Exit Eric Brunet, BFM wants to launch an 8 p.m. news show with Maxime Switek – Libération

Exit Eric Brunet, BFM wants to launch an 8 p.m. news show with Maxime Switek – Libération
Exit Eric Brunet, BFM TV wants to launch an 8 p.m. news show with Maxime Switek – Libération

According to information from “Le Monde” and “Parisien” on Tuesday, December 3, the new management of the channel owned by Rodolphe Saadé wishes to stop the opinion debates in the 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. time slot, to refocus it on news at from January.

Barely four months after its opening, Eric Brunet's café du commerce on BFM is already going out of business. Decision of the new management of the news channel (Fabien Namias and Jean-Philippe Baille), little customer of this choice of programming decided by his predecessors Marc-Olivier Fogiel and Hervé Béroud. Instead: information. Or a great JT presented by Maxime Switek, with reports, interviews and interventions from experts on set, according to information from Parisian a you Monde this Tuesday, December 3. The announcement of this new show was made in the morning at an editorial conference by Fabien Namias. This is a real paradigm shift, in reality: until then, at 8 p.m., the news channels rather played the counter-programming of the TF1 or 2 news by offering polemical fights (from “really false debates” or “falsely true”would have said Pierre Bourdieu) around the news of the day, inspired by the desperate success of Pro Hour on CNews. This time, BFM TV seems to want to play on the territory of Gilles Bouleau and Anne-Sophie Lapix.

From January 6, Maxime Switek will go down a few boxes in the schedule, from 9 a.m. to noon which he hosts daily until this new 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Will this future news show bring back the devastated audiences of BFM in this section? At this time, according to the ParisianBFMTV brings together some 215,000 viewers, or 1% audience share. This is even worse than what Laurent Ruquier achieved last year (244,000 viewers on average), again a back-to-school failure that was quickly dealt with. And it's still extremely far from the 845,000 Pascal Praud-zouzes of the channel next door (4.1% audience share). But BFM's audience is also dangerously close to Darius Rochebin's 186,000 fanatics on LCI (0.9% audience share). There is therefore an urgency, especially since it is an important crossroads for the calculation of the channel's total audiences. In November, BFM TV once again fell behind CNews. Bolloré's channel has an audience share of 3.1%, compared to 2.8% for Saadé's, according to Médiamétrie.

Eric Brunet recast as editorialist

The billionaire seems furious with these poor results if we are to believe the Letterwhich reported last week the soap passed by Rodolphe Saadé to the executive committee of its media branch (which also includes the Tribune, the Tribune Sunday or Provence). The boss of the shipowner CMA CGM would be dissatisfied with the slowness with which BFM TV is trying to get back on track. The channel has thus experienced around twenty departures in its editorial staff since the beginning of October, the result of a transfer clause (a mechanism which allows journalists to leave their media with compensation in the event of a change of shareholder) opened after the takeover by Saade. Among these departures, we find certain figures from the antenna such as the editorial director Philippe Corbé. He was replaced by Camille Langlade, who held the same position at BFM Régions.

And to reshape its schedule in January, the news channel has already attracted France 2 journalist Guillaume Daret, who will come to present BFM Politics on Sunday morning. Maxime Switek's change of show also opens the door to his replacement at the presentation of the Live, daily every morning: the job could go to Julie Hammett, returning from maternity leave, or to Alice Darfeuille. Eric Brunet, for his part, is not leaving the channel, and could be reassigned to a position as an editorialist. Finally, the start of 2025 should definitely not be easy for BFM, since the channel will also have to deal with the probable change in the numbering of DTT. Despite the efforts of Nicolas de Tavernost (vice-president of CMA Média) to escape it, Arcom seems well on its way to creating a block of news channels by bringing together LCI (channel 26) and Franceinfo (27) of BFM TV (15) and CNews (16).

France

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