He will succeed from March 13 to Guilhem Ricavy who left on November 3, a few weeks after the takeover of the regional press group by the shipowner CMA CGM.
"I am very proud and honored to take the helm of this great and beautiful editorial staff", welcomed Mr. Viers to AFP, whose appointment had been mentioned the day before by the Marseille media Gomet'.
Its priority, within "many projects", will be to "relaunch the title and develop its digital offer".
"The idea is to make it a leading medium in all media," he explained.
Provence has taken "years behind in the face of the major current challenges of the press such as the digital shift", underlined Mr. D'Harcourt, believing however that "there is a lot of potential in the newspaper".
The daily has 10,000 digital subscribers.
Forty-something Aurélien Viers, who has "family ties to Marseille", is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris and the Journalists Training Center (Paris).
He was a reporter for 10 years within the TF1-LCI group, notably covering international news in the Middle East and Asia before becoming a correspondent in Japan for the first French private channel.
At the end of the 2000s, he was editorial manager at the video-sharing website Citizenside (of which AFP was a partner) which has since closed.
Mr. Viers then joined the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur where, between 2011 and 2018, he was digital editor-in-chief, deputy digital director before becoming head of the "visual division".
He then joined Le Parisien.
According to Mr. D'Harcourt, "the ambition is in 3-4 years to make a media reference in France in terms of editorial quality, modernity and commitment".
According to the specialized site of the Alliance for Press and Media Figures (ACPM), the total distribution of La Provence in paper version amounted to 73,917 copies per day in 2022, down almost 5% compared to the previous year.
La Provence covers news from three departments in the south of France (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône and Vaucluse).
The group, which publishes the regional daily newspapers Corse Matin and La Provence, passed into the hands of the shipowner CMA CGM in October, after a legal battle lasting several months with Xavier Niel, the founder of Free, and owner of Nice-Matin among others.
© 2023 AFP