L'Agéfi chief editor gone
Business Press: Another Dispute at L’Agéfi: The editorial board is throwing in the towel, just as their predecessors did two years ago.
Fabarez: He employs journalists from different
political horizons. His editorial team turned the
daily newspaper for the economy L'Agéfi is a respected paper; the
The print run of around 10,000 copies is not being published at the moment.
controlled by Wemf, but the range (as of September
2005: 19000 readers). Fabarez has also managed to reach the
to withstand competition from Le Temps, which was founded by the two major publishers
Edipresse and Ringier - no small matter for the
publisher who built up the Agéfi Group. But for three years
his company is in the red.
Too much criticism, too little praise
With the financial difficulties, the terminations of
Editor-in-chief Christoph Roulet and his deputy Gian Pozzy
but nothing to do with it. Entrepreneurs and employees such as
from one mouth. And that's the end of the similarities.
Roulet had the feeling that he "no longer had any room in the editorial office".
He had resigned due to the strained relationship with the publisher and
because he had the impression that this relationship could be reconciled with the
"do not improve future strategic directions". In other words:
Too much criticism, too little recognition for the editorial team.
Pozzy has been forced to leave due to "differences of opinion about the increasingly striking
political orientation of the newspaper" has thrown in the towel. He means
comments "that act as if everything that is not to the right of the
right is almost "socialism". He had to do with the
economic liberalism, which the newspaper defends, is not a problem,
the "doctrinaire political liberalism" that they have recently
he could no longer support: "Switzerland has a
government system of concordance, you cannot pretend that three
Quarter of the parties and nine-tenths of the population do not
existed," says Pozzi. Alain Fabarez, on the other hand, denies a postponement of the
editorial line to the right: "We are and will remain a newspaper,
which defends economic liberalism, but we are not the
Transmission belt of any party."
Last December, the Agéfi Group changed its shareholder structure.
changed. Major shareholder Fabarez reduced its shareholding from 38.2
to less than 20 percent. The shares were sold to various companies
now anonymous individual shareholders. "We are disclosing the names of the new shareholders
in the first half of 2006," says Fabarez, "together with the new
strategic directions."
Le Temps practices the balancing act
Fabarez does not want to talk about these new strategic options for the time being.
betrayed. The assumption that the paper could be even more of a
business-friendly environment does not seem to have been plucked out of the air.
as Le Temps suggests and asks about further possibilities:
"Concentrating on business information, dispensing with the print version,
Expansion of the magazines, alliances?" Whatever the case may be, we need to
than Le Temps, L'Agéfi's only competitor on the market.
the French-speaking Swiss market. While the former is a national full-length newspaper
daily balancing act between their rather left-leaning intellectuals and their
readers and the economic and financial experts, it has
The Fabarez paper is simpler: its target audience is primarily the
financial and business world. Nevertheless, Le Temps is giving Fabarez a hard time because the competition
between the two newspapers has become increasingly close in recent years.
sharper.
Helen Brügger
