A conversation with Groupe Le Monde (Le Monde, l’Obs, Télérama, Courrier International, La Vie, le Monde Diplomatique) CEO, Louis Dreyfus.

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Name a major newspaper—anywhere in the world—and you will find a magazine. Or two. Or three. The New York Times is the obvious example of this. The Times of London is another obvious example. And now more and more legacy newspapers from around the world are publishing their magazines in English.

La Repubblica in Italy publishes D. And now France’s venerable Le Monde is out with M International, a glossy biannual that distills their weekly M magazine for an English-speaking audience.

Long called “the newspaper of reference” in France, Le Monde occupies an oversized space in the French media. When the Olympics returned to Paris, Le Monde decided to create an english version of their newspaper for the web. Then they decided to create the magazine—in English—something that not just added an extra piece of land to their media ecosystem, but one that pleased their advertisers as well.

We spoke to Louis Dreyfus, the CEO of Le Monde about the business case for English, how the magazines attract new readers to the newspaper, the power of print, and how AI is one of the reasons Le Monde can create in english in the first place.

Arjun Basu: Before we talk about Le Monde and the magazine, I just want to ask about you and your past and your journey that led you to Le Monde.

Louis Dreyfus: I studied in France. I’m a graduate of business school, then I moved to London when I studied at the London School of Economics. And then I moved to New York where I started my career for Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, at the time a quite large magazine group in the US publishing a magazine like Woman’s Day, Car and Driver, Road & Track, but also Premiere.

And we launched, at the time, George magazine. The publisher was John F. Kennedy, Jr. We bought Mirabella, we bought the US edition of Premiere. We did plenty of things. I was, at the same time, the international controller for the magazine group, but also in the US, as a New York correspondent for Premiere magazine in Paris as a journalist. I stayed there for six years.

Arjun Basu: And then you came to France and joined the group? Or you did something else?

Louis Dreyfus: No. Then I moved to Marseille, in the south of France, to get more operational experience as a CFO. And then I was hired by Libération, the French daily, as a CEO. And a few years later I built a project for Pierre Bergé, Xavier Niel and Mathieu Pigasse to take over Le Monde. And when we succeeded, they offered me a job as a CEO. That was 15 years ago. So I’ve been in my current position for the past 15 years.

Arjun Basu: So your experience in magazines, which started in New York, what did you learn about the business of magazines?

Louis Dreyfus: I learned many things. I learned the importance of the design and of the position of creative director. I learned that when a magazine was successful—and sexy—it could seduce advertisers much more than what we could do with a newspaper. And I learned that magazine was a perfect object for long-form journalism.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, we’ll get back to that because I think that’s very interesting and you were there, right before, or as it started, the whole digital revolution. The titles you’re talking about, I remember, and that was the height really, of magazines and print.

Louis Dreyfus: Yes. Just before, I was lucky enough to work in the US, in New York, as a single young man before the internet revolution. It was an amazing year.

Arjun Basu: Okay. So I think we need to talk about Le Monde a bit for some of our listeners who don’t know its history. It’s been around for so long, 1944, it’s the newspaper of reference, it’s called in France. So I just want to talk about the importance of Le Monde in France and the relevance of it, and then perhaps in the wider world as well.

Louis Dreyfus: Le Monde was created in 1944, so just before the end of the second World War. At the time, it was forbidden for all the newspapers that had been publishing news in France while the Germans were in power. So there was a new generation of newspapers in France starting in 1944. And if you look around, many French newspapers were created in either 1944 or 1945.

At the beginning it was created by a journalist, Hubert Beuve-Méry, and it was a very serious newspaper. One of his mottoes when he was speaking to his staff was “faites chiant,” meaning “make it boring.” This newspaper was over-serious. There were no pictures. It was a black and white paper covering international news, French politics, and French economics. It was a magazine run and written by male journalists. It was very serious. It didn’t endorse presidents, but it was considered more the left-hand side of the political landscape. So it carried on, and it is today the largest French newspaper.

Arjun Basu: So who reads it?

Louis Dreyfus: I would say the average age is 44 years old. Mainly graduated people. And over the past 10 years, thanks to the development of digital subscription and the content we were producing for social networks, we have grown our total audience and the paid circulation is now twice what it was 10 years ago. And as you were saying, we like to consider ourselves as the reference newspaper, which means that we do invest to make sure that what we’re publishing is independent, rigorous, and checked. I think one of the reasons why we have been developing this trust relationship with the audience: because we are spending a huge amount of money in journalism to meet the standard, being the reference newspaper.

