Hervé Poirier, former editor-in-chief of "Science et Vie" and Mathilde Fontez, former deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine, return to Philippe Vandel's microphone, Wednesday on Europe 1, on the showdown that began between the journalists of the famous scientific monthly and the Reworld Media group.
INTERVIEW
Century-old magazine, serious and respected,
Science et Vie
, the best-selling monthly in France, has just lost almost all of its editorial staff.
The news fell on Tuesday like a thunderclap: nine journalists (five incumbents and four freelancers) have left since the beginning of the month, exasperated by the methods of their management and their owner, the Reworld Media group.
They accuse him of endangering the independence of the magazine, but also of impoverishing its quality.
"There are no longer the means at
Science et Vie
to do journalism at the height of what readers require", declared Wednesday at
Culture Médias
microphone.
, on Europe 1, Mathilde Fontez, former deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine, whom she left for her part two months ago.
To understand this situation, we have to go back a year and a half.
In August 2019: Reworld Media bought the French subsidiary of the Mondadori group, i.e. around thirty magazines, most of which are known:
Auto Plus
,
Biba
,
Grazia
and
Science et Vie
, therefore.
Science et Vie
is a profitable magazine, circulated in 180,000 copies, and whose editorial staff then had around twenty journalists.
At the time, Reworld Media undertook new recruitments and the maintenance of a certain journalistic quality.
"The
Science et Vie model
does not work on advertising. It is the readers who pay and we know them. They demand demanding journalism, investigation, investigation, monitoring of a sector over several years, etc. It is also science that requires this quality of in-depth study, ”explains Mathilde Fontez.
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Takeover of the website
“The change in attitude of Reworld media took place in the summer of 2020. At that time, it was announced, on the one hand, that we would not have the means of replacement that we were asking for. And on the other hand, there was a takeover of Reworld Media on the Internet site of
Science et Vie
, which was done until then by the journalists of the drafting ", continues the former deputy editor-in-chief.
From then on, the leaders no longer talk about information, articles or surveys;
the word used is "content".
The articles are no longer written and checked by specialist journalists, but by employees trained in a kind of internal academy, the Reworld Content Factory, and who work for several of the group's magazine sites.
They are therefore not necessarily specialized in science.
"They are still journalists, but who are no longer in internal writing. They are freelancers, of whom we can fear that the situation will deteriorate in the coming months", explains, also at the microphone of
Culture Médias
, Hervé Poirier, ex- managing editor, who left last September after 21 years in the house.
The disappearance of a "collective spirit"
"We have always seen this newspaper as an editorial staff, it is a place where people build a collective spirit. The disappearance of this place of exchange, with this atomization where there are only self- entrepreneurs everywhere who work in outsourcing, it is also the disappearance of a spirit, and the reader will end up feeling that the newspaper is filled by content rather than animated by a collective spirit ", he says. .
"By speaking of 'content', we necessarily lower the cost of production", points out Mathilde Fontez.
All the more so as for Hervé Poirier, "this content is no longer at the service of the reader's intelligence but serves advertising interests or the organization of trade fairs", which is one of Reworld Media's fields of activity.
In a statement, the Society of Journalists (SDJ) of
Science et Vie
estimated Tuesday that this wave of departures risked dealing "a fatal blow" to a magazine that has become in a century a staple of the French press.