Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Editor Is the Story as the French Huffington Post Starts

Anne Sinclair, right, and Arianna Huffington at a news conference on Monday in Paris.Credit...Thibault Camus/Associated Press

PARIS — Anne Sinclair smiled big for the cameras, not as the betrayed wife standing by her man but as the star journalist she once was and hopes to be again.

The wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Ms. Sinclair returned to public life before more than 250 journalists in her new role as editorial director for the French version of The Huffington Post news Web site, which had its debut on Monday.

The news conference represented her first professional appearance since Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, was charged with sexually assaulting a maid in a New York hotel last May and forced to abandon his quest for the French presidency. The criminal charges were later dismissed.

“She is definitely going to be our public face,” said Arianna Huffington, the founder of the site, in an interview on Sunday.

A former television anchor and the heiress to an art fortune, Ms. Sinclair seemed well rehearsed and at ease in describing her goals and her role at Le Huffington Post.

She insisted that there would be no conflict of interest in carrying out her duties. “All important news will be treated normally, as it would be treated elsewhere,” she said. “Anything that should be on the front page will be on the front page.”

She denied that her relationship with her husband would affect her work. “I do not mix private and professional life,” she said.

She dodged a question on whether she would support the Socialist candidate François Hollande for president of France and denied that she had played a role in her husband’s plans to run for president on the Socialist ticket. “I wasn’t invested in the candidacy of my husband,” she said. She described herself as careful.

Paradoxically, had her husband been the Socialist Party’s candidate for president, this job might not have been hers.

Since this is France, where journalists are loath to pry into the personal lives of the rich and powerful, she was not asked questions about her husband’s activities or her reaction to them, which might have come up in an American setting.

Ms. Huffington, sitting by Ms. Sinclair’s side, defended her as a gifted journalist and a role model for other women.

Asked why she had picked Ms. Sinclair, Ms. Huffington reeled off a list of her qualifications, and then added: “Every woman in her private life — if not in her public life — has been through setbacks, ordeals and problems. When we see a woman enter the arena again, and get engaged with what is happening in the world, it gives hope and courage to every other woman.”

Le Huffington Post is a joint venture of AOL, the Internet company that owns The Huffington Post; the French daily newspaper Le Monde; and Matthieu Pigasse, a banker who acquired Le Monde in 2010 in partnership with two other investors.

The Web site’s tiny staff of eight will work out of Le Monde’s offices in Paris, and the news conference was held in Le Monde’s auditorium. Ms. Sinclair’s every gesture, every smile, every whisper in Ms. Huffington’s ear was greeted with the clicks of the cameras by dozens of photographers.

Ms. Sinclair delivered. Her makeup was impeccable, her voice low-pitched and confident, her gaze focused on certain photographers.

“This is a chance for me,” said Ms. Sinclair. “The Huffington Post gave me a chance.”

Ms. Sinclair said she would be working full time, although day-to-day editing responsibility would fall to Paul Ackermann, a former journalist with the newspaper Le Figaro.

Some critics of Ms. Sinclair claim she lost her relevance after she gave up her job as host of a successful television interview program in 1997 when Mr. Strauss-Kahn was named France’s finance minister.

“Everybody’s laughing in France,” said Daniel Schneidermann, media critic for the newspaper Libération, who runs his own Web site. “She represents the voice of the old media of the 1980s and 1990s. Are the French going to buy the product sold by Anne Sinclair? I don’t think so.”

Le Huffington Post’s inaugural front page carried the main news of the day — the beginning of Mr. Hollande’s presidential campaign — calling it a “successful liftoff.”

It also included postings by Catherine Cerisey, a cancer survivor, on her 11-year battle with the disease; a war reporter, Anne Nivat, on whether the recent deaths of four French soldiers in Afghanistan might revive France’s interest in that war; and Rachida Dati, a spokeswoman for President Nicolas Sarkozy and a former minister of justice, on running a successful presidential campaign.

There was no mention of Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

In her inaugural essay, Ms. Sinclair wrote, “For me, today’s launch is the culmination of a lifetime of loving France.” There were no direct references to her husband in the reader comments posted underneath.

Le Huffington Post is the site’s third international arm after those in Britain and Canada. Ms. Huffington said in the interview that she planned to introduce sites in a dozen more countries this year, including Spain, Greece and Italy.

In an interview with Elle magazine last week, her first since the hotel scandal in May, Ms. Sinclair said, “’I am neither a saint nor a victim,” adding, “I am a free woman.”

Perhaps one sign of her independence on Monday was that she was not wearing a wedding ring.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Editor Is the Story as the French Huffington Post Starts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT