L’Equipe, a turning point in sports journalism
How does sports journalism take the digital turn to not stay behind and be able to evolve?
Since the beginning of the 2000s, newspapers have experienced a period of unprecedented crisis in this field, due to the increase in Internet usage. From 2008 to 2019, the sale of paper newspapers has decreased sharply by about 24% (Wikipedia; 2020; https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presse_en_France).While the consumption of digital news and newspapers has increased by 15% in 3 years (Statistica, 2017). That’s why more and more newspapers and journalists rely heavily on digital, by creating their own website in which they published the newspaper but in a digital way.
We are going to focus on one French newspaper named l’Équipe, which is a newspaper treating subjects about sports in general (basket, football, global competition…). It is a weekly newspaper, meaning that it is sold every week. Available in paper format and in digital format with a website and a mobile application.
The first difference between the website and the paper format is that the paper format is available only once a week. But on the website, there are articles every day according to the sports that are treated. The second difference between the website and the newspaper is that the newspaper can only treat about few sports because of the number of page and the price of ink. Whereas online it’s possible to find articles about more than thirty sports, and those one are very precise according to the sport, and its actuality. There is also the chance to have real time information for example for a football match and every day “À la Une” articles are available.
The business model of the website is divided in different part. First of all, there is a free part, in this part the access to everything that has been described above, like the access to the “À la Une” articles… There are two monthly offers, one for young people aged 1 to 25 and another for people over 25. For both offers, the articles are available from 00:30, they have access to all the articles, but also to exclusive contents and before the covid there were subscribed meetings. Finally, there is a last offer that offers the advantages of the other offers. In addition to being delivered the paper newspaper every Saturday plus a magazine that is only available in paper format.
The newspaper is present on the three main social networks, Twitter (5.3 million followers), Facebook (4.3 million) and Instagram (1.9 million), and they have a large following on these. However, they do not communicate in the same way on each, for example on twitter where they are the most followed, they propose all the articles that the site but in addition they publish the previews for the subscribers. On Facebook, the articles that are available to all are highlighted. Finally, on Instagram only the photos of the articles are put forward. On Twitter and Facebook, it is not the articles themselves that are published but the title of the article with the URL to access it. The URL refers to the L’Equipe website on the article directly and they accompany the title and the URL with the photo of the article.
Let’s see if like the other newspaper, L’Équipe has been touched by the crisis. Like the others, from 1999 to 2020 the newspaper l’Équipe has decreased its number of paper newspapers sold by 47% (ACPM, 2020) which is huge in only 20 years. It has created in digital website in 2017. Today, L’Équipe is the number one media with 3 million unique visitors per day and 1.5 billion page views, 80% of which are on mobile (L’Équipe, 2019; https://www.lequipe.fr/Medias/Actualites/Le-site-de-l-equipe-fete-ses-20-ans/1141604) . This redesigned digital universe should allow them to continue to develop their audience and recruit new subscribers, who are more than 230,000 today (Blog; L’Équipe, 2019).
To conclude we can say that l’Équipe is a great example to illustrate the fact that online journalism is more convenient than the paper newspaper.
