French Newspaper Research Articles

Reshaping Sports Journalism Through Innovation: An Analysis of L’Équipe Explore’s Strategies, Practices and Output

ABSTRACT Sports journalism practice faces important challenges deriving from the multiplication of platforms, the acceleration of workflows, the emergence of new entrants and the audiences’ shifting consumption habits. In a bid to overcome those challenges and advance innovation across the board, the French newspaper L’Équipe established a specific unit for that purpose: Explore. By focusing on this case study, this research has examined the formats, output and practices deployed by Explore and evaluated its impact within L’Équipe’s offer. The study is informed by content analysis performed on the projects (N = 201) published by Explore over a 32-month timeframe (May 2021–December 2023), ethnographic work and eight semi-structured interviews with its employees. Findings reveal that Explore stands out as a leading “media lab” in sports journalism. Through a broad range of formats and a multifaceted agenda, Explore occupies a unique position in terms of delivering cultural capital. Explore embraces alternative production modes that invest in freedom and research while rejecting hyper-accelerated cycles and clickbait-oriented approaches. Such proposition has resonated with audiences and positioned Explore as a cornerstone of L’Équipe’s commercial strategy. Solutions articulated by Explore contribute to the broader discussion of how sports journalism practice can be reshaped in the digital age.

1989 in Poland (Up to the June Elections) in the Journalism of Le Monde

The article aims to show how one of the most influential centre-to-left French journal Le Monde assessed the political developments in Poland from the end of 1988 until the Solidarity victory in the June elections. The attitude of Le Monde towards the changes in the Soviet Union and its external empire is considered as well but it serves only as a contextual backdrop. The French newspaper observed the irreversible nature of the ongoing processes in the Soviet Union that marked a significant change in Gorbachev’s foreign policy approach. The political developments of all members of the Eastern Bloc were closely examined by the daily but the changing dynamics in the Polish People’s Republic directed most of the magazine’s focus towards the situation in that country. It may seem astonishing that the journal analysed the puzzling murders of Polish priests and scrutinised the reforms introduced by M. Rakowski in significant detail. However, these issues were considered intertwined with the progress of Poland’s political transformation. The agreements made at the Round Table and the results of the June elections were viewed as significant accomplishments. The Solidarity was commended for abstaining from abrupt actions that could threaten the agreement with the authorities. Le Monde opines that such actions could be hazardous owing to the present geopolitical situation and the likelihood of resistance within the party.

Pragmatic conditionality of linguistic means of expressing evaluation in French newspaper discourse

Pragmatic conditionality of linguistic means of expressing evaluation in French newspaper discourse

Philippe d’Orléans, the Press and the Army: The Shaping of the Political Identity of Louis XIV’s Brother in the Gazette de France

This study delves into the shaping of the political identity of Philippe d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s brother, by investigating its official constructed image in the main French newspaper of the time and voice of the monarchy, the Gazette de France. It focuses on Philippe d’Orléans’s military activities and analyses the tensions between reality and official discourse. Considering the essentialisation of appearances characteristic of the court society, it argues that Monsieur’s depiction is complex and double-edged. On the one hand, Monsieur, due to his rank, occupies a central place in the Gazette and reinforces the magnificence of the monarchy. On the other hand, his presence in military news declines over time following his military exploits during the French-Dutch War (1672–1678). The article concludes that the representation of Monsieur was helpful in spreading a favourable image of the louisquatorzian regime by means of the depiction of family concord.

Reflection of the Kurdish Issue in The French Newspaper Le Monde

Reflection of the Kurdish Issue in The French Newspaper Le Monde

Reflection of the Kurdish Issue in The French Newspaper Le Monde

Reflection of the Kurdish Issue in The French Newspaper Le Monde

Evolution of the Concept of <i>Barbarism</i> within the Context of the Franco-German Confrontation in the 1870s–1910s

