The former journalist and operator of the To have to Benoît Munger died last week at the age of 69 after a long illness. It was largely thanks to this technomaniac that the first version of the daily’s website was created in 1997.
The man who had been fighting brain cancer for several years saw his health deteriorate suddenly and rapidly on Saturday. He was surrounded by his loved ones when he took his last breath.
It was after having worked for ten years at Progress of the Saguenay, in Chicoutimi, that Benoît Munger began to collaborate on To have to in 1993. He was then hired there in December 1994 as a journalist and operator.
“He was a deeply endearing character,” sums up the director of the To have to, Brian Myles, who was hired just a few months before him. “I remember a colleague laughing, humble, endearing and unshakeable in his capacity for wonder, until his last breath”, he underlines, qualifying “his energy, his passion and his enthusiasm” of “Contagious” in the newsroom.
A fan
Benoît Munger quickly distinguished himself by covering the sector of new technologies and innovation, which fascinated him so much. “All the new technologies passed through his hands,” recalls Brian Myles. Benoît was the first to arrive with an iPhone in the room, while we were still taming our phones flip on which we had a hard time texting. “
For his part, the consultant in digital communication strategy BrunoGuglielminetti remembers a journalist who covered “technologies and digital with a lot of passion, a lot of seriousness and rigor”. “He was inspiring for anyone interested in this field,” notes the one who religiously read his texts and often met him in press conferences when he worked as a director and columnist for Radio-Canada in the years 1980-1990.
Benoît Munger was among the first in Quebec to see the emergence of the Internet as an opening onto a whole world of possibilities. “We can choose to draw the curtain and act as if nothing had happened; we can also take a look, a question of catching a glimpse of what awaits us, ”he wrote in our pages on July 10, 1995, when presenting his new weekly column“ On the information highway ”.
A precursor
Already at the time, the journalist was convinced that the Internet would play a crucial role for the media. It was even the future for this sector. Yes The duty was able to inaugurate, as of June 26, 1997, a first version of its Internet site, it is largely thanks to Benoît Munger.
“Benoît pushed very hard so that The duty, a newspaper attached to the paper tradition, also offers its contents on the “information highway” which then emerged at the end of these three letters, www… indicates Brian Myles. He believed deeply in the chances of success of the To have to in modernity. “
Benoît Munger thus naturally became the “great manager” of the website by occupying the very first position of digital operator at the To have to. His wife, Carolle Brabant, former director of Telefilm Canada, remembers frantically checking every night to see if the site was still working, ready to step out of the comfort of her home and go for the newspaper the minute the system showed the slightest fault.
“His job, it wasn’t even a job, it was his passion. It really took a very important place in her life, ”she adds.
Benoît Munger is survived by his wife and two children.