Traditions of the Grand Reportage in Contemporary French Media

The article examines the features of the classical model of reportage journalism in modern French media and the strategy of its actualization. In the context of the audience's declining confidence in the media and the declining popularity of the reporter profession in France, the professional community - and, above all, electronic versions of printed publications in which the reportage genre was formed at the turn of the 20th century - continues to defend the value of traditional genres of national journalism. The aim of the study is to identify methods by which the modern French press actualizes the legacy of high-quality national journalism. The empirical basis of the study consisted of eleven publications in Le Figaro for January-October 2021 and three materials of the online resource RetroNews, launched with the support of the National Library of France (2017-2018). The emergence of the reportage is interpreted as a turning point in the development of French journalism since this genre marked the transition from the model of the 19th-century opinion press to the information press of the 20th century. In the historical aspect, the author traces three stages of the formation of this genre: (1) the 1870s-1890s, when, under the influence of the Anglo-Saxon press, the small reportage on local material was formed; (2) the 1890s-1910s, when the so-called “grand reportage”, which was distinguished by more complex issues and large volume, emerged; (3) 1914-1920, when reportages were published in the form of serial material connected with long trips of correspondents to regions remote from France. The heyday of the reportage in France falls on the 1920s-1930s and is associated with the names of Albert Londres, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and Joseph Kessel. As the analysis shows, the genre in its classical form not only still exists in the modern media, but also concerns the current agenda more and more noticeably. The newspaper Le Figaro uses archival publications as an illustration of the events and processes unfolding before the eyes of the modern reader. The RetroNews website seems to “dissolve” current events in archival publications, offering readers to find echoes of modernity in the works of correspondents of the past. As a result of the analysis, it is concluded that the classic genre of the grand reportage has quite successfully adapted to the peculiarities of various platforms. This indicates its strengthening as a kind of a standard of professional journalism. The flexibility of the genre and its ability to find and retain its reader even in conditions of intense competition with many other journalistic formats nowadays arouse interest in its origin.

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