Paris (AFP)
The new weekly La Croix will launch Friday, October 4 proposes to "explore" the world, "slow down", and especially reach new readers beyond the faithful of the daily.
"This is the most important change for La Croix since it became a morning newspaper in 1998," says the newspaper's director, Guillaume Goubert.
The launch of this new magazine, which replaces the Saturday-Sunday edition of the newspaper, has been prepared for almost three years; the failures of Ebdo then Really pushed La Croix to test and retest its formula with readers, shifting its output by several months.
Sold 3,80 euros in newsstands, independently of the daily newspaper, the magazine of 68 pages in tabloid format differs with its illustration in One of the weekly supplements of Echos, the World, Figaro, L'Humanité or Parisian.
"We were pushed to our limits by our groups of readers," says Anne Ponce, the editorial director. "We want to help them understand the global issues and answer this question: + me, as a reader, what is my role in today's debates?"
In the pages of La Croix L'Hebdo, journalists "render accounts" to their readers by explaining why they chose one file over another.
The formula is quite similar to that of Ebdo, launching which La Croix had participated, with little publicity, a rather positive vision of the news and a lot of breathing in its pages, between "ideas to act" and cultural inspirations.
But L'Hebdo takes a step back on the news.
A major demonstration against medically assisted procreation (PMA) is scheduled for October 6, subject on which the daily La Croix, owned by the Bayard Presse group, belonging to the religious congregation of the Augustinians of the Assumption, follows the positions of the various Catholic currents. But L'Hebdo has chosen another issue for its first issue, with, we promise, a positive angle.
- Humor and poetry -
Weekly also promises weekly a great "conversation" intimate with a leading personality, a chronicle "case of conscience" and a notepad of the writer Frédéric Boyer.
The weekly has no section on religion, reserved for the book "Religion & Spirituality" which now appears with the newspaper on Friday.
He wants first to seduce the subscribers of the daily, "extremely faithful", who will receive the weekly on Friday with their newspaper without supplement, and who had trouble to "pass" La Croix to younger generations, according to Guillaume Goubert.
With its "zest of humor and poetry", the newspaper would also like to restore the taste of the weekly to hundreds of thousands of parents subscribed to Bayard Presse's youth publications (Pomme d'api, J'aime lire or Okapi).
"The Cross is a two-way bridge: it helps Catholics to better understand the world around them and help the world to better understand how believers are" Guillaume Goubert stresses, echoing a sentence of his predecessor, Dominique Quinio.
Bayard will give "the time it takes" to the weekly to succeed, with a goal of 25,000 new sales, especially on subscription to the image of the newspaper, indicates his direction. The daily has seen its sales decline slowly in recent years, around 67,000 copies per day for its paper version. The newspaper intends to strengthen itself on the internet.
The youth magazine "Les Dossiers de l'actualité" has also refocused on the brand by becoming "La Croix Campus", with a new model that gives more space to reports and infographics. The other weekly of the group, "Pilgrim", will remain more "demanding" on the news of the past week and religious subjects.
© 2019 AFP