Bernard Mourad
Bernard Mourad, the former Altice Media chief who left to work for Emmanuel Macron’s presidential bid, is planning to launch a new online video initiative that will lean on social media networks, according to a French press report.
According to Challenges.fr, Mourad has teamed up with former Dailymotion chief Giuseppe de Martino and current Libération editorial director Johan Hufnagel to launch Looper, a new service on the model of the US Now This offering launched by former Huffington Post executives in 2012, or Al Jazeera’s AJ+.
Both services offer text-based news and short news-related videos that can be viewed and made sense of on mobile phones without activating the sound. Social networks – in particular Facebook – are the key distribution channel.
Mourad has reportedly secured financial support to the tune of about €1 million for the venture, with supporters including Franck Papazian, founder of MediaSchool Group, and Pierre Fraidenreich, both of whom invested in Altice-backed Libération.
Mourad quit his post as Altice Media Group president in October last year to take on the role of campaign director for Macron, a story also broken initially by Challenges.fr.
