening something both a little elitist in the imagination and at the same time of being shared by the greatest number. So here it is, for all these reasons, we thought that the book was going to be at the heart of our project”, he continues.
Three distinct parts
What will that actually look like? A magazine between 80 and 100 pages which is structured in three parts. The first: the book. That is to say what writers and authors say about our society, our time. In this first issue for example, on the occasion of the American elections, the midterms, Douglas Kennedy deciphers what is happening in society. And then, in another genre, there will be an unpublished news every month. The first to take up the pen was Edouard Philippe, who wrote about the Notre-Dame fire. The second part is devoted to the investigation. This part which will focus in particular on books of journalistic investigations.
Art of living and lifestyle pages
Finally, the third and last part will focus on beauty with pages on the art of living, lifestyle, but always with literature as a backdrop. Example for the first issue: fashion pages photographed in London in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf. So much for the content of this new magazine. This magazine arrives in a tense context in the world of the written press, in particular because of the price of paper which has soared. So isn’t it paradoxical to want to launch a new magazine?
Another way of existing for the JDD
“There was the desire to say precisely ‘indeed, it is difficult at the moment, but there is room and there is room to propose something’. But it had to be something original. It was the prerequisite. If we started, it was because we had found a concept in which we believed. And then for the JDDthere is a desire to say that this brand, which is so special, can have another way of existing and can continue throughout the month in newsstands”, explains Stéphane Albouy in Culture Media. the JDD Magazine is therefore on newsstands from this Sunday.
If you buy the JDD, you are obliged to buy the magazine for three euros. It’s 60 cents more than the usual price of the newspaper. Otherwise, the magazine will remain available on newsstands all month, only at 4.90 euros.