Olivier Royant, Paris Match July 29, 1998 I wanted to be a journalist when I was fourteen or thirteen. I grew up in a Paris suburb. Actually, my family is from the west coast of France, from Brittany. We are the Celtic people. We are not real French. We are these people who look like Irish or Scottish. So I guess I worked on a newspaper in my high school and then I tried to--(incomprehensible). Basically, at that time the French government had a monopoly on the radio stations and there was a grassroots movement that tried to deregulate the radio industry. So basically what we did, we went to Italy, we were on the radio and we bought this broadcast machine and we went back to Paris and we tried to--we started broadcasting a radio program in Paris. The government was freaking out. You had all these young teens. Today, 20 years later, almost 20 years later, 15 years later it’s a very profitable business that creates tons of jobs. We have ninety-nine hundred private radio stations in France. That’s how I got into the journalism business, through the radio. Because all the editorial staff, we were reporting to the news in Paris. We had no clue, we had no press card, we were out doing interviews and we were trying to focus on angles that big stations were not covering. That’s how I did it. I was a journalist before learning how to be a journalist. But at the same time, I happened to have full intention of going to study in Paris. It’s called the IET on the (incomprehensible). My majors, they were economics and history. So, I was 21, I guess, 22, and I was a reporter for a TV station in the south of France for two months and then I got the possibility of doing a period of training at Paris Match. It was August 1984 and I never left Paris Match. I stayed there, I did a couple of stories during that summer, and then I started working with them after I graduated from school. In ’86, I covered the news in Africa and Asia and then in 1987 I was a reporter, a U.S. correspondent for Paris Match. I stayed in New York. I stayed 10 years in the U.S. covering the news out of New York and I was a member of the White House press corps. I’m still a member of the White House correspondents association. I covered the United Nations, too, and basically for Paris Match I covered all the news in the U.S. and also in South America. And what I found three years ago was, I was a little disappointed. I don’t know, maybe I had been doing this job for too long. I started very early, and I say, I want to go back to school. So, I was frustrated at what had been happening at some of the media groups, BBC. (Incomprehensible) say, you don’t know anything about numbers so you cannot pretend having a word to say on the way business is conducted in your company. So I think, all right, I always dreamed of going to university, I wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to be part of this school of enlightenment. It was too late because I was already a journalist, so I decided on an MBA. So I followed the MBA program for three years and I graduated last August of 1997. (Incomprehensible). We said all right, we wanted to go back to France because BBC was making an offer we couldn’t refuse. So I went back in early January after 10 years in the U.S. Basically, what’s my job? My job is, I’m the number two of the magazine. Who is the number one? The number one is (incomprehensible). He created the magazine in 1949. He’s 75, 74 years old. He has been the charismatic figure at Paris Match over the last 50 years. Basically, he has been doing this magazine on a weekly basis for 50 years and now it is time he’s trying to retire so they have brought a new guy. Some people say that I will be number one in two years. I mean, I don’t want to (incomprehensible) that because they have all these candidates from French or German magazines. What I’m doing right now is just my job. It’s--what I used to do, I used to be a reporter. I used to manage myself and a little staff in New York--we are four of us, two photographers, one assistant and one picture editor and one trainee on the West Coast. Now, I have to manage like 115 people and it’s a weekly magazine so things can go fast but in the long run, I’m trying as best I can to do this. So, a little background on Paris Match. Paris Match is like an institution in France. It was created, as I told you, in 1949. It appeared in a period of history in France that was quite hectic. Because, you know, the tramautic events in World War II with the fact that a lot of media and newspapers collaborated with the German army during World War II, so basically when the new government came back from London at the end of World War II, they said, all right, we don’t want to have the old press. They were with the enemy. Now we’re going to create a brand-new press. A lot of new magazines and new publications emerged from World War II. So that’s when Paris Match was being born. The main thing is, the concept has not changed. The concept has not changed. It’s a mixture of pictures and text. It’s plenty of pictures and plenty of double pages. That really didn’t exist in many magazines. We were the only magazine in the world that featured double pages with subtitles and text. And then you have these pages of text. So that’s really the mix that existed in 1949. And at that time, the magazine’s circulation was two million and increased very, very high, because the French T.V. was very weak and so the only way people could have access to the rest of the world was through the