Arjun Basu: So let’s talk about the publishing program at Le Monde beyond the newspaper. You’ve been doing a magazine for … is it 10-15 years now?

Louis Dreyfus: It’ll be the 15th anniversary in September 2026.

Arjun Basu: And it’s a weekly.

Louis Dreyfus: And it’s a weekly. It was created by Marie-Pierre Lannelongue, who is still the editor in chief of M, le magazine le Monde, who took her inspiration at The New York Times with a prototype that was a mix between T and The New York Times Magazine, meaning long-form journalism, but also fashion pages and style coverage.

Arjun Basu: It’s been going for a long time, so I imagine it’s successful from a business point of view as well. And it’s another way for Le Monde to get a certain kind of advertiser that maybe the newspaper wouldn’t get.

Louis Dreyfus: The first thing, the first goal for us, was to reach out to another audience. And it was also a way to convince the editorial staff that this magazine was not only designed to attract advertisers, but also a new form of audience. And the first success of this magazine was to grow the Le Monde readership on the day it was published by 30%.

So we saw a younger audience, more women, coming to the magazine, and thanks to it, this new audience and its large audience, we managed to attract advertisers. And right now Le Monde attracts, I think I would say a force of the total advertising revenue for Le Monde, 25%.

Arjun Basu: Wow.

Louis Dreyfus: So it’s important.

Arjun Basu: So it really is a funnel, not just for the audience, but for ad dollars as well, and it moves 30% of people coming from the magazine to the newspaper. That’s a really great number actually.

Louis Dreyfus: Yes. And another challenge was to make the core editorial staff of Le Monde produce for M le Magazine Le Monde. Not to have two different staffs. And Marie-Pierre Lannelongue, during the first two years, managed to make on the cover the signature of star journalists from Le Monde, to underline the link between the magazine and the internal staff. So we managed to have all our staff proud of this new format and could enjoy having more space and a different angle to write a story.

Arjun Basu: So then it’s also an internal tool in a way, I mean for morale, for just keeping the talents or all the talents of your staff in tune or interested in the project.

Louis Dreyfus: Exactly. And what we even saw is that we have a few formats of stories that have been ordered and produced for the magazine and then have been bought as an option for either TV or movies. So the Le Monde journalists discover that this magazine could be also a way for them to find new markets for their journalism.

Arjun Basu: New opportunities—so then it’s such a brand play. I always tell my clients that 80% of branding is internal. And that makes M as an object a very important part of the overall brand.

Louis Dreyfus: Yes. And when you are responsible for this brand, it can be difficult for advertisers. We didn’t think the right formats were possible or that our coverage was only focused on hard news. That could be difficult as a context for advertisers. To have this safe space with the magazine was quite new for them.

That’s why we manage to attract a new sector of advertisers. And as luxury goods advertisers are the ones who are paying higher tariffs. So the profitability of the magazine was made with those both sources of revenue, higher circulation with a higher cover price, plus a larger advertising market.

Arjun Basu: So then let’s talk about the jump into English. Le Monde, mirrors the newspaper. Le Monde did it as a newspaper a while ago. But what is the goal of the English magazine? The press release talked about global ambitions, but also the growth of your English language media overall which is interesting. And the magazine, I think, is proof of a very healthy media company in many ways. But the magazine is a selection of stories from the weekly French-language magazine, correct?

Louis Dreyfus: Correct. The reason is quite simple. We do believe that the future of journalism relies on the quality of the journalism—meaning to do quality journalism, I know it’s not fashionable to say it, you need more journalists. If you want to have more time to cover stories, if you are different, you want different angles. If you want to produce on a 24-hour basis, seven days a week, you need more journalists today. To have more journalists, you need to have a larger audience and larger revenues. And the future of revenues are on digital subscriptions.

So with that in mind, two years ago at Le Monde we decided to launch a digital English-speaking edition, Le Monde in English, that is available on your app, on desktop. And two years later, we thought it was a good time for M to also have an English-speaking version.

Mainly because we knew that its covers and photo shoots were well known beyond France, but the magazine was unreadable in French and often not distributed abroad because it was too costly. So we thought that there was a market and we could launch. So we launched the first issue on March 3rd, and we’ll do another one in September.