Intolerance, demonization and hate speech used to be an integral part of Franco-German relations in the 19th century. The paper is devoted to the analysis of the image of barbarians within the context of the confrontation between France and Germany in 1870s–1910s. Creation and transformation of political myths is viewed through the lens of cultural artefacts. The study is topical because it allows for the analysis of the universal development of cultural confrontation on a specific example. The prime goal of the article is to identify the patterns of mutual stigmatization and account for their seeming anomalies or exceptions to these patterns: the German simultaneously viewed as well-educated and barbarian; common origins of barbarian and classical antique cultures resulting in opposing identities, etc. The aims of the study include: 1) to systematize empirical sources; 2) to assess the impact of historical and cultural context on the formation of the conceptual images of barbaric and civilized; 3) to single out basic dichotomies of the barbaric vs civilized opposition. The study was based on various cultural texts of the period, ranging from speeches, essays, and memoirs to posters and monuments. Methods used included comparative, semiotic, and imagological approaches, corpus, discourse, and content analyses. French newspaper clichés are compared to the Europe-wide opinions about Prussian militarism. As it turns out, the German way of thinking about the heroes of the past contributed to political stigmatization of Germany. Another finding, based on French literature, is the unobvious correlation between decadent world perception and political turmoil in France. Modernist poetry, literature and journalism compared the fall of the French Empire to the collapse of the Roman Empire and thus contributed to the conceptualizing of the German as barbarians. At the same time German propaganda attempted to defend itself by finding barbarians on the east and ironically quoting French sources to speak about actual war crimes. The results of the study show that seemingly chaotic hate speech and confrontation are determined on the basis of the specific rules related to age-old non-political traditions and current political circumstances marking the dichotomy between oneself and the other, friend or foe.

To foreignize or to domesticate? How media vary cross-nationally in their degrees of incorporating foreign events

While the domestication literature indicates how national media link foreign events to a country’s domestic affairs, it has thus far only examined modes of domestication - the ways through which these links are created. In this article, we introduce a different dimension of the phenomenon: degrees of domestication. This includes the extents to which a foreign event gets connected with the domestic. By making a topic-modeling analysis of French and Dutch newspaper articles about 9/11, the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, the Arab Spring and Donald Trump’s political rise, we provide an explorative case study of this dimension. We inductively arrive at a scale ranging from no to extreme domestication of the event, classified according to four degrees of domestication: (1) an entirely foreign affair; (2) a foreign political affair involving domestic actors; (3) a domestic political affair; (4) or a personal disruption. French newspapers score higher on the second degree, the Dutch ones on the third and fourth. A deepening of this pattern shows how these differences stem from two distinctive cultural repertoires that journalists and other media participants employ when relating to foreign events: a French one, which sees them as an opportunity to dominate the international political stage, and a Dutch one, which considers them a reason for reflecting on domestic or personal matters. These clear differences indicate the concept’s importance for the literature and for investigating it within other national media contexts.

INTERCULTURALISM IN THE POLITICAL ARISTOCRACY MEMOIRS OF ROMANIA DURING THE PERIOD 1881-1914

Interculturalism, explored by anthropologists, sheds light on global dynamics in the past two centuries. The 19th century featured economic interdependence and labor mobility. In Europe's La Belle Époque, the nobility, predominantly in foreign affairs or state institutions, demonstrated unique intercultural interactions. Romanian nobility of the late 19th century, educated in Western universities, engaged in cultural exchanges during events like Eastern celebrations, mingling with peasants. French correspondence occasionally included phrases like "je un dor de vous." Memoirs reveal intercultural instances, emphasizing a network of connections. Romanian noble families intertwined with French, Russian, Austrian nobilities through marriages, some residing abroad, notably in Paris. Bucharesthosted French newspapers reporting global news. The daily life of the Romanian nobility authentically exemplifies interculturalism, offering historians a valuable perspective on their evolution until the First World War.

Are religion metaphors anti‑revolutionary?

Abstract This paper investigates the socio-political implications of sceptical metaphors in French discourse about the climate crisis. Existing literature has demonstrated the prevalence of religion metaphors in English sceptical discourse. Yet, in France, religious references in language use are limited as such references have been considered “anti-revolutionary” since the storming of the Bastille, in 1789. I thus ask to what extent sceptical metaphors in French climate crisis discourse differ from English sceptical metaphors. To this aim, I conduct a corpus-based study relying on texts published in the extreme-right wing French newspaper “Valeurs Actuelles”. The metaphors identified in this corpus are analysed so as to uncover the mini-narratives related to sceptical metaphor scenarios. Consistent with existing literature, the analysis establishes the prevalence of the religion scenario. However, the research highlights significant argumentative exploitations: metaphor users define the source concept according to cultural viewpoints on religion and ideological understanding of the religious lexicon. I demonstrate that religion metaphors prevail because associated source concepts (environmentalism as islam) are not conceived as being part of the domain of religion, according to these (extreme-right-wing) discourse producers.

El pleito por la Isla de Clipperton visto a través de los periódicos mexicanos y franceses durante el Porfiriato

Clipperton Island – a.k.a. Pasión Island or Médanos Island – is a small atoll in the Pacific Ocean that has aroused the interest of various specialists in recent decades. The purpose of this text is to review the dispute over this island as seen by Mexican and French newspapers from their respective capitals, during the government of President Porfirio Díaz. As such, the 'Clipperton case' is framed within a historical period that witnessed various political-diplomatic controversies. Here, I identified and compared narratives, controversies, and impact on public opinion from both the Mexican and French press. In this way, I explain how this atoll was semantically represented and the implications that this historical moment had in social political spheres.

The Making of a Crisis: Migration and Polarization in the French Press

Mass inflows of immigrants are believed to create moral panic which impacts attitudes and votes. However, few scholars systematically explore the discursive construction of migration as a crisis in relation to actual migration flows. When and how does migration become a crisis? To answer this question, we draw on mixed methods harnessing automated text analysis, linear regression, as well as qualitative analysis, to analyze “migration crisis” discourses in a corpus extracted from French newspapers between 2008 and 2020. We locate the emergence of “migration crisis” discourses in the summer of 2015, absent massive inflows of migrants or refugees in France contrary to other European countries. We show that conservative newspapers overwhelmingly contribute to framing the crisis as one of “migration or migrant” rather than one of asylum or refugees despite the humanitarian nature of inflows. Furthermore, conservative newspapers do not only mention the migration crisis more than liberal ones, but they also create a sense of slow-burning or creeping migration crisis, as an undercurrent in media topics. Our fine-grained analysis of the case of the migration crisis in the French media offers theoretical and methodological inputs for an empirically grounded and constructivist theory of political crises.

Cutting colonial losses: imperial ideology in media coverage of the 1878 transfer of Saint Barthélemy in Sweden and France

ABSTRACT During the last several decades, important new research has been published on the Swedish Caribbean colony of Saint Barthélemy, but this has almost exclusively focused on its early years, during the early modern period. By the time it was returned to France in 1878, its heyday was long past. Nevertheless, this article argues that press coverage of the island’s transfer to France in the 1870s provides a useful window into colonial mentalities during an era that constituted the apex of global imperialism, even as it marked the end of Sweden’s small tropical empire. What did Swedes think about imperialism in the 1870s, and how was Sweden’s role as a colonial power viewed from abroad? Investigating a representative sample of Swedish and French newspapers, this article argues that while the peaceful transfer of Sweden’s last formal colony during the high age of empire could be described as exceptional, this did not reflect exceptional humanitarian or anti-imperial attitudes in Sweden. Rather, Swedes subscribed to the contemporaneous European logic of successful colonialism as a source of national pride, but were eager to divest themselves of Saint Barthélemy since the island’s poverty was understood as a national humiliation within this same colonial discursive framework.

Кодирование массмедийного дискурсивного формата знаний (на материале изданий Le Monde и «Российская газета»)

The article discusses mass media discourse and provides the author’s typology of discursive formats of knowledge. The coding features of the mass media discursive format of knowledge in two multilingual publications, the French newspaper “Le Monde” and the Russian publication “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” are revealed. The author’s algorithm for encoding the mass media discursive format of knowledge, consisting of seven stages, is proposed. Projecting the author’s coding algorithm onto articles in French and Russian newspapers revealed: 1) the number of articles in the “Culture” heading, the “Art” subheading in the publication “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” is five times greater than the number of articles in the newspaper “Le Monde” in the corresponding heading “Culture”, subsection “Art”, for the same period; 2) the number of coded components prevails in the titles of articles in a Russianlanguage newspaper; 3) among the coded components, proxemes prevail in the articles of both newspapers.

