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AUGUST/SEPTEMBER The Linguist 15
proofread each article before it is published on any of
our platforms, including Le Monde in English. We work
closely with our Los Angeles bureau, which takes over
from 10pm to 6am Paris time.
Since 2013, a Le Monde journalist has been running
the French website during French nights from a country
in a convenient time zone. LeMonde.fr has been running
24/7 for almost 10 years thanks to this system. In 2015,
for example, I went to San Francisco for six months and
worked 2pm-10pm local time, which corresponds to
11pm-7am French time. At the end of 2016, we decided
to invest even more in this model and opened the LA
bureau, where about five people work every 'night'.
This means we have fresh and up-to-date websites at
all times.
Most of the time, the English version publishes stories
after they have been published in French. As far as
breaking news and scoops go though, we publish at the
same time. Both websites published the results of the
presidential election at 8pm sharp on election night. Like
any other Le Monde publication, we work closely with
the wider Le Monde team: we attend daily and weekly
editorial meetings, and are aware of the main stories the
French side is working on and any potential scoops.
My job is basically to make sure our homepage (what
we publish daily) reflects the main news stories of the
day, as well as the main stories published on the French
side. Everyone on the team is involved in making sure
the site is up to date and looks great.
24/7 translation needs
We work with translation agencies that have translators
all over the world, as we need them to be able to work
on articles at any time of day or night. We send machine-
translated articles for them to post-edit and return within
a few hours or a few days, depending on the type of
article (news or magazine) and the topic (urgent or
'colder'). The in-house team also occasionally works
directly from machine-translated articles when we need a
story published within one or two hours.
As for future developments, Le Monde in English
has a lot of potential, and that is also why this project
is so exciting. One of the things we want to be able
to do is publish different formats (not just text and
pictures but also maps and video, for example). We
just launched our Instagram account and we're working
on an app.
Interview by Miranda Moore
MODES OF
INFORMATION
A reader takes in the
French-language
newspaper (left); and
(below) another
accesses the English-
language online
version on their tablet
IMAGES
©
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