Journalists dump CEO of French daily Le Monde

Paris, May 24: Journalists at French newspaper Le Monde have voted to dump the influential daily's CEO Jean-Marie Colombani after he failed to convince staff his strategy could turn around the paper's fraught finances.

Colombani fell well short of the 60 percent support he needed in a vote late yesterday by the paper's Societe des Redacteurs du Monde (SRM), a body that groups the paper's journalists and which has a veto over the appointment.

Colombani, 58, won just 48.5 per cent of the vote in his bid to win a third, six-year term at the helm of Le Monde, a French institution founded in 1944 which, unlike all other main French dailies, appears around midday in Paris.

''He didn't even get 50 per cent. Nobody thought he'd get so little,'' Jean-Pierre Tuquoi, one of SRM's 12 members, told sources in a telephone interview.

''It was a real surprise because he carpet-bombed the newsroom with e-mails and advice about how we should vote for him. People were sick of it and this is an incredibly strong slap in the face,'' he said.

Board To Review Next Step

Some staff said Colombani's bid to keep his job resembled a slick political election campaign. Colombani was unavailable and the paper declined to comment ahead of a board meeting later this week which will review the next step.

The group lost 19.24 million dollar last year on turnover of 631 million, a 50 per cent fall for the second straight year. But despite the relative improvement, Colombani's stewardship has been heavily criticised within the paper.

The SRM said the group needed ''a clean break with the habits of the past, a clear strategic vision and a large-scale project''.

It has been unhappy with the Lagardere group's 17.27 per cent stake in Le Monde, reinforcing staff concerns about the paper's ability to retain its independent voice.

Le Monde has recently forged a partnership with media mogul Vincent Bollore, to launch Matin Plus, a freesheet whose popular style contrasts sharply with that of its high-brow sister paper.

''The newsroom is not against the growth strategy, but we quickly realised that the strategy, far from making the group more solid, was making it more fragile,'' Tuquoi said.

''We also saw some pretty worrying people come in, like Bollore and Lagardere. All these people close to the new head of state,'' he said, referring to new French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose close ties to television and press barons has raised fears in some quarters about the media independence.

Reuters>