Lyon, France – After announcing a new on-air look adhering more closely to international news codes and personalising the presentation at MIPCOM 2013, the European news channel is now launching the second stage of its transformation: the morning edition.
Euronews is taking on the morning news market in Russia, the CIS countries (ten former Soviet Republics), Eastern Europe as well as the Mediterranean Basin (Turkey, Greece, Cyprus), the Middle East, the central zone down to the Horn of Africa and part of Western Asia.
This area, covering three time zones, extends from North to South, from Murmansk in Russia to Nairobi in Kenya and from East to West, from Baku in Azerbaijan to Sofia in Bulgaria. The zone represents millions of new viewers for the morning edition of the channel.
The news programme will be broadcast every 15 minutes, starting at 4am CET (until 10am, then every 30 minutes during the day). This means that in Russia, a country where Euronews is watched by 2 million viewers daily, the morning edition will start at 6am and will offer viewers from Moscow to Saint Petersburg the news in their language, every 15 minutes.
The new morning schedule required a complete re-organisation of the newsroom and technical resources for all 13 language versions of Euronews: Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
Grégory Samak, Director of Broadcasting and Programme Marketing, said: “This initiative is part of our global programming strategy which aims to boost the channel’s audience numbers. By moving the morning edition forward by two hours, the channel will be able to reach morning viewers in key countries for Euronews, including several where it is broadcast in the national language.”
“We expect these changes to increase our audience and awareness of the channel in these territories. This should help Euronews strengthen the pertinence of its news offering for these viewers and to be even more attractive to advertisers who already recognise our status as a global news media and the most-watched news channel in Europe,” he added.
These first two steps — the new on-air look in October and the earlier morning edition in April — will set the stage for the new programming strategy currently being developed which will be effective by the end of 2014, in conjunction with the inauguration of Euronews’ new headquarters, currently being built in Lyon.
