Haiti's Le Nouvelliste Goes Online-Only Following Gang Looting of Its Printing Press

Com reported. They began looting and vandalizing the building that day, eventually dismantling and carrying off the newspaper's 130-foot printing press. An aerial photo shows the destroyed offices in the area.

The incident forced Le Nouvelliste, Haiti's oldest newspaper at 128 years, to move exclusively online two years ago. Editor-in-Chief Frantz Duval has kept publishing the paper digitally since then. It took eight months for Duval to send someone to the ransacked streets near the office to assess what remained, he said.

The last print edition of Le Nouvelliste was dated March 26, 2024, hidden amid documents on Duval's desk in the current office. That office is now located in the hills of Pétion-Ville, far from the abandoned downtown newsroom. The temporary building sits in one of the final sections of the capital still free from gang control.

Le Nouvelliste is one of the oldest continuously published French-language newspapers in the Caribbean and one of just a handful of institutions in Haiti to surpass a century of existence. It has been led by predecessors since 1898, when it was first known as Le Matin for the first year. Duval sits beneath portraits of his nine editorial predecessors in his office.

The newspaper ceased publication for 11 days in 1921 during the United States' occupation of Haiti, in response to martial law prohibiting articles detrimental to American rule. It also underwent an ownership change at the turn of the 20th century, causing a three-month pause in publication.