pictures and through the reporting of Paris Match. At that time, Paris Match was really ruling the world. It would send people all over the place. There were always people in Asia and Africa-- everywhere. We had a staff of 16 people in New York. Paris Match circulation went down between ’68 and ’72, for some reason. I guess at that time T.V. was stronger or maybe new competition was starting in France, so Paris Match went down to 300,000 between ’68 and ’72, which was very, very low. In the ’50s, in some villages, you would have the name of the village and the number of readers of Paris Match. Paris Match was so influential. After the ’70s, something happened in France. Maybe Paris Match would get more people again and more star and celebrity-oreinted. They were covering more princess stories, they were covering more movie stories. And Paris Match lost a lot of pages in terms of covering the news and focusing on celebrity stories. In ’76 there was a new order and the week (incomprehensible). Now, die. And the largest special issue and right away Paris Match went back to one million copies that week. So it was very, very (incomprehensible). And that week Paris Match went up to 1.2, and right now, last week’s special issue was sold at 1.1 million copies. And most of the time we are between 860 and 900,000 copies a week, which is quite big if you consider the population of France. And if you compare Time or Newsweek’s circulation to Paris Match, it’s quite big. So what happened--let’s go now to the present. Princess Diana died last year in Paris. Paris Match was caught in the turmoil in terms of (incomprehensible). We had been doing people stories for a long time. The whole French press became more people oriented, more entertainment reading. The same issues as in the United States now the news has to focus on people. So name creates news. And certainly the death of Princess Diana had a very important impact on the press, on the French press in particular because suddenly (incomprehensible). What's going to happen? Oh, you used to put her on the cover 20 times a year no, I'm exaggerating 10 times a year, what's going to happen? And people started to back up with this trend from the press and at the end of last year we had a (incomprehensible) meeting and we started pushing the magazine to go back to where it was departing from the celebrity of the stories to more reports, reportage, like what we used to do in the '60s. And so far, we have several issues that are very good, but the verdict may shift again in six months or one year from now when they forget about the accident. So, we are in this very, very complex environment and I think the fact that Paris Match is being published is very hopeful because we should have died like Life magazine. Life magazine no longer exists anymore. It was a news magazine with wonderful stories that was being published month to month and (incomprehensible) which is probably relevant. Paris Match survived because I think French television is very weak in those days and even right now when for example advertising revenues are decreasing for the TV and are increasing for magazines like Paris Match and other publications. So, we are doing well sometimes not because of our own job but because of the weakness of the French TV. It's much weaker than the U.S. networks are, that's really destroyed this kind of magazine. What is our point? Our point is that we are a general interest magazine. Half of the people who read Paris Match are from the left, half are from the right. Fifty-four percent are women, 46 percent are men. We cover all the political spectrum, we cover all the social spectrum and that is a very, very uncomfortable situation because right now I went back from the U.S. two weeks ago and there have been six magazines that have been launched on the beanies. You know the beanies? Those little toys for kids? Six magazines have been launched on the beanies which means that this business is becoming extraordinarily focused on Ty and we are not focused on Ty. We have to cover the whole world for the whole population and that's basically why it is so difficult to make Paris Match succeed. And for the group Paris Match is part of this group called Hachette Filipachi magazines. Its total circulation is the largest publication company in the world. We have about 30 publications in the U.S. Premiere, George magazine, Elle, Mirabella, Boating, Car and Driver. In France we have Paris Match, we have several daily newspapers in the south of France also, we have the equivalent of the Sunday Times (incomprehensible), and we have Elle, we have Premiere. In Asia, same thing. We are present in China, we have Car and Driver in China, we have Elle in Beijing and we have Women's Day in Beijing. And Women's Day is a magazine also in the U.S. But basically, in the U.S. and in the rest of the world, the group is all these segments that are very, very special interest magazines. We are the only one that has to deal with the future, Paris Match, because that is where we are (incomprehensible). Student question: Are there pressures, advertising-wise, or from the people owning the magazine? OR:It's very interesting because I came in to this management job from journalism which means I was most critical of that pressure. Sometimes I would like more pressure because I wouldn't get so along at the magazine. The kind of pressure that is most common is, at the magazine we have the large Paris section. For example, food, cooking, decoration. What we try to do, the kind of pressure we're receiving is that the person who is advertising in the magazine would like to know when is going to be the issue of Christmas gifts. That's the kind of pressure we deal with. So we tell them, okay, around the first week of November, that's going to be our issue on Christmas gifts. That's the kind of pressure. We have this problem this week, a very interesting case. Paris Match is part of a big conglomerate. Half is about weapons and missiles and the other half is media. Last week, that half merged with Aerospecial, which is the largest airplane and helicopter company in France. So we said, are we going to cover this, because basically we cover the major news in France and all the newspapers run the full story, front-page story. So we have this problem. Are we going to talk about the future of our company? So what we did was we interviewed the military to provide us with some view of the future. The issue is coming out tomorrow with a picture of our boss and the people who were involved in the merger, but we have a very neutral story. That may be the best way to approach this story because it happened backstage and the daily newspapers had the competitive edge. We knew they were going to print the story before us. So in this instance we remain neutral. What the pressure we feel is we are not left, we are not right. We tend to stick to the French society, so we are not going to go after the president very much. Most of the time, we remain, at this level, very consensual. I would expect there to be more pressure. Basically, every week we have 80 pages to close in a matter of seven or eight hours and we get everything done. Student question: You were talking about magazines that have very specialized topics. When you're advertising in those magazines it's easy to know who you're catering to. So with your magazine that appeals to a wide range of people, how do you sell ads and who are they looking to target? OR:There is a difference between advertising revenue in the U.S. and advertising revenue in France. In the U.S., 70 percent of revenue for magazines comes from advertising and 30 percent comes from newsstand. You put 60 magazines on a newsstand in New York, on Broadway, and you're going to sell 20 magazines. So basically, you're not making money on newsstand. You're making money on ads. In France, it's a totally opposite equation. We make money on newsstand. We sell one million copies, we sell 700,000 on newsstand and 200,000 by subscription. Our ad revenues are only 20 percent of all our revenues. The ad market is much stronger in the U.S., so traditionally, a magazine like George magazine, whatever they put on the cover or in the magazine, it won't survive more than two years because (incomprehensible.) That's not the case in France. The market is not as strong here. DA: Why is that? Could you speculate? What is the nature of French society and French business that makes the ad market the way it is? OR:That is something that's also that comes from the war. What was the assumption in 1944 when they were reorganizing this new media and this new magazine and newspaper business? Every magazine has the right to be distributed in the press, which means that if you create a magazine tomorrow and you decide you are going to praise right, you will have to be distributed as well as Paris Match because there is a national registry of magazines and everybody has the right to be distributed, which is not the case in the U.S. Everybody's competing to have their magazine next to the cashier in the supermarket, some people go in and remove the competition and put your magazine in the desirable space, which is not the case in France. At the beginning, we had this (incomprehensible) approach. DA: We also noticed that compared to American magazines, which tend to be 50 percent advertising, 50 percent editorial, at least in the issues of Paris Match that we looked at, there seem to be very few— OR: Paris Match is organized so that you have 10 pages at the beginning where you have advertising and 10 pages at the end where you have advertising and then the hot news advertising that's part of the (incomprehensible). So that's why also we have to sell on newsstand, but on the other end, the fact that we are ad-free causes us to sell our double-page advertising very efficiently. Of course, our ad people would like Paris Match to have some of its pages inside be ads, but we're not there yet. It may happen, but it's a big struggle, a very big struggle for integrity, I guess. We don't want to do this right not. DA: Will you seem to be affected by the ban of tobacco advertising? OR: Not really. We were, but we have so few pages that we can find something else to fill in. I think some other industries will be much more affected. Student question: Inaudible OR: That was major news in 1995, '96. Everybody knew the story in France. Every journalist knew that Francois Mitterand had a (incomprehensible). She was traveling with him on official trips, she was having dinner at (incomprehensible), she was staying in an apartment at the expense of the French taxpayers, and so on. The traditional way is not participating in the life of our public servants, or at least in the members of government, so no one would say anything. There was a complicity among the Parisian world, inside the Parisian beltway, not to say anything. And one day, these photographers saw Francois Mitterand coming out of this wonderful bistro with her, and thought that Paris Match was