L’Orient-Le Jour – the only Lebanese French-language daily to have survived every crisis for a century

Born in Lebanon from the merger of two newspapers, L’Orient, which was founded in 1924, and Le Jour, which was founded in 1934, L’Orient-Le Jour's main mission is to tell the West about the East. 

The newspaper is proud to have continued to publish its printed edition, in French, for a century, in a context of media crisis where paper is becoming increasingly rare. To diversify its readership, L’Orient-Le Jour also launched a sister publication in English, L'Orient Today, in 2020. 

In a country marked by civil war, the catastrophic explosion at the Beirut port, a major economic crisis in 2019, and, more recently, the war between Hezbollah and Israel, the news is dense. However, despite one million unique visitors per month, the media outlet, which claims to be the most consulted in Lebanon, faces numerous challenges, notably that of financing. 

We talked about it with Fouad Khoury Helou, director of L’Orient-Le Jour.

I would say it's a mix of two things. Lebanon has remained a country of relative freedom [despite the crises that’s befallen the country] because it’s a multi-confessional country where the state is weak. The [effect] is that there is no single dictator who can decide to shut down the newspaper, and thus a form of space for freedom emerged that persisted despite everything, dangers, or wars.

Since we are a newspaper in French and now also in English, perhaps the most dangerous political formations, as they didn’t necessarily speak the same language, believe that it is not worth causing harm.

If you look in the newspaper's archives, there are certain periods when it did not appear, and most of these periods were during the French mandate, from 1934 to 1943. The newspaper that opposed the mandate's policies was very critical, and the mandate authorities did not appreciate that. So they would shut down the newspaper or imprison the editors-in-chief. 

Despite the Lebanese chaos, we continued afterward. Our DNA is that it’s an independent newspaper with opinions that were often in opposition to the ruling power. It’s not a complacent newspaper. After all, we have been here for 100 years and have managed to survive. It is quite rare for a media outlet in this region to last a century without having to shut down or face other major challenges.

The Lebanese economic crisis, with the financial shock in 2019, literally toppled our old economic model. We were on a very paper-based model and relying on advertising. [Paper sales and advertising] traditionally accounted for more than 90% of our revenue. It forced us to completely reinvent ourselves. Today, advertising and paper [sales] must account for 25% of our revenue. Everything else comes from digital subscriptions, donations, and partnerships. 

The fortunate thing we had is that we launched the digital subscription model quite early in 2014. But it really took off with the economic crisis of 2019, the explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020, the coronavirus, and of course, when we had the war starting in 2023, even more in 2024. So all these events helped us to develop the audience.

We have an average audience over a year of one million unique visitors per month, which means it must be six or seven million page views per month. It's colossal. We are actually the leading Lebanese media in terms of website traffic, ahead of the others. From that, we have 80 to 85% of our audience, who are the diaspora outside of Lebanon. The challenge for us now is to turn all of this into subscriptions. 

One of the challenges is that our readers outside of Lebanon don't subscribe enough, and it's clear that for us, that's where the key lies. If we could get international readers to subscribe in the same proportion, we would solve all our problems by far.

Yes, it remains a real challenge to develop a digital newspaper beyond the somewhat dramatic audience and the hot news. That means diversifying our content, having alongside political and economic news, all the so-called evergreen content, like everything related to leisure, even cooking, like The New York Times does.

So all of that becomes really a business that we are focusing on now, so it’s a bit different from traditional press. Traditional press was there to inform first, and now we are here not only to inform but to accompany people in their daily lives. That's the model we are trying to achieve.

We have had an in-depth debate on this for years, knowing that the quantities of printed newspapers are obviously no longer the same as before. But we made the decision that paper is an emblem of the newspaper. Without paper, it’s no longer the same. So our decision is to keep the paper, even if it means raising the price, as long as readers will be ok to pay the price. 

News is free today, so if you want the printed version, it's because you're looking for an experience, a sensation, and specific articles because the paper lends itself to long, very explanatory articles. Digital is also suited for long articles but also for quick news. 

What I'm saying is that the drop would have happened anyway. What we did was anticipate and gradually increase instead of doing it abruptly. We did it gradually, and those who don't want the paper can read us digitally.

We must continue to develop our revenue diversification strategy. Not only with digital revenue but also positioning ourselves on event partnerships and grants. There are a lot of foundations around the world that help media outlets, but the problem today is that with the decision regarding USAID, it's starting to affect the landscape a bit. If this becomes a trend that can encourage everyone to do a bit of the same thing, then it would be very problematic.

Our future also depends on the situation in Lebanon itself. The return of the Lebanese economy to growth could help us a lot. It would mean we can have more subscribers, we might be able to sell the subscription at a higher price, and we can have more local partnerships as we used to do before. The problem is that, as is always the case with the media, if the region becomes completely quiet and entirely uninteresting in terms of hot news, we will have to reinvent our editorial offer. So it's a constant challenge.

Source of the cover photo: Jon S via Flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic