Les Echos (France)

French newspaper

Les Echos (lez‿eko) is the first daily French financial newspaper, founded in 1908 by brothers Robert and Émile Servan Schreiber. Owned by LVMH, it has an economic liberal stance and "defend[s] the idea that market is superior to plan". Les Echos is the main competitor of La Tribune, a rival financial paper. Les Echos was sold to Pierre and Jacqueline Beytout in 1963, who had only one objective: to make the newspaper a "genuine" economic daily with an international perspective. However, the French government did not appreciate that Jacqueline Beytout sold Les Echos group to a foreign group, in particular the Minister of the Economy and Finance Édouard Balladur, who vehemently opposed the sale, stating at the beginning of 1988 that "the communitarian character of the Pearson group is not sustainably established today". In September 2003, Les Echos switched from tabloid format to Berliner format. In 2004, the newspaper won the EPICA award. In 2006, the turnover of Les Echos was 126.2 million euros (US$167.5 million in 2023). In 2010, the coverage of Les Echos was expanded to cover such topics as innovations in science, technologies, green growth, medicine and health and skills concerning marketing and advertising, management, education, strategy and leadership, law and finance. In 2013, the newspaper started a project called LesEchos360, a business news aggregation platform. In March 2023, Arnault fired Les Echos editor in chief, Nicolas Barré, which sparked a protest among journalists.

Les Echos has an economic liberal stance and is published on weekdays. According to one of the former managing editors, Jacques Barraux, "the orientation of the journal is essentially economic liberal: we defend the idea that market is superior to plan. Consequently, we believe that private enterprise is the most effective tool, even if it is not the only one." In 2017, the society of Les Echos journalists also protested against the censorship of an interview with left wing politician François Ruffin in a press release, forcing the managing editor to justify himself publicly, claiming that he did not want to give publicity to someone who was "denigrating their newspaper in terms that are not in the realm of debate which is legitimate but systematically caricatured". Arnault was heard in January 2022 by the Senate committee investigating media concentration. He said: "If tomorrow Les Echos defended Marxist economics, I would be extremely embarrassed." Les Echos has opposed the left wing coalition in the 2022 French legislative elections. The 2009 circulation of the paper was 127,000 copies. In 2020, the newspaper had a total circulation of 135,196 copies.