the only place to run the story. But I think the decision to run the story was in part because Francois Mitterand was going to leave the Parliament in a matter of months. I am not sure that we would have run the story knowing that Francois Mitterand had still 12 years to go in the Parliament. I think it was daring for Paris Match. There was a major conspiracy. I had friends at the New York Times, at ABC News say will you write me a story about the situation in the U.S. For Americans, the idea of not knowing the number of children that their president had was something that was totally out of whack. And that was the case. Basically, we are not allowed to know (incomprehensible). The number of his kids. So there was a major story. I think if this kind of thing happens again, we won't wait 15 years to print the story. But we know that you can ask a person in Paris, they know situations about mistresses, they know rumors about the president and in France, that's talked about. There was a feeling at Paris Match that if he had made a regiment for his succession, we should be able to do some issue. We should know about it before the public because you may have to change the (incomprehensible). So the president knew that Paris Match was already closed, so the president knew about the story Monday night after we were closed. Somebody went to see him with the double page. His reaction was, he said it was a very nice picture. In Mitterand language, that means a lot. It was not a red light, it was not a green light, but orange. Student question: How did the people respond to that? OR: It's a very elitist society where if you imagine Diane Sawyer being married to to (incomprehensible) in the U.S. I mean, this world, the world of politics and the world of journalism, of media totally mix in France. It's a very weird situation. Sometimes I had issues with that in the U.S., the frontier between politics and media. They have gone to the same schools, they go to the same places. The people don't know. In Paris, you had maybe 2,000 or 3,000, but for the rest, it was a major shock. And it was very well-accepted. They just believed that he was the father and they took care of her for the first 15 or 16 years of her life and suddenly, the answer to this controversy came the day that Mitterand died because at the funeral service, there was the daughter, the illegitimate daughter, and the wife standing next to each other. Can you imagine what it would have been like if we had followed the principle of the French press? The public would have discovered that Francois Mitterand had an illegitimate daughter the day of his funeral service. DA: That picture I believe it ran on the front page of the New York Times. OR: That's what's amazing that you could see these two families, the legitimate family and the shadow family being together. DA: Do you guys remember that picture? It seemed sort of normal. It was a grieving wife and a grieving daughter. It was like, what's wrong with this picture? DA: Would it be out of the realm of possibility for someone like you to someday enter the realm of politics? Would that be out of the question? OR: No, it would be possible. Student question: Inaudible OR: What happens is that what is interesting in the life of Paris Match, of course, is that the difference between Paris Match and other magazines like Time and Newsweek is that basically if you work at Time or Newsweek each of us is going to run one service or one to two pages. At Paris Match, it changes. If we believe in a story, we can run 20 pages on it. If we don't believe in it, it's just going to get canceled. So, if your story on politics is not really very good this week, we might cancel it. You might be working on a two page story and suddenly it has to be eight pages. So it's a major difference. We're working in a swinging environment. So what happens is that we close on Monday night. If something happens on Tuesday morning when we're just finishing the closing of the magazine, we can do something. We can forget about what we did on Monday night and print something else Tuesday morning on very short notice. Then the magazine publishes on Thursday morning. What we do on Tuesday afternoon is we have a conference and we are talking about the next issue. Then we are sending people on assignments on Wednesday and Thursday. Most of the time Wednesday morning is being lost because we are trying to forget about our night on Monday night. Wednesday is a period of adjustment. Thursday we are planning the next issue. What is difficult for Paris Match is that we have people working on Saturday and Sunday because our deadline is on Monday. So from a personal point of view, you have to deal with people working on the weekend. DA: Sports Illustrated does that. Their weekend is Tuesday and Wednesday. Do you go into the office every Saturday and Sunday? OR: Sometimes. Most of the time. Most of the time, what is really critical for Paris Match is, on Saturday and Sunday, are there people on the job? We could do it from a restaurant if we had three or four phone lines and a computer. Because at that time we are in the news gathering process. We have the cultural department, we have a style section, we have a political department, we have economy pages and otherwise we have people who are covering general news and also people departments. But sometimes we can move people from one department to another. DA: How many people report directly to you? OR: A hundred and fifty. A director, who is running a department of 10 people, they report to him and he reports to me. DA: I guess a better question would be, you have lieutenants and they all report to you, but is the way magazines are managed in France, does that mean that all of the 150 people feel that they have direct access to you? OR: Historically, that's the way we have operated. We have a very low degree of hierarchy. We make decisions but it's an open-door policy. Anyone can come to my office and complain. That's what they do, actually. Student question: So most of the staff are staff writers and not contributing writers? OR: We have contributing writers. We have about 120 people on staff and 30 contributing writers. The difference between Paris Match and other magazines is that also we have to be in the market for the news pictures. That's a very important market. You have news agencies like Reuters, like (incomprehensible).Take, for example, the Kosovo fighting. Right now, we're trying to know who is the best in Kosovo. It's vacation week, so the agencies many people may die in Kosovo but nobody cares this week because most of the agency photographers are on vacation, so they didn't send pictures. We are trying to get the pictures back to print in Paris Match next week. We are buying pictures every week. Every week we have a picture budget of about $100,000. Which is a lot. So for example, if an event takes place, people expect to see it in Paris Match. You expect to see the best picture in Paris Match. So what's going to happen is we will have to buy everything. If there were 15 photographers taking pictures of Mitterand's daughter, we would have bought the 15 to make sure that-- We have to struggle with this on a daily basis, so that makes us different. We have to be picture-oriented all the time. If you come up with a good story, if the picture is not good, if the visual is not good, you don't end up with a very strong story. If the pictures aren't good, we aren't going to run an eight-page story. The visual aspects of Paris Match are very, very important. Student question: When you look five or 10 years down the line, what does the future look like for general interest magazines like Paris Match when more magazines are going to specialized markets? OR: I'm trying to be optimistic. I would love to say that there will be a future, that of course Paris Match is like a bullet train, not a bullet train, but an old train, so it would take years for Paris Match to slow down. But right now, we are not making progress. At the end of the year, when your circulation is flat, you are happy because you maintain your level, but we are not making any progress. This is a saturated market. As a consumer, my favorite magazine is Conde Nast Traveler or something, I'm not buying. I can feel the French consumer is moving more toward the special-interest magazines. We are eroding very, very, very slowly. So slowly that we don't even notice it, but even if we lose maybe 1 percent every year, I don't think that we can endure. So what's going to happen is we are aware of that. We are going to capitalize on the brand. Paris Match is a very strong brand. So what happens, for example, is that one of the first things I did, because it didn't cost anything, was I put the web address on the cover of Paris Match. Some people said, why are you doing this? I said, why not? It doesn't cost anything. The web site gets maybe 80,000 hits a week, a day, sorry, a day, which is very big in France. It allows us to have access to young customers, young readers that do not buy Paris Match because it is for more mature, not mature, but an older audience. It's not going to be that the circulation is not going to progress, so the Paris Match brand is going to weaken in five or 10 years. We're going to have a TV program, we are publishing books, we have a Spanish edition, after September we will have a Russian edition that's being launched in Moscow, so the loss in circulation has to be compensated by an expectation of capitalization on this brand. People trust this magazine because it has been in business for 50 years, so we want to launch a Paris Match medium, a product line. So that's what we're trying to do. (Inaudible). We are serving people in the U.S. and Time and Newsweek are reporting the same news. Look at People magazine. They also have to create Teen People to make sure to capture a new audience and the special interest. DA: (Inaudible) OR: Basically, the magazine and also you can go on the web site and get the issue from your date of birth the archives. But at this point, it's not a big web site. But for example, we publish on Thursday and you can go on the web site on Wednesday night, and there is already the news. (Inaudible, brief discussion of web.) Student question: I'm wondering if there is a possibility that, despite what the trends toward specialization are saying, maybe there is a need for a publication that can appeal to people on a broad level and maybe that kind of publication could thrive in a market that's so fragmented. Maybe it could position itself as a magazine can kind of look on a broad scope and comment on the common moments among people. OR: The problem at the moment is the Paris Match is very, very expensive. And if you want to be good, you have to put that money into it. (Inaudible). I don't think you can make a general interest magazine that's not expensive, whereas you can make a special interest publication that's not expensive at all. Student question: (Inaudible). OR: I think that would be what Life magazine has been doing on a monthly basis, basically they are focusing on pictures. There will be one text from time to time, or maybe two texts, but basically they are becoming a photo magazine. There are already photo magazines in France. DA: Life magazine is not photojournalism anymore. It's all sentiment, nostalgia. OR: It's almost special-interest about nostalgia and sentiment. DA: For melancholy 50-year-old matrons. Student question: What's your ratio between art and actual copy in the magazine now? How much is photography and how much is actual words? OR: I would say 65/35. (Inaudible). DA: There's something you said a few moments ago that kind of reminded me of a conversation I've had with other editors. You're in a position that a fair number of other editors are in also, depending on their magazine, and that is you are the editor of this magazine, you are the creator of this magazine, and yet you, as a person, with a collection of ideologies and interests, are not really the person that this magazine is edited for. You are not really a reader of this magazine. OR: No, no. There have been situations where I've been working for them for a long time, 14 years, and when I was a correspondent I would write a story and what happened was that I would spend the week watching the people who read Paris Match. I would be on the plane and I would be watching the people read my story. For example, I was on the plane last year and there was this woman and she was reading a story, but 15 minutes later she was still reading the story, and I thought, what's going on? Or somebody next to you is reading and they're laughing. And I'm just fascinated with this process. I'm fascinated with the relationship with the consumer. And you don't have to be now, like all the other French people I'm a big fan of football, of soccer, but I was not then. I became fascinated with them just like everybody else. So you do not have to be this kind of, the customer, to be interested in the process. The thing is, you have to be very careful because when you talk to your parents, when you talk to people around you, if they tell you, oh, yes, that's interesting, you have to be careful because you have to forget right away about your feelings. If three people in the morning tell you, everyone was talking about this, you know at a restaurant in Paris three tables were talking about the issue, it had to be Paris Match. You know that now the Tour de France is a major story about these athletes getting steroids. Everybody's talking about a small story that became a big story. You know it had to be Paris Match. So I think you are compensating for the fact that you are not a consumer by trying to keep your ears open all the time. It's a way to be sensitive. That's how I think of it. We are running a special story on the last dynasties of the early 20th century. Where did the oil magnates go on vacation? Where did (incomprehensible) go on vacation? Where (incomprehensible) go on vacation, before the war? I am not supposed to read this, but actually, now I am really getting interested in this. Student question: (Inaudible). OR: I am a typical journalist, I am not supposed to be a good manager, which means we are egoistical. I have difficulties running my life, I have difficulties running just one individual life and now I have to deal with 150, and I found out that you have born managers and not born managers. I think I am a born journalist, I am not a born manager. If something happens in five minutes, I know I'll get the story. I mean, there is no way someone is going to beat me on this thing. But running 150 people is not my stuff. But it's a challenge because journalists are not supposed to be good managers and that's what the administration, that's what the people in the field want to hear. So I went back to school and did this MBA because the assumption was that journalists don't know anything about numbers, they don't know to crunch numbers, they know to spend money. They don't know to save it and they don't know to prioritize. I think it's a bad assumption. I think journalists should be informed of the life of the magazine. Journalists should be informed of the daily life of the magazine. We shouldn't have people coming from the (incomprehensible) industry and other companies running our magazine. There is a big difference between the content of a magazine and the content of the problem of Coke. I mean, this is a life of a people that you're reading. What you are printing is very important. When you make a mistake I would tell you years ago about the woman, she wrote to my boss and she said, you know, you made a big mistake, you wrote that Reno was the capital city of Nevada. I'm a teacher in the south of Florida and this is not true. The capital city of Nevada is Carson City. Well, it may not be important, but for her it was important, so you have to be careful to any work. Our situation is no different than a surgeon who have to listen to some gray suit man to tell them what kind of scissors to buy, what kind of scalpels to buy. We are in the same situation. The surgeon and the journalists in magazines and newspapers are in the same situation. We have to be informed also in the business aspect of the magazine. Because the world is changing. It's very different than the way it was 15 years ago. Now, you have to informed in business issues because where are you going to put your money? Are you just going to spend, or are you prioritizing much better? I guess I forgot the question.