Rima Abdul Malak will become the new executive director of L'Orient-Le Jour on Nov. 10, 2025. (Credit: Jeanne Accorsini)
One hundred years. To be exact, one hundred and one. Is there a better age to open a new chapter?
On Nov. 10, the L’Orient-Le Jour group will welcome Rima Abdul Malak as its new executive director. She will succeed Fouad Khoury Helou, who has steered the ship for the past four years during a particularly difficult time in Lebanon.
Franco-Lebanese and former minister of culture under President Emmanuel Macron, Abdul Malak’s mission will be to lead L’Orient-Le Jour into a new phase of development: international reach, broadening the editorial offer, digital innovation, and expanding the readership — all while remaining true to the newspaper’s founding values and mission. These are values we celebrated on our centenary in 2024, and during our major "Un Vent de Liberté" festival in Beirut in mid-September.
L’Orient-Le Jour owes its longevity as much to a constantly evolving newsroom as to a creative administration seeking new sources of revenue and a total commitment to its digital transformation.
The values that make up the DNA of L’Orient-Le Jour are the common thread of Rima Abdul Malak’s career in humanitarian work, diplomacy, and cultural policy — at Paris City Hall, the Élysée Palace, in New York, and in refugee camps across the globe.
We are convinced Rima Abdul Malak will bring new momentum to expand the newspaper’s reach, adapt its business model to the sector’s new challenges, and strengthen its influence both in the Middle East and internationally.
A determined and sensitive person, loyal to her convictions, she has always defended press freedom and worked to support civil society in Lebanon. Her international experience, strategic and operational skills, attachment to Lebanon, and connection to the diverse Lebanese diaspora are vital assets for strengthening the future of L’Orient-Le Jour, at the head of a committed team.
If we have managed to convince someone of Rima Abdul Malak’s caliber to join L’Orient-Le Jour, it is also thanks to the standing our newspaper has acquired in recent years. In 2021, our reporter Caroline Hayek won the Albert Londres Prize; the following year, the Académie Française awarded us its ‘Grande Médaille de la francophonie’; and in 2025, L’Orient-Le Jour became the first Lebanese media outlet — and one of the few in the Middle East — to earn the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) certification, developed by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Designed like an ISO standard, this certification is a mark of professionalism and transparency.
The expertise of L’Orient-Le Jour and its distinctive outlook are now recognized and celebrated well beyond Lebanon’s borders.
This is the result of the commitment and high standards of everyone at the newspaper. Among them, Fouad Khoury Helou, whose sustained work I wish to salute on behalf of the entire board. As group director since 2021, he has grown the paper’s audience while safeguarding its financial stability during a period of unrelenting economic and security crises in Lebanon and the region.
With Rima Abdul Malak, our centenarian institution is gaining new momentum: championing the cause of information, of free and enlightened debate, and, as she put it to us, "strengthening the vital link between Lebanon and all those who, wherever they are in the world, continue to believe in its future."
Rima Abdul Malak, a unique figure in the dialogue between France and Lebanon
Born in 1979, Rima Abdul Malak spent the first ten years of her life in Beirut before her family, fleeing the civil war, settled in Lyon. A graduate in political science, she began her career in international solidarity, working in the Palestinian territories for the CCFD (Catholic Committee Against Hunger and for Development), then led the association Clowns Without Borders, which provides psychosocial support to children affected by war and poverty. Culture then became her primary field of action: at the French Institute, at Paris City Hall under Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, and in New York as a cultural attaché, building exchanges between France and the United States. In 2019, she became culture adviser to Emmanuel Macron, playing a key role during the Covid pandemic by protecting the press, artists, and cultural venues with unprecedented measures.
From 2022 to 2024, she served as minister of culture, the first French-Lebanese person in a French government. Her priorities: youth, heritage, creation, media independence. She strengthened public broadcasting, advanced media education, supported cartoonists, and prepared the ‘États généraux de l’information’ (a collective 9-month study by a French independent organization on the right to information). In Europe, she helped shape the Media Freedom Act, designed to protect press freedom and media pluralism.
Since leaving government in January 2024, Rima Abdul Malak has supported a number of Lebanese institutions: the Samir Kassir Foundation for press freedom, the Sursock Museum, Metropolis cinema, and Saint Joseph University (USJ).
She sits on the board of Reporters Without Borders, the international committee of Aliph (the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas), and chairs the jury for the ‘Planches Contact’ photography festival in Deauville, among other nonprofit commitments. She regularly lectures and gives talks at universities, institutions, and companies. She also developed the "Rima Poésie Club" (Rima Poetry Club) and several performances inspired by her love of poetry.
A unique figure in the dialogue between France and Lebanon, her career reflects an unwavering belief: that words, art, and ideas can illuminate the future.
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