The managing director of Fraternite Matin (state-owned newspaper), Serge Abdel Nouho, unveiled on Monday,
December 9, 2024, the restructuring plan of the Ivorian pro-government newspaper, on the sidelines of a gala dinner, commemorating the 60th anniversary of this press group.
“With the restructuring plan that was presented by the general director, we are convinced that Fraternite Matin will last at least another 60 years. This is why we call on the staff to be calm, but above all to have confidence in the State,” said the Minister of Communication, Amadou Coulibaly.
On the sidelines of the gala dinner and the symposium on artificial intelligence in early December, the Minister of Communication indicated that the Vice-President of the Republic, Tiemoko Meyliet, the sponsor of the festivities, went to the headquarters of Fraternite Matin, this Monday morning, “to demonstrate the state’s commitment to Fraternite Matin, concerning the financing of its restructuring plan.”
He noted that this restructuring plan is taking place “in a global environment that is very difficult for the
press in general with the increase in the cost of inputs, but also the change in habits of readers who are much fonder of the digital version.”
Faced with the “gloom of the paper press, we decided to implement media solutions to offer a unique customer experience. Today, we want to move from a paper press group to a multimedia group,” Abdel Nouho said.
In this context, “we decided to go into everything that is omni-channel, everything that is television. So, soon we will have Fratmat Television, we will have Fratmat radio and Fratmat Podcast in everything related to the press,” he announced.
“We will also have interactivity in the daily paper, because what we want to do today in our transformation is to transform the paper into a digital version with barcodes so that each article that is read takes us back to multimedia (text, video, audio),” he continued.
“The paper newspaper will become, from this moment, an interactive newspaper when we will set up our multimedia project that we have already started to build and which will allow us to move from a paper press group to an omni-channel multimedia group,” he stressed.
Concerning the publishing aspect, the general manager of Fratmat, Abdel Nouho, declared that “with our publishing house, we want to attack another segment, in particular the school books sector which is a market on which we are returning,” he indicated.
Fraternit” Matin intends to boost its printing activities. “We believe that we have significant potential that will allow us to print all school books, because several players print outside,” he said.
Furthermore, Fratmat intends to “attack the sub-region,” he confided, before announcing that a rotary printing press should be installed “in the second quarter of 2025.” The group also plans to operate in the events sector by transforming its management into an agency.
“We also want to position ourselves vis-à-vis the state as a consultant in terms of marketing and communication strategy that can organise major international events for the state of Côte d’Ivoire,” he added. Through printing, the Fraternite Matin group plans to launch into “the packaging sector which is an important market, on which
investments are quite heavy, and we have barely 2 percent of printing companies that are in this segment with regard to packaging in the agro-industry” and others, he said.
Fraternite Matin, created on December 9, 1964, organised a symposium on Friday focused on Artificial Intelligence in order to project itself into the future by trying to adapt to the evolution of the world. Amadou Coulibaly welcomed the resilience in the face of “shocks” that this organ was able to absorb and remain the best-selling daily newspaper nationwide.
AP/Sf/fss/as/APA