And in between Marie-Pierre Lannelongue, the head of M le Magazine Le Monde, is producing a biweekly newsletter to give five stories that are translated as coming from M le Magazine Le Monde. And we do believe it’s important for us to have a much larger audience. We deserve a much larger audience, and as you can imagine for advertisers, it is very interesting to be able to reach out to this audience that is interested in M but couldn’t read M.

Arjun Basu: And I think it helps that so many of the brands are French, that so many of the world’s luxury brands, perfumes, and fashion are French. And so you don’t have to go far to tell them about this. You just have to have a regular meeting with the people who are already advertising your other stuff and say, “Oh, by the way, we’re doing more.”

Louis Dreyfus: It helps, because we do the same. I was in Milan two months ago to promote this project and all of the fashion brands—Italian fashion brands—understood the interest for them.

Arjun Basu: This investment in English, does it mean that you think you have saturated the French market or this was really, or is there still growth in France and the French market in general as well?

Louis Dreyfus: We do believe there are still growth possibilities in France, but I think we can do both at the same time. The main reason to launch Le Monde M International is the development of AI. Without AI we wouldn’t be able to translate all those stories on a daily basis. However, we have decided to recruit an English-speaking staff that, after the first layer of AI, is amending the translation and editing the papers before publishing it. So AI has given us the possibility to translate much more, much faster and a larger volume of stories. So AI is probably the reason that helped us to do this important step forward.

Arjun Basu: Okay. That’s interesting. So without AI you might not have started the English venture, is that what you’re saying?

Louis Dreyfus: Exactly. But we wouldn’t have done this edition without having the resources internally to check the AI translation and to edit it. I t would be too risky for us to ask the people to pay for the content with a bad translation.

I feel responsible for the brand safety and I do believe that at the core of our success there is this trustworthy relationship between our readers and Le Monde, and I want to be able to have the same quality of relationship with English speaking audiences, and for that I need additional staff. So we mixed AI plus staffers.

Arjun Basu: Was there any hesitation from your editorial staff about using AI for this purpose?

Louis Dreyfus: Obviously there was at the beginning, but for Le Monde in English at the beginning there were three layers of discussion. The first one was AI. Then we asked professional translators who take the stories translated by AI, and amend it. Then send it back to Paris, where the English-speaking journalist we hired amended it a second time before publishing it.

And after a year and a half, all journalists told us this, the second layer made by professional translators is not useful anymore. Because AI has made so much progress in a very little amount of time. So now we can have only two layers: AI, plus journalists. And they are confident we will stick to this commitment to have internal staff and they are quite happy with it.

And you can imagine for a Le Monde journalists to discover that he’s read or she’s read in the US, in Asia, in Western Europe, in Scandinavia, and to have comments for readers, it’s completely different compared to an only French-speaking audience. So it’s contributed to the adoption of this project by the staff.

Arjun Basu: The other thing I find amazing about the magazine is it is so French still, it’s really a window into France. It’s unabashedly French. Those stories that are translated, the references remain very French, and if you don’t know it, too bad. You will not understand the reference, because it’s pure France, this magazine. And so that in itself was a decision that you made. It’s like no, we’re not going to change it for the audience. This is still going to be Le Monde’s magazine, the M magazine, but it’s going to just be in English.

Louis Dreyfus: Yes. We may be wrong. So we’ll see. But we are very proud of our DNA and thought that the best we could do is promote our DNA. Plus last year they were at the Olympic Games in Paris. And at Le Monde then in France we were quite proud of the images of Paris, of France, of the French attitude that was conveyed by those Olympic games.

And so we thought it was a good time to acknowledge the success and to do a cover on the French Touch and saying, “Yes, we are French media. But we can show you the best of France or the best of our coverage.”

Arjun Basu: Now you’re doing it twice a year. Is that the plan?

Louis Dreyfus: We’ll do it for the first two years, I believe. Twice a year plus a biweekly newsletter. And then we’ll see. I think there are three options: We remain with these two issues a year, or there is a market for four issues a year as a quarterly, or we find international publishers or local publishers that could be interested in doing joint ventures to do a local edition of M. I think that’s probably too—it will be a second or a third step, but I do think at some point of time we could expand the M International as a local edition, but it’ll be in a few years.

