Gateways to the news: Headlines on Le Monde's home page and front page

In the context of ‘mediamorphosis’, this paper explores how the French quality daily, Le Monde, presents ‘news at a glance’ on paper and online with its headlines. A corpus of six constructed weeks of front pages and home pages published from September 2010 to February 2011 is analyzed in terms of news selection, framing and construction by different actors. The analysis shows that the most prominent headlines on the front pages and home pages share a similar focus whose strong tendencies are emphasized in the top headlines. However, the home page may appear less ‘elitist’ by the way its headlines reflect the rapid turnover of online news, by being less ‘highbrow’ in what it covers, and by including more and different voices thanks particularly to the pictures accompanying the top stories. These differences might indicate an evolution in the concept of journalism and its links to citizenship. It is suggested that keeping neighboring but separate desks for the print and online editions is worth trying for the survival of Western print quality media.