Ariana Lavrilleux is an investigative journalist for the online media Disclose and Secretary General of the association Prenons la Une, which brings together nearly 200 members and campaigns for better representation of women in the media and for equality within newsrooms. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, the association is organizing its first festival on Saturday, October 12 in Paris. Cyberstalking, equality officers, the role of allies: Ariana Lavrilleux addresses the challenges women journalists face internally, while also discussing the necessary solutions to transform practices within newsrooms.
Is it good news that Prenons la Une still exists, ten years after its creation?
Yes, absolutely. At the start, it was a very small collective. I was there from the beginning, in 2013-2014, and honestly, we didn't think it would take on such scope. We were around thirty journalists, and we saw Let's Take the Front Page as a modest initiative, without imagining it would become a large association.
A lot has changed in ten years. The main shift is that feminism is no longer a taboo subject. It has enabled a number of topics to be covered by newsrooms. Journalism has clearly become more rigorous on these issues thanks to feminist movements and to Prenons la Une. We were almost overtaken by the rise of these movements, which started talking about femicides, for example. In the early years, we spoke of "violence against women" using the terminology available in public debate at that time. So yes, it's very good news that Prenons la Une still exists, because we still need to defend equality. I'm glad that this tool continues, evolves, and grows stronger.
What major changes have you observed over the past ten years? Have there been improvements, or are there areas where the situation has stalled or even regressed?
One thing that has radically changed over ten years is cyber harassment. When I started my career, we talked more about harassment in newsrooms or coming from certain sources. But cyber harassment, such as that denounced notably by Salomé Saqué and Rokhaya Diallo, has become one of the main occupational risks for women journalists.
It's violent, and the objective is clear: erase women journalists, particularly those who are racialized and/or outside cisgender heterosexual norms. Today, it's a recurring workplace incident, even though it's not officially recognized as such.
It's true that we're stronger collectively than we were ten years ago, and that our coverage of gender issues has improved. We made headlines. But the backlash is much more violent. The determination of part of society to silence women journalists has intensified. I didn't feel things that way at all ten years earlier.
The rise and democratization of social media has armed reactionary groups whose goal is to silence minorities and women. What is deeply concerning is that only women are aware of it. Certainly, on the media side, they take into account the risk of custody or defamation lawsuits. But the risk of being threatened with rape, being followed in the street, having a deepfake made of oneself [a video or audio manipulation using artificial intelligence to superimpose a person's face or voice onto another body or sequence, editor's note], being harmed physically or mentally—news outlets don't account for this, or only marginally. Yet this violence produces a form of censorship and undermines press freedom. The French Observatory for Attacks on Press Freedom, which has just launched, aims to count these still too-invisible attacks.
How can newsrooms better protect journalists against this cyberstalking?
The goal is to establish genuine prevention plans with the main potential targets because cyberbullying is a workplace risk in its own right. It's necessary to assess the risks for each investigation, for each article. We now know how these attacks unfold: they often target women, particularly those who appear on screen. We can consider disabling access to comments in case of attack, or in any case, implementing moderation that can be effective quickly.
It is also essential to train women journalists about these dangers to better prepare them for them, and to provide sick days when there is a raid.
Above all, newsrooms must be able to allocate time to file complaints and build cases, as defense work is time-consuming and exhausting. The counterattack strategy against cyberstalking must be carefully thought through in order to protect journalists quickly and ensure the same situation does not happen again two months later. Every media organization must ask itself: "which journalists are at risk of being targeted by harassment, online or otherwise? What strategy can we implement in the short and medium term as a company?".
Finally, I believe it is essential to educate male journalists, all the colleagues who observe these situations passively, and who actually have an enormous role to play in mounting a counteroffensive. Concretely, this means taking a direct stand to defend their colleague. We know that men listen more readily to their peers, so they need to step up and get more involved.
Is France behind on these issues?
The world is behind, but France especially so. In Belgium, the Association of Professional Journalists published a very comprehensive study on cyberbullying, and many initiatives exist abroad. In France, even in independent media, we are still too reactive. We do not consider cyberbullying as a systemic risk.
