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.
After telling the same stories of broken promises time and again, a newsroom can end up believing that history is simply repeating itself. Perhaps that is the greatest challenge of our profession: to keep looking at a country with curiosity when everything pushes us toward pessimism.
For more than a century, L’Orient-Le Jour has been telling Lebanon’s story: its tragedies and its rebirths, its divisions and its moments of resilience. A country that, against all odds, continues to defy certainty.
For nearly 20 years, I have had the privilege of being part of this journey. I have learned that journalism is not simply about reporting the facts, but about making sense of them. Above all, I have learned that journalism is about passing on knowledge: nothing we become is built on its own.
The last 20 years have been among the most trying in Lebanon’s modern history. We have covered endless wars, a popular uprising, an economic collapse, the explosion at the port of Beirut… We have reported on them without ever being mere observers. This proximity is our strength, but also our vulnerability. As we live through the crises as much as we cover them, fatigue sets in. And with it comes a more dangerous temptation: resignation. Not the kind that drives you to abandon this profession, but the kind that makes you no longer fully believe in its purpose. Yet, for a newsroom, giving in to this would be tantamount to renouncing its very raison d’être. Our role is not to surrender to fatalism, but to challenge it.
If I have never lost my passion for this profession, perhaps it is because while the crises may repeat themselves, the stories never do. That is what keeps me from giving in to cynicism and sustains my attachment to both this newspaper and this country. Loving Lebanon has never meant turning a blind eye to its flaws. It means believing that it deserves better than the narratives that claim nothing will ever change.
It is with this conviction that I take on my new role as editor-in-chief today. With humility, because I am fully aware of the responsibility entrusted to me. And with gratitude to those who came before me, who profoundly transformed L’Orient-Le Jour, accelerated its digital transition, broadened its readership and strengthened its editorial ambition without compromising its identity.
I take on this responsibility at a time when our profession is undergoing one of its most profound transformations. Never has information travelled so quickly ; never has it been so difficult to distinguish what is true from what is merely plausible. Our responsibility, therefore, is not simply to report the news, but to uphold a method, rebuild trust where possible, and remind ourselves that truth cannot be proclaimed; it must be sought.
Being editor-in-chief is, above all, about upholding high standards, preserving a legacy without allowing it to become set in stone, supporting a newsroom while helping it evolve, and passing on to new generations a passion for curiosity and rigor.
That’s because a newspaper is a collective endeavor. It thrives thanks to those who write, edit, photograph, lay out, promote and reinvent it every day. And it lives through its readers — their trust, their expectations and their criticism, which compel us to do better.
It is with this newsroom and with our readers that I want to write this new chapter. Because I continue to believe in this profession. But above all, in Lebanon. A country that gives us new reasons every day never to give up.
This article was translated from French by Joelle Khoury.
