FRATERNITE MATIN, DU PAPIER AU NUMERIQUE : ENJEUX ET PROCESSUS FACE A LA PROBLEMATIQUE DE LAUTONOMIE FINANCIERE

For more than two decades, the press has been changing around the world. A new stage has opened in which the evolution of content will continue and amplify under the spur of competition from news sites. The different forms of printed press are profoundly transformed by digitization. The activity of journalists, marketing, manufacturing, evolve simultaneously, partly in interrelationship (Charon, 2010). Thus, the advent of the Internet and the conveniences (spontaneity, interactivity, free, flexibility, continuous information, hypertextuality, etc.) that it offers are increasingly push readers of the traditional press, who have become eclectic, to the web. This wind of change, precocious in North America, is gradually spreading to the whole world. Côte dIvoire is not on the sidelines of this phenomenon and there is a growing trend in the creation of digital media, with the transformation or duplication of the printed press into a virtual format. Among the pioneers of this migration is Fraternite Matin, the first Ivorian general news daily in independent Côte dIvoire, which since 2004 has had a digital version under the name of fratmat.info. The internal and external causes of this transition to digital, its process and its main challenges are at the heart of the problem of this study. Interviews with the editor of fratmat.info, a focus group with journalists and direct observation, under the primacy of theory of change in organizations, made it possible to collect the main data necessary to address our concerns. It emerges that, nearly twenty years later, the transition from paper to digital still leaves unresolved the nagging question of the financial autonomy of the Ivorian media.