When a journalist goes into a war zone, everyone knows they need to wear a bulletproof vest, undergo first aid training, and learn about PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) risks. But when you tackle a sensitive subject online, you're left to fend for yourself with fingers crossed, even though the Internet has become a battlefield, especially for women. You need to prepare for it—that's clear. And very few newsrooms do that.
Beyond cyberbullying, what are the major initiatives of Prenons la Une?
We have two permanent activities that are working very well: training and the listening unit.
We offer training in schools and in companies in partnership with La Fronde, a feminist training agency created to help media outlets better cover the news and combat sexism in their newsrooms.
Next, we have a listening cell with trained volunteers who offer support and advice to journalists who are victims of or witnesses to sexist violence and any form of discrimination who need guidance and concrete support from colleagues. This makes it possible to support those who don't necessarily know how to respond to these situations.
Looking ahead, we have several projects under discussion, notably a study on the media coverage of the Mazan rape trial, to see how the media handles this type of news today. On this subject, we observe things that seem quite positive when we apply the analytical frameworks of feminist movements. The media have clearly made progress in their understanding of gender-based violence. At the same time, members have identified fairly problematic coverage of this news. Hence our desire to analyze all of this, much as we did a year ago, by asking ourselves how Marseille media covered sexist and sexual violence. How are victims treated? How are perpetrators presented? What photos are used to illustrate the articles? Are there statistics, help hotline numbers?
Do you work with other organizations to carry out this work?
Yes, we collaborate with other organizations on joint projects. For example, AJAR (Association of Antiracist and Racialized Journalists) has a project for a collective guide on more rigorous journalism, in partnership with organizations such as AJL (Association of LGBT Journalists) and Prenons la Une. This guide would address the full range of discrimination and prejudice that the press amplifies in order to help newsrooms and journalists adopt more inclusive writing and approaches to news coverage.
With five associations, we also denounced the discriminatory rules targeting veiled journalists and transgender journalists at the commission that issues press cards (CCIJP).
Our resources are limited because we're volunteers, but many of our members belong to multiple organizations. This creates fairly obvious bridges between Prenons la Une, the AJL and the AJAR. We share a common vision of discrimination rooted in intersectionality. For example, we've developed joint training with the AJL, the AJAR, and PLU, aimed at journalism schools. We work together, all three organizations, on topics like gender, minorities, and discrimination. In these training sessions, it's journalists who are experts and personally affected by these issues who lead the sessions. This gives their discourse greater weight and relevance.
Do you also encourage the establishment of equality officer positions within editorial teams?
We're running a workshop at Festival Prenons la Une, where we're addressing the question of "equality representatives". These aren't necessarily full-time positions, but rather designated individuals in newsrooms tasked with addressing issues like equal pay or sexual violence within teams.
To date, there is no gender editor as clearly identified as at Mediapart. Jessica Lopez at AFP holds a similar position, though she is more focused on diversity issues. She oversees a range of topics related to inclusivity in news coverage. In newsrooms, what you mainly find today are equality officers.
These are mainly women. For now, that's a positive thing given where we are in terms of awareness of these issues in France and the need for women to have someone they can trust. But it remains a significant mental burden that always falls on the same people. The major absentees from these struggles and strategies are male allies. Where are they? What are they doing? There are associations of racialized journalists, associations of women journalists, but there's no association of "allies." It's because these issues aren't vital to them, plain and simple.
How to be a good ally in a newsroom?
I have this anecdote that happened in a Paris newsroom, where I had a very heated debate with an editorial writer. He was essentially saying: « Today, you can't flirt anymore, feminism is tedious and going too far», this was a bit before the MeToo explosion. What really troubled me was that in that same newsroom, there had been cases of sexual assault, and I had collected testimonies from several women on the subject. Hearing this editorial writer, who was very well-known, downplay this problem made me furious.
Women who were present took part in the debate and tried to defuse the tension, but what struck me was that there were also men there, witnessing the scene. Some agreed with him, but there were also those who didn't. Yet none of them spoke up. They simply watched the scene without intervening. I was a young journalist facing an influential editorialist, so the power dynamic was already lost, and the men who could have tipped the scales stayed silent. Their intervention would have been crucial. When I talked to them about it afterward, they told me: "Yes, I disagreed, but I didn't know what else to say, it's not my issue." But actually, it is their issue. Because it's silence that allows the dominant to continue dominating. We can struggle, strengthen ourselves, be more numerous and better armed, but the silence of our allies costs us dearly and weakens us.
