Aventinus Foundation buys Le Temps and Heidi.news: what this means for Geneva Solutions
The Aventinus Foundation announced this week that it will take over the newspaper Le Temps from Ringier Axel Springer Group Switzerland, and that it plans to buy a large majority of Heidi Media SA’s capital, the publisher of Heidi.news.
What does it mean for Geneva Solutions given the historical relationship between Geneva Solutions and Heidi.news? Geneva Solutions was indeed born within Heidi.news and maintains a privileged relationship with its team.
Geneva Solutions is financed by the FIDI foundation (Fondation pour l’information et la diversité dans l’information) which is not involved in or impacted by the acquisition of Heidi Media SA. FIDI is chaired by Joëlle Kuntz, a well-known journalist and author, with the purpose of supporting new innovative media projects, which Geneva Solutions fell under (more information on our organisation here).
Geneva Solutions is, and will, therefore remain completely independent: financing, editorial and operational resources will continue to be completely dissociated from Heidi.news and Le Temps. We are also, by virtue of our status, mission and culture, intrinsically a non-profit journalistic project with well-defined objectives and deliverables in relation to international Geneva.
That said… these changes in the local media landscape are very interesting for our young platform!
The Geneva Solutions newsroom will relocate next year, together with Heidi.news, to the same premises as Le Temps, which will move from Lausanne to Geneva. The relationship between our team and the other two newsrooms will be social and certainly beneficial to the development of our content and our audience.
We look forward to these interesting times for the media industry in Suisse romande, boosted at this scale for the first time by a private foundation in Switzerland.