Arjun Basu: So I was going to ask about how you see it operating within the overall Le Monde ecosystem and how you would use it in the future. And you’ve answered the question, but it does seem to be a very strategic magazine in that sense.

Louis Dreyfus: Yes. It’s strategic in that sense. It’s also very strategic in the advertising market. As many brands are quitting print to invest only on digital. However, they do keep a bucket of investment, advertising investment, for a few brands, statutory brands, with a global audience and high quality content. If I want to remain in this bucket to have access to these budgets, I need to show that I’m a global brand and I can reach out to an audience beyond my natural boundaries. That’s why I think it’s also strategic in the advertising market.

Arjun Basu: I find the idea of newspaper magazines, and newspapers as media brands, fascinating. They exist, obviously, in many parts of the world. Is the advantage the history of the newspaper or the access that an advertiser gets to multiple touch points?

Louis Dreyfus: I think what strikes me is that if you come back 20 years ago, the bet was that daily newspapers would die and only would remain magazines because their format and their rhythm was so different from digital. And now, today, it’s exactly the contrary. The ones who are thriving are newspapers—look at the figures of The New York Times—Le Monde is quite profitable. And so to do a magazine supplement of a newspaper brand is the best of both worlds.

You have the format, you have the quality paper, plus you have the audience driven by daily newspapers, and I think for advertisers it’s quite important to manage other formats of magazines, but also to be supported by the audience, the large audience, of a newspaper. Plus on digital, I can take each of my stories that I will be publishing at the end of the week and choose when I will be publishing it at what time during the week.

So if it’s print, everything will be in the Friday edition. But on digital you will have a few stories on Tuesday, others on Thursday, so I can reach a much larger audience. And it’s very interesting for our advertisers too.

Arjun Basu: So are the advertisers pushing not just you, but large legacy media brands, to do more—and is it a way to find new advertisers—or are you just consolidating the advertisers you have?

Louis Dreyfus: I would say that the only way is to both consolidate the major advertisers and reach out to new ones. I don’t think that you would expect a rise of your advertising revenue without this kind of support.

Because also, and as the news and the environment have been quite difficult over the past I say two years—wars in different points of the world, elections, turmoil—in the magazine I can expect to regularly have a safe space for advertisers.

In a daily, it’s very difficult to do good news when your environment is made only of bad news, or violent news. So advertisers have difficulty understanding that they may be between two very difficult stories of war coverage. I can build a safe space with a magazine, a weekly magazine.

Arjun Basu: Newspapers are always difficult for that very reason. What is the media landscape right now in France? Is it closer to England than it is to the United States? What’s going on there?

Louis Dreyfus: In France, the media market used to be a magazine market with a few newspapers. Now this market has consolidated around a few shareholders that have aggregated magazines or magazines and dailies. And Le Monde, in this market, is an exception since it is owned by a foundation and by its employees.

So in this world, when French media are mainly owned by either oligarchs or people who are trying to push personal or political interests, we remain an exception. I do believe that it’s because of this exception that we have been that successful over the past 10 years. And it’s like in the US there is this saying in economics, that “the leader takes all.” Out of 100 new digital subscribers in France, Le Monde takes 70% of them. Seven zero. The rest of the market will share the leftovers.

So it’s a market that is starting to be very consolidated which, at the same time, is good for the Le Monde business model, but not good for the debate. I would love to have two or three strong newspapers. In France there’s Le Figaro, which is reaching a paid circulation of 300,000 a day, while Le Monde is now 550,000 a day. It’s different, it’s a conservative newspaper, but it’s a newspaper. The rest is very small.

Arjun Basu: So you’re in an interesting position to comment on the future of magazines and media in general. The backlash to the internet is here. People are realizing that what they were promised isn’t happening. At least the mass market part of it. The ads often are irrelevant and I think hurt the brand in many ways. The way the internet treats people—we’re using the word ‘slop’ a lot now in English. And the great word that has entered the language is “enshitiffication,” which is about the general entropy that happens around the internet. I don’t think the ad industry sees it that way, though. They see convenience and economics and simplicity in many ways. We know print offers the most engagement. It’s the deepest reading. And so for advertisers that understand it, they support print. And you’re lucky enough that a lot of them are luxury brands and that they happen to be where you are. What do you think about the media overall and the state we’re in right now?