The role of allies is to understand the mechanisms of sexism in the workplace, to stay informed, read, listen, and train themselves, truly. Because with their privileges, they have the ability to talk to other men and get involved in these discussions. There were examples, like during the Obama era, where strategies were put in place to amplify women's voices. For example, when a woman proposed an idea, another woman would support it, and a man would reinforce the idea while always mentioning the woman's name so as not to steal her credit and take ownership of her victory or proposal. It may seem like nothing, but it can change the game.
What is feminist management?
In fact, feminist management isn't limited to the question of feminism—it's really the opposite of toxic management. It means recognizing, in my view, that power dynamics exist within a newsroom, and they're not simply about the relationship between managers and employees. It also means accounting for privileges and power dynamics that exist outside visible hierarchies: between women and men, between people from privileged or underprivileged backgrounds, between Parisians and non-Parisians, racialized and non-racialized people. So the first step is to be honest and objectively analyze a snapshot of your newsroom. Where do the privileges lie? Where is power concentrated? This requires opening a collective discussion on these subjects. Journalists often tend to look at others, but not at themselves. That's what Mediapart did, by asking themselves why certain people, particularly women, didn't dare speak up in public, during editorial meetings for example. They then adapted their meetings accordingly. So there's necessary introspection work to be done.
Next, there must be clear reporting mechanisms independent from management and editorial leadership regarding sexual violence.
Finally, it's important to ensure greater transparency in compensation between colleagues in different positions. For example, when Le Monde became aware of the salary gap for women managers and department heads compared to their male counterparts, they allocated a specific budget envelope, a kind of Marshall Plan for wage equality to close that gap. Feminist management is based on self-reflection, honest diagnosis of the media outlet's situation — what are we doing well, what are we doing poorly — and then the implementation of concrete actions. Newsrooms are businesses like any other, and there are already tools available to achieve this.
Is there a global two-tier system between traditional newsrooms and independent media?
No, honestly, it's quite similar. Perhaps in some independent media outlets, there's a bit more awareness or a stronger commitment to implementing inclusive management, but that's never a guarantee.
For me, independence is by no means a guarantee, based on what I observe and what our members tell us. It's not because a media outlet is independent that it's necessarily more aware of these issues. In fact, as soon as a media says "No, but we're fine", that's when there's a problem. If there's no concern, it means we haven't asked ourselves the right questions.
To go further
- View the resources made available by Prenons la Une on its website for journalists and newsrooms.
- The finding is clear and studies demonstrate it: women and minorities are underrepresented in the media. Beyond the numbers that help us understand the problem, solutions exist. We explore them with Mathilde Saliou, journalist at Flint and member of Prenons la Une, and Cécile Méadel, sociologist and lead researcher for the Global Media Monitoring Project in France.
- Rémi-Kenzo Pagès, one of AJAR's spokespersons, reviews a year marked by rapid scaling up for the young association and several major media episodes.
- Transparency, inclusivity, delegation… Read our ten recommendations for newsrooms so that management stops flying under the media radar.
- Cécile Sourd is the editor-in-chief of the independent online publication Mediapart. In this episode of our podcast Chemins, she reflects on the evolution of the media's internal practices.
- Initially a journalist in the political section, Lénaïg Bredoux has been, since 2020, editorial director for gender issues at Mediapart. Or gender editor, depending on who you ask. The investigative outlet has implemented concrete policies, and while newsrooms are becoming aware of the changes ahead, progress remains slow.
- The third edition of the Festival Imprimé was held on May 4, 2024, in Cenon, near Bordeaux. Co-organized by Médianes and Revue Far Ouest, the event championed engaged journalism that grapples with the pressing issues of our time to build society collectively. Click here to watch our round table on protecting sources hosted by Owen Huchon with Ariane Lavrilleux, journalist at Disclose, and Pauline Delmas, litigation and advocacy officer at Sherpa.