Le Phare de Bayonne and La Sentinelle des Pyrénées: two french newspaper’s crossed views upon the spanish news of the year 1838

Réalisé dans le cadre d’une enquête sur les correspondants de guerre pendant la première guerre carliste, cet article s’appuie sur le dépouillement de l’actualité espagnole présentée dans le journal Le Phare de Bayonne en 1838 et la même actualité traitée par son rival, La Sentinelle des Pyrénées, principalement durant le dernier trimestre de l’année 1838. L’auteur se livre à une analyse comparée des informations à propos de deux ensembles d’évènements à sensation en lien avec la première guerre carliste. D’une part, venant d’Autriche incognito, l’arrivée de la princesse de Beira dans les provinces basques et son mariage avec le prétendant Don Carlos de Bourbon (Charles V d’Espagne). D’autre part, la multiplication des massacres de prisonniers de guerre des deux côtés et leurs représailles, justifiées par des proclamations militaires et des lettres publiées dans la presse. En dépit de la Convention Elliot signée en 1835, ces atteintes aux droits humains étaient portées par un contexte de violence des milieux populaires, qu’il s’agisse des libéraux ou des carlistes. L’auteur montre comment l’opposition idéologique entre les deux journaux les amène à privilégier des informations différentes et à pratiquer deux formes distinctes de journalisme.

Rel Topic : A graph-based semantic relatedness measure in topic ontologies and its applicability for topic labeling of old press articles

Graph-based semantic measures have been used to solve problems in several domains. They tend to compare semantic entities in order to estimate their similarity or relatedness. While semantic similarity is applicable to hierarchies or taxonomies, semantic relatedness is adapted to ontologies. In this work, we propose a novel semantic relatedness measure, named Rel Topic , within topic ontologies for topic labeling purposes. In contrast to traditional measures, which are dependent on textual resources, Rel Topic considers semantic properties of entities in ontologies. Thus, correlations of nodes and weights of nodes and edges are assessed. The pertinence of Rel Topic is evaluated for topic labeling of old press articles. For this purpose, a topic ontology representing the articles, named Topic-OPA, is derived from open knowledge graphs by applying a SPARQL-based automatic approach. A use-case is presented in the context of the old French newspaper Le Matin. The generated topics are evaluated using a dual evaluation approach with the help of human annotators. Our approach shows an agreement quite close to that shown by humans. The entire approach’s reuse is demonstrated for labeling a different context of articles, recent (modern) newspapers.

A Darwinian Murder: The Role of the Barré-Lebiez Affair in the Diffusion of Darwinism in Nineteenth-Century France

Most studies on the reception of Darwinism in France focus on the scientific community. This essay investigates the popular press. Widely discussed in French newspapers in 1878, Darwinism was connected with a sensational murder case in which two well-educated young men, Aimé Barré and Paul Lebiez, killed an elderly woman. Before his arrest, Lebiez had given a public lecture on the Darwinian “struggle for life.” Competing factions of the press explicitly linked the case with Darwinism to advance either conservative or republican political agendas, which brought Darwinism into the public eye. This essay argues that Charles Darwin’s instrumentalization was decisive in spreading his theory in French society. That same year, the Academy of Sciences elected Darwin to membership after six failed attempts.

Gender Imbalance in the Media: Time Lag or Hysteresis?—French Newspapers, Gender Parity Shocks, and the Long and Winding Road to the Demasculinization of Political Reporting (1990–2020)

A large corpus of scientific literature details how the media generates an imbalance in their portrayal of society and thus contributes to the reproduction of extant power structures, particularly gender. However, there has been scant attention paid to understanding how the media adapt to changes in the social environment, especially with power structures modified by exogenous shocks such as new laws requiring gender parity in politics. This study examines how such shocks affected gender imbalance in the coverage of politics in France between 1990 and 2020. It highlights the shortcomings of an overly linear approach to the time lag effect in understanding the parameters and substance of gender imbalance in political news and advocates instead for utilizing the concept of gender imbalance hysteresis to understand why media stories do not demasculinize as quickly as the gender composition of Parliament.

