“It’s a link between our past and our future,” according to the editorial director

On the eve of its 60th anniversary, the news magazine is reinventing itself to try to stem the fall in its sales. “The magazine that is always focused on progress,” assures Cécile Prieur, editorial director.

Cécile Prieur, former deputy editorial director of the worldis director of The Obs since 2020. To mark the magazine’s 60th anniversary, the newspaper will reinvent itself, in particular with the development of its digital format. Created in 1964 by the industrialist Claude Perdriel and the journalist and writer Jean Daniel, The new observer is a weekly, rather center-left news magazine. It is the newspaper which in 1971 participated in the fight for the right to abortion by publishing the Manifesto of the 343, a position that Cécile Prieur still claims, 60 years later. “We are the heirs of the second left, of social democracy, she explains. But we don’t have a partisan position. We are not a political team.”

The renewal involves a change of name. The new observer became The Obs reconnects a little with the past by now being called The New Obs. A new stage in the life of this sixty-year-old title that the director appears to have a hyphen, “a nod to our history since we are a title which has great values, progressive values. It is a link between our past and our future. The magazine which is always looking towards the future , towards the idea of ​​progress”.

A digital transformation

The fundamentals of the newspaper are preserved.“We are truly a magazine that unites intellectual debate, political debate, culture”, she explains. The innovation lies in its digital transformation with a completely renewed site positioning itself as a digital magazine as an extension of the paper version, a vital change according to Cécile Prieur. “We know that uses are changing. We have a lot of very loyal paper subscribers, but we are also obviously trying to win over our digital audiences.”

Convinced of the social usefulness of the newsmagazine and faced with a tense public debate, “our social role is to shed a different light, to explore major debates, to convey progressive values ​​very clearly on the front page”, underlines Cécile Prieur. The legacy of the “second left” and social democracy is still assumed, even if all political parties have a voice in its columns. Cécile Prieur believes that the newspaper has a role to play in the reconstruction of the left. “The left is fragmented within itself, we often talk about irreconcilable lefts,” she confides. The newspaper plans debates on social issues, the first on youth bringing together Salomé Saqué and François Hollande. Cécile Prieur announces the organization, as the culmination of these meetings, of an event which will take place on November 23 and 24, at the Théâtre de la Concorde.

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