Although Franceinfo is the only news channel not to have yet announced when its rentrée/back to normal schedule will resume, perhaps we can suspect that they may have heeded some of the above commentary. Today's matinale started showing "
Le 6h30:8h30
" on the studio screens, before reverting to 9h30, maybe daytimes might get bulkier from 9am soon? If they don't, it's game over as the audience figures continue to be catastrophic, particularly between 9am and noon when BFMTV and CNEWS do particularly well.
I'd speculate that the back to normal service will resume on Monday 31st August.
But to be fair the presenter roster being a bit random is the least of their worries - it's the embarrassing scaling back of coverage during summer that lets them down and has really caught them out in the last few days. All the competitors have fill in anchors all over their schedules (it's no worse than BBC News/Breakfast)... And the average French viewer knows exactly what's going on when the A-team takes the whole summer off!
The main difference is the other news channels have set presenters for the period without the quality going down. Where as Franceinfo have basically got whoever they can find who isn't on leave for that particular day while heavily relying on recorded loops of news.
The channel is certainly devoid of content, yes. It's clear they have been running the channel on a shoestring which shows when big news breaks. I can perhaps understand the odd recorded bulletin if the news hasn't changed... most viewers probably dip into the channel for one bulletin, especially on the weekends. Watch BFMTV and apart from visual changes/presenter changes, consecutive hours of news get repetitive too.
I don't think it's right to say they're just plucking whoever isn't on leave and getting them to read the bulletins. They've relied on a fairly small pool of regular fill-ins and there has been a regular face (Sébastien/Johanna) every day on the 6h30/9h30 slot which is probably their main priority. It's actually probably more consistent than BFMTV which is almost exclusively fill-ins all week too, but for a schedule which requires several more presenters per day than franceinfo.
I have to disagree, Sebastien has done a couple of weeks, then went off, Johanna I'd agree has been the most frequent of the presenters and has been on again this week with Louis Laforge in her normal newsreading role. But those days haven't been the usual Mon-Fri, sometimes she's come in and done Thurs-Mon, then back two or three days later, where there's no continuity in who has been the regular presenter. In the early part of the holiday, one of the two regular of the weekend morning presenters would come in with someone else depping with them with a full morning programme and then from the beginning of August has been one of the reporters coming in and doing the 15 min wheel of news.
So far this week has been the most stable of the morning shows on Franceinfo, Louis and Johanna for the last two days, along with Alix Dauge who's been off for a month doing the touch screen features. And then it goes back to the 15 min wheel from 9am.
The second presenter role and the duty journalists who do the touch screen features have varied from day to day and even week to week.