Louis Dreyfus: I remain quite optimistic, and with the degradation of the environment on digital, I think at some point of time advertisers will understand that they need to focus more on brand safety. And if they want their ad to be efficient, they need to make sure that the environment is safe.

It’s not safe on social networks. It’s not safe on digital. It’s often not safe on all those websites that are available for free. When you have a media that is investing in staff and journalism, plus is developing digital subscriptions, I can guarantee who is going to watch your ad and what will be around it. And then, at some point of time, I’m pretty sure there will be a balance.

Arjun Basu: A cleansing?

Louis Dreyfus: Yes.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. I always say that an ad is leverage. You’re leveraging the brand and the brand is leveraging the advertiser. It’s a partnership. And that has completely gone, in many places, out of whack. It doesn’t exist. That’s the big problem that people have, I think.

Louis Dreyfus: There is one issue that remains. We managed to reach a younger audience. And all those brands are fond of reaching out to the teens or the late teens, and they think that only TikTok or Instagram will be able to reach this new audience, which is our future. So our responsibility also is to address this issue and say, “No, you can come to Le Monde because I can be legitimate for this audience. So come with me and you will be able to reach out to this audience.” But that’s something that was difficult to convince the advertisers that were in this fashion trend thing, saying, “Those legacy media are dead or dying. We should move forward and go to Instagram and TikTok.” It’s not good for the brands.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. I keep thinking of the marketing funnel and the readership funnel that you’ve created. In a way, these magazines are labs for the larger media, in terms of dealing with the public, in terms of social, all of that stuff. They’re like laboratories.

Louis Dreyfus: Yeah. And plus for us, it’s forced us to invest. To expect this younger audience to come to a newsstand, or to pay for a subscription would be very naïve. This audience—it is my job to manage, to initiate a relationship with them on those networks. And then step-by-step to make them come to me on the app, on the international edition of M, on Le Monde in English or in the app of Le Monde. And then to manage to find a place for advertisers. So I think we have a role in securing a safer environment for those brands.

Arjun Basu: I can picture the journey-mapping that’s going on for the reader from the magazine up to Le Monde, and to the advertiser as well.

Louis Dreyfus: We have seen it with Snapchat. I was the first to sign with Snapchat, I would say, 10 years ago in France. Right now we have 1.5 million French teenagers reading our content on Snapchat Discover on a daily basis. And after two or three years, I saw a part of this audience moving to the app or moving to digital subscription, when they were getting a little older. So there is a journey, but to expect the journey, to go over there and to respect that those networks are their playing field. So we have to be there.

Arjun Basu: One of the things we’ve learned on this podcast is that young people are discovering print. And they didn’t really grow up with magazines, and they’re discovering them and realizing that they’re actually good places to be because they’re quiet and the reading experience is deeper than it is on the internet. And it’s not distracting. So many of the magazines we’ve been talking to, the readership is incredibly young. And some of the places we’ve been talking to, who have magazine stores or something, are just amazed at how young their clientele are. So maybe there is hope.

Louis Dreyfus: We have many reasons to be much more optimistic than 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago, Le Monde was losing €10 million/year. This year we’ll be making an EBDA (Earnings Before Depreciation and Amortization) of €26 million. We were selling 240,000 copies a day. We are selling 550,000 copies a day now, and even more interesting, digital subscription will next year pay for the total cost of my editorial staff, both digital and print.

It’s a huge transformation. And when you get this momentum it’s a win-win situation. This momentum attracts younger journalists who attract a younger audience. This young audience plus the momentum attract advertisers. Then I get profit, then I can reinvest and be optimistic.

Arjun Basu: It’s a circle.

Louis Dreyfus: Yes. It’s a positive circle. Yeah.

Arjun Basu: So we always end the show. We ask for three magazines or media that are exciting you right now. So what are they?

Louis Dreyfus: Magazine or media … I would say New York magazine. It was a magazine I was reading 30 years ago when I was in New York, and I’m still reading it. They made a huge transformation of the format. They are very good on digital. So I’m reading it. It’s very interesting.

I think what The New York Times is doing remains a reference in terms of coverage, in terms of diversity of formats, in terms of UX design. That’s another reference for me.

And the third, not in France, would be The Guardian. They have been developing their international audience with the European edition. They are very good on digital and in print also.