(Credit: Illustration by Iva Kovic-Chahine with artificial intelligence)
On the rooftop of Libération’s headquarters on Rue Béranger in Paris, Nayla de Freige, director of L’Orient-Le Jour, and Ghassan Khneisser, who was in charge of technical development, smoked a cigarette with Ludovic Blecher, the digital editor of the French daily.
It was 2010, and the two leaders of the nearly century-old Lebanese newspaper were visiting French newsrooms, by then well-versed in the digital landscape. As they asked about the latest tools, Blecher shifted the conversation to strategy. It was going to be one long cigarette.
On that rooftop, a key alliance was forged between the three, setting the stage for the creation of a dedicated web team at L’Orient-Le Jour, led by Émilie Sueur, now director of digital development.
But the newsroom’s digital shift didn’t happen overnight. The groundwork had been quietly laid back since 1997, despite significant resistance.
‘There were many challenges and much pushback from the editorial team,” recalls Rita Sassine, the group’s first web journalist. “Some thought it was just a passing trend.”
Clearly, it wasn’t a fad. Today, as L’Orient-Le Jour celebrates its centennial, the newspaper’s ability to reinvent itself and embrace the digital era has ensured its survival.
1997 to Y2K: The technical basics
In 1995, Le Monde launched its first website, followed by the NYT a year later. By 1997, L’Orient-Le Jour joined the digital ranks with its own website.
The initial offering was modest: A PDF version of the newspaper, a few key sections and the much-consulted announcements page, featuring births, weddings and essentially, obituaries.
“I would upload selected content from the print edition every morning at 5 a.m., often on my way home from a party,” recalled Khneisser, who was initially hired to handle the newspaper’s “technical basics.”
Today, Khneisser is CEO of Whitebeard, a web development firm he founded in 2011 that continues to serve as L’Orient-Le Jour’s technical partner.
At the turn of the millennium, de Freige took the helm of L’Orient-Le Jour. Abdo Chakhtoura, then deputy editor-in-chief, was one of the few in the newsroom who believed in the digital shift.
Together, De Freige, Chakhtoura and Ghassan Khneisser laid the groundwork for the newspaper’s online presence.
“Our primary motivation wasn’t financial,” said de Freige, now CEO of the L’Orient-Le Jour group. “We saw the internet as a tool to reach the diaspora and expand our audience.”
“The goal was to share our values with a wider public,” she says.
Once the archives were digitized, L’Orient-Le Jour introduced a fee for access toits announcements page.
When most digital strategists were pushing for free content, de Freige stunned a Paris conference on digital media by declaring, “We used to say that if you weren’t announced dead in L’Orient-Le Jour, you weren’t dead.”
Even now, she says, “The Lebanese diaspora remains deeply attached to that page.”
The new millennium: Experimentation
At the start of the new millennium, the internet wave was sweeping the world, already challenging how media outlets operated.
Amid the rise of online forums in 2005, L’Orient-Le Jour launched its first comments section, allowing readers to engage in dialogue. Shortly after, the newspaper introduced a paywall, monetizing selected content and establishing an actual online subscription model.
By 2009, L’Orient-Le Jour expanded its digital presence with online classified ads, SMS alerts and mobile apps.
By the time that rooftop cigarette was shared at Libération, the groundwork had been laid. It was time to build a strategy and that required a dedicated team.
A year later, L’Orinet-Le Jour launched its web newsroom, staffed by journalists and a videographer.
In 2012, Hanaa Jabbour joined to create a digital marketing infrastructure.
“In 2011, we were the first in the Middle East to develop a Windows Phone app,” said Rudy Zeinoun, Whitebeard’s Technical Director and Khneisser’s early associate at L’Orient-Le Jour in 2007.
“The Windows system didn’t last, but even then, we were always experimenting with new technologies,” he said. “We didn’t wait for a platform to become mainstream before adopting it.”
In 2016, Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election was covered in real-time on the OLJ website.
The crisis years: When digital became a necessity
In L’Orient-Le Jour’s newsroom, there were the new recruits, fresh with skills and a passion for the web. Then there were the others, much less enthusiastic about all things digital.
