Bon Anniversaire to Le Huffington Post, which turned one-year-old today. We are all thrilled with our first foreign-language baby -- and with our amazing French team under the leadership of Anne Sinclair, our editorial director, and Paul Ackermann, our editor-in-chief.
Exactly a year ago, we were all crowded in our HuffPost office in the offices of Le Monde on the Boulevard Auguste-Balnqui, celebrating both the launch of Le HuffPost and the 30th birthday of our international editor Nicholas Sabloff with (what else?) champagne and lots of French pastries.
When I wrote about the launch of Le Huffington Post exactly a year ago, I thought of it not so much as an announcement but an invitation -- to readers in France, to French-speakers around the world, and to all those who care about the country and its rich history and culture.
And in the year since, our readers in France and around the world have taken us up on that invitation in ways that exceeded even our highest expectations. We now have more than 1,100 bloggers, and more than 100,000 comments a month. In September, we launched the lifestyle section C'est La Vie, which Paul described as the place to go to "discover what makes daily life today and what will make it tomorrow." Our editorial team has covered everything from the French and U.S. elections and the Toulouse shootings to the euro crisis, and, more recently, the taxes debate and the Mali intervention. This hybrid focus -- being both a journalistic enterprise and a platform -- has helped make Le Huffington Post, in less than a year, the top online-only news site in France.
So I want to say merci du fond du cœur to Le Monde's CEO Louis Dreyfus, Les Nouvelles Editions Indépendantes chairman Matthieu Pigasse, and to everyone on our Le Huffington Post editorial team: Anne and Paul, of course, but also deputy editor-in-chief Alexandre Phalippou; business editor Gregory Raymond; politics editor Geoffroy Clavel; entertainment editor Alexis Ferenczi; news editors Vincent Gibert, Sandra Lorenzo, Adrien Oster, Gregory Rozieres and Sara Taleb; C'est La Vie editor Stanislas Kraland; trends editor Lauren Provost; blog editors Annabel Benhaiem and Marc Botte; and community manager Melina Loupia.
So please, continue to make Le Huffington Post your destination for news, opinion, and community on all things France -- or, if you are visiting for the first time, bienvenue! And to all those who are a part of this vibrant community, may our second year be as full of creativity, growth, and great conversations as the first.