The editor of Le Monde has resigned following a dispute with staff in the latest upheaval for the heavily-subsidised French press as it struggles to adapt to the digital transformation of the media, reports The Financial Times.
Natalie Nougayrede quit a week after the majority of her senior editors resigned from their managerial roles and employees expressed a lack of confidence in a plan to shift staff to the newspaper’s online operations, revamp the print edition and launch a tablet edition.
“The personal and direct attacks against the management and myself prevent me from implementing the transformation plan I put to shareholders and which requires the broad agreement of the editorial teams,” she told staff at France’s most prestigious newspaper in an email.
The editor of Liberation, a rival leftwing daily whose founders included the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, resigned in March in similar circumstances after staff rebelled against a plan by its owners to transform the newspaper into a social network, including turning its headquarters into a “cultural space”. Staff responded by hoisting a banner reading: “We are a newspaper”.
Read more of this report from The Financial Times.