“At the time, the editorial team was afraid,” de Freige said. “They didn’t understand the purpose of digitization and feared its consequences,” particularly the potential cannibalization of the print edition.
Their concerns were valid. Digitizing a newspaper required new practices and a shift in how content was produced, with different timeframes and demands.
“When management made decisions about digital, they were often met with resistance from the editorial staff,” recalled Jabbour.
“The challenges digital posed for us as journalists were enormous. Yet, we’ve managed to tackle them one by one,” said Élie Fayad, co-editor-in-chief since 2019.
That adaptability has allowed L’Orient-Le Jour to stay ahead of the curve, often embracing changes in the media landscape both in Lebanon and globally.
Faced with the decline of French-speaking readership in Lebanon, the website became a lifeline, allowing L’Orient-Le Jour to reach the diaspora and build lasting connections.
When online advertising revenue collapsed in 2010, swallowed up by tech giants, L’Orient-Le Jour had already established a viable economic model through online subscriptions.
By 2019, as Lebanon’s financial crisis deepened and the national currency crumbled, diaspora subscribers kept L’Orient-Le Jour afloat and fueled its growth.
In 2021, under the leadership of Michel Helou, who took over the newspaper in 2015, L’Orient-Le Jour launched L’Orient Today, its English-language publication.
In 2022, the digital transformation reached a new milestone with the creation of a dedicated department, led by Sueur, then former editor-in-chief. The mission was to accelerate digital growth by aligning strategies across editorial and marketing teams.
“Today, L’Orient-Le Jour is primarily a digital platform, available across multiple channels, with a print edition,” said Blecher, a member of the Board of Directors. “It’s no longer a print newspaper with digital extensions.”
The proof of this transformation is clear: Since Oct. 7, 2023, the editorial team has provided continuous, live coverage of the war in Gaza and southern Lebanon — in two languages: A far cry from what was once dismissed as the “Achrafieh Gazette,” [a nod to the upscale Beirut neighborhood of Achrafieh, where French is predominantly spoken].
Into the future: Craftsmanship and artificial intelligence
While L’Orient-Le Jour has fully embraced digital technology, it has not lost its human touch, preserving an almost artisanal connection with its work and readership.
Despite the digital shift, L’Orient-Le Jour remains a close-knit community that has grown with the help of technology.
“Our customer service team is constantly in touch with our readers and subscribers,” said Nicole Karkour, who took over from Jabbour as head of marketing. “Personalized human contact is crucial for us.”
This meticulous approach has been vital to the paper’s resilience. “We’ve avoided being trapped in an insular bubble, whether in Achrafieh or elsewhere, by leveraging the digital revolution,” Sueur said.
“Digital technology is incredible for the opportunities it offers and the new realms it opens up,” she added. “Yet, it’s also a tool that constantly challenges us. It reshapes how we tell the story of Lebanon and the region to a readership overwhelmed with information and dispersed globally.”
For Sassine, now deputy editor-in-chief, “At some point, the paper needed to reassess and evolve its editorial approach.”
“Digital technology drove this transformation, pushing us to adopt innovative and creative strategies to engage a global and expanding audience,” she said.
As artificial intelligence (AI) rises to prominence today, L’Orient-Le Jour, like other media outlets, faces new challenges.
“The key is to harness the benefits of AI while preserving the core of our profession,” said Blecher. “AI will play a supportive role in our workflow and L’Orient-Le Jour is already experimenting with it, but the journalism sector will remain among the two percent where precision, quality and uniqueness are paramount.”
Adaptation and exploration are the driving forces behind L’Orient-Le Jour’s growth.
“L’Orient-Le Jour has been dancing. With its feet firmly rooted in its values and causes, L’Orient-Le Jour dances through history, crises, the evolution of the world, and the whirlwind of technological advancements,” Sueur said.
“The dance might be more or less fluid at times, but the most important thing is that we keep dancing,” she said.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour and translated by Sahar Ghoussoub. English version edited by Yara Malka.