Conflits sur/dans la langue: perspectives linguistiques, argumentatives et discursives by Geneviève Bernard Barbeau, Franz Meier and Sabine Schwarze

Reviewed by: Conflits sur/dans la langue: perspectives linguistiques, argumentatives et discursives by Geneviève Bernard Barbeau, Franz Meier and Sabine Schwarze Samira Hassa Bernard Barbeau, Geneviève, Franz Meier, et Sabine Schwarze, éd. Conflits sur/dans la langue: perspectives linguistiques, argumentatives et discursives. Peter Lang, 2021. ISBN 978-3-631-83778-8. Pp. 232. This book offers ten chapters on French language controversies in contexts such as films, stores, Wikipedia, the media, and more. The first chapter, by Schwarze, diachronically analyzes the terminology used to describe linguistic debates, referred to as polémique, querelle, débat, and discussion. Schwarze notes that the term débat entered Old French in the twelfth century from the verb débattre and gained the meaning of dispute in the thirteenth century. Vanessa Wettengl analyzed more than 300 reactions published in the Québec press and on social media on the Québec French used in the film Mommy by Canadian director Xavier Dolan. She reports that supporters of Québécois criticized the use of French subtitles in the film because Québécois can be understood by all Francophones and the use of subtitles reinforces the hierarchical view of French from France as the standard, superior variety. Others criticized the variety of Québécois used in the film as exaggerated and not “authentic,” devaluing the language of Québec. Still in Québec, Bernard Barbeau and Chiara Molinari examined the bilingual greeting Bonjour/Hi used by store owners in downtown Montréal. The greeting was criticized by language authorities as a form of assimilation that aims to do away with French while others characterized it as a “charmant” (66) greeting that reflects the bilingual city of Montréal. Ideological views of French in Québec are also addressed in Meier’s chapter examining the call for a boycott of the sports brand Adidas after the manager, a Francophone Québécois, used mostly English in his speech at the opening ceremony of the Adidas store in Montreal. This was viewed as a lack of respect for Québec Francophones. The media debate around gender-inclusive grammar is discussed in Stefano Vicari’s chapter analyzing headlines in the French newspapers Le Figaro and Le Monde. The author reports on the ongoing polemic on gender-inclusive writing in France, with some feminists perceiving it as a linguistic shift that could improve women’s status and rights while others see it as a “manœuvre d’intimidation idéologique” (148). Vicari found that 38% of headlines in Le Monde and 48% in Le Figaro are against gender-inclusive writing. Bettina Eiber and Ursula Reutner examine Wikipedia controversies, reporting that, although Wikipedia is a collaborative writing platform, insults are minimal at the site and discussions among contributors are often professional and engaging. This collection of chapters is worth reading, although some chapters devote too much [End Page 228] space to introducing the topic and to general information rather than providing more data and analysis of study results. Québec is given quite a bit of space, which is a positive change, as the focus is often on France. Including other Francophone countries would have rounded out the scope of the book. [End Page 229] Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

The Mapping Turk: Human Judgment Driving Algorithms to Visualise Twitter During the 2022 French Presidential Election

Abstract I had the occasion of visualising the French political Twitter just before the presidential election of 2022, in collaboration with other researchers and the journalists of the French newspaper Le Monde. In this paper, I reflect on this case in an auto-ethnographic style to open the black box of visual network analysis and expose the entangled dialogue between human expertise and computation. I contend that the visualisation’s validity does not root in mechanical objectivity because human judgement was involved at multiple levels, even though that work is not visible in the produced image itself. Like the proverbial “mechanical Turk”, a 18th century chess-playing automaton actually hiding a human player, this big data visualisation hides a reliance on man-made decisions. I first present the origin and social dynamic of this project, I document the methodology employed, I unpack what the map represents, and I explain how to read it (that section is incidentally relevant to the reader interested in French politics). I then return to the question of human judgment to expose in detail how the map was shaped by a negotiation between the journalists from Le Monde, my own research agenda, our methodological commitments, the algorithms employed, and the constraints imposed by the data themselves.