As we enter the new season, L’Orient-Le Jour is continuing to grow. As part of that effort, we are also evolving our organization. Anthony Samrani is taking on the newly created role of editorial director, with greater strategic responsibilities. After nearly 20 years with the newspaper, Rita Sassine is becoming editor-in-chief and will oversee the newsroom’s day-to-day operations. Our entire team remains fully committed to bringing you independent, rigorous and uncompromising journalism, in Lebanon and across the region.
We have fully entered an age of uncertainty — one of fading certainties, blurred boundaries and an increasingly hard-to-read future. We feel it even more acutely from Lebanon, and more broadly from a region marked by seemingly endless wars, but we are far from alone in this. This uncertainty touches every sphere of our societies and every aspect of our lives. It has seeped into morality, politics, the economy, health, the environment — and the list could go on.
Despite the prevalence of apocalyptic rhetoric, our era is not, at least for now, one of the worst in history. But it may well be one of the most dizzying. The speed at which our world is changing, coupled with the erosion of traditional structures at the individual, collective and even international levels — two developments that are undoubtedly more closely intertwined than we care to admit — leave us without a compass.
In this context, the role of a century-old newspaper like L’Orient-Le Jour is more important than ever. It is not about claiming to hold the truth on every issue, let alone predicting the future, but about providing a space — unique in the Middle East — for reflection, freedom and nuance. Within the limits of its resources and reach, L’Orient-Le Jour must therefore aim to be one of the guiding lights we so desperately need.
This responsibility demands more of us. It must push us to set the bar ever higher by offering rigorous and original journalism that goes beyond simply reporting the facts as honestly as possible — which is already a great deal — and plays a full part in building a free, sovereign and pluralistic Lebanon and a more democratic Middle East. These terms may sometimes seem like relics of another era, but we believe it is essential to continue to defend them with greater conviction, courage and, above all, intelligence than in the past.
L’Orient-Le Jour has three core missions: to tell Lebanon’s story, with all its beauty and its darker sides; to serve as a strong connection between the country and its diaspora; and to offer a distinctive perspective on the Middle East, a region that has been undergoing constant change for at least 15 years.
We will remain faithful to everything that has shaped this newspaper, but we will not rest on our past achievements. In an age of uncertainty, we need to be more ambitious and more creative than ever. That means more investigations, more reporting, more incisive analysis and more opinion pieces that challenge false narratives rather than take the easy way out. Excellence must be our guiding principle, because our survival depends on it.
We are all being inundated with free, low-quality information, and artificial intelligence will only exacerbate the problem. Our minds are already saturated. We do not want to add to the noise. We do not want to do more. We want to do better.
We want to be a space apart, a refuge for those who refuse to be trapped in uncertainty — a place where it is still possible to question, to understand, to debate and, above all, to think freely.
This article first appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour and was translated by Joelle Khoury
