IT’S ONE of the busiest weeks in France’s political calendar and print advertising is as its seasonal peak, but you wouldn’t know any of this from the bare racks of the country’s news stands.
The venerable Le Mondehasn't appeared for four days. Le Parisien, France's biggest-selling national paper, didn't print yesterday. One of its competitors, France Soir,was absent on Tuesday and may decide today to become the first national title in the country to scrap its print edition altogether. La Tribune, a business daily, could follow suit.
The shortage of printed newspapers, coming in a week when the political drama of the Socialist Party’s presidential primary is nearing its climax, has turned the spotlight on the crisis facing France’s print media. But each missing title tells a different story about how those papers are faring.
Le Monde'slongest non-appearance since 1947 – its presses started rolling yesterday after a four-day hiatus – was due to a strike at its Paris printing plants, where the company wants to cut between 150 and 170 staff from a workforce of 225.
Rescued last year by new owners – the internet billionaire Xavier Niel, the investment banker Matthieu Pigasse and Pierre Bergé, the former business partner of Yves Saint Laurent – the centre-left daily has managed a steady turnaround.
Having cut costs and posted a profit of €2.3 million for the first half of 2011 – its first in six years – it recently launched a new magazine, hired more journalists and is strengthening its website.
This week it confirmed plans to start a partnership with the Huffington Post that will see the US website launch a French-language version.
The company says problems at the printing works, where losses amount to €3 million a year and will triple next year when lucrative contracts for other titles run out, are “a cancer” eating away at the company. They blame a closed union that allows workers regularly to “hold the paper hostage” by refusing to print.
While Le Monde– an afternoon paper – hits news stands in Paris around lunchtime, the obligation to print in Paris means readers outside the capital have to wait until the next day.
To put that right, the owners want to shut down two of its three Parisian presses and start using regional plants.
Le Monde'sproblems look tame compared to those of some of its rivals, however.
France Soir,which was also born after the second World War and sold 2.2 million copies on the day Charles de Gaulle died in 1970, failed to appear on Tuesday due to a staff strike called after rumours circulated that its owner was going to cut 80 jobs out of 120 and scrap the print edition.
Owned since 2009 by Alexander Pougatchev, the 26-year-old son of a Russian billionaire,
France Soir’s
circulation has stalled at 60,000 despite an injection of €100 million over the past two years. One of the leading postwar French papers, it regularly sold more than one million copies during its glory years in the 1950s and 1960s, before its decline began in the 1970s.
An attempt to model itself on populist English tabloids in the past decade failed to stem losses that now stand at €31 million a year.
At a meeting scheduled for today, a digital-only plan for France Soiris expected to be unveiled. The business daily La Tribune, which experimented with the same strategy by not printing for three weeks in August, is expected to follow suit in December.
France's biggest-selling paper, Le Parisien(which publishes as Aujourd'hui En Franceoutside the capital) also failed to print yesterday, when staff went on strike over plans to seek 48 redundancies out of a total workforce of 537.
The company wants the job cuts to coincide with a €30 million restructuring and relaunch, which it hopes will solidify its position as the number one national daily, with current sales of 460,000.