Wake up, Messieurs!
Guest commentary France's captains of industry like press flagships and will ruin them sooner or later, warns Stefan Brändle.
Guest commentary France's captains of industry like press flagships and will ruin them sooner or later, warns Stefan Brändle.
Mao is dead, Trotsky is dead, and the Parisian gazettes are fighting for survival. Le Monde and Libération, the two self-managed left-liberal dailies, have to bring an arms company (Lagardère) and a top capitalist (Rothschild) respectively into their capital in order to see the next spring at all. And the conservative traditional paper Le Figaro, together with 70 other press titles, is coming under the control of the aircraft and gun manufacturer Serge Dassault, who has been France's media tsar since the end of last year. At the midday paper Le Monde, the ex-Trotskyist editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel was replaced by the more easy-going Gérard Courtois. At Libé, investor Vincent Bolloré was initially to become the main shareholder, although two editors had published a critical book about his financial empire. Now the editorial team has to vote on whether it wants to transfer more than a third of the newspaper's capital to the (horse betting) investor Edouard de Rothschild, a scion of the well-known banking family. The paper, co-founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and headed by ex-Maoist Serge July, sees its ideals floating down the Seine every day. And with them, the feuilleton battles that once made the Parisian paper a must-read for intellectuals are disappearing.
Economization has had even more dramatic consequences for French newspapers than in the rest of Europe. The general loss of advertising and circulation as a result of competition from free newspapers, TV and the Internet is hitting the "presse parisienne" hard. It has always been financially weak. Now, gun dealers and captains of industry are taking over the helm of the once decidedly independent Parisian press flagships. With their editorial autonomy, they are probably also losing the cheekiness and freedom that the public appreciated far beyond the capital and even the country's borders.
So are they degenerating into mere paper dragons? Will French intellectuals have to switch to other channels, such as the Internet or the still very popular
popular special interest titles? For some time now, the impression has been spreading that Libé in the morning, Le Monde in the afternoon and Figaro magazine at the weekend are no longer compulsory reading for Parisian citizens. Today, most people are happy with a quick-read that is also successful in Switzerland. A sign of the times: the existential crisis of their former favourite papers also illustrates the decline of the revolutionary Parisian debating spirit and salon culture, which served as a benchmark and source of inspiration for the rest of civilized mankind for 200 years. So wake up, Mesdames et Messieurs les Maoistes - the capitalist press system in Paris is in danger!
> Stefan Brändle is a correspondent for various German-speaking countries.
Daily newspapers in Paris.
Mao is dead, Trotsky is dead, and the Parisian gazettes are fighting for survival. Le Monde and Libération, the two self-managed left-liberal dailies, have to bring an arms company (Lagardère) and a top capitalist (Rothschild) respectively into their capital in order to see the next spring at all. And the conservative traditional paper Le Figaro, together with 70 other press titles, is coming under the control of the aircraft and gun manufacturer Serge Dassault, who has been France's media tsar since the end of last year. At the midday paper Le Monde, the ex-Trotskyist editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel was replaced by the more easy-going Gérard Courtois. At Libé, investor Vincent Bolloré was initially to become the main shareholder, although two editors had published a critical book about his financial empire. Now the editorial team has to vote on whether it wants to transfer more than a third of the newspaper's capital to the (horse betting) investor Edouard de Rothschild, a scion of the well-known banking family. The paper, co-founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and headed by ex-Maoist Serge July, sees its ideals floating down the Seine every day. And with them, the feuilleton battles that once made the Parisian paper a must-read for intellectuals are disappearing.
Economization has had even more dramatic consequences for French newspapers than in the rest of Europe. The general loss of advertising and circulation as a result of competition from free newspapers, TV and the Internet is hitting the "presse parisienne" hard. It has always been financially weak. Now, gun dealers and captains of industry are taking over the helm of the once decidedly independent Parisian press flagships. With their editorial autonomy, they are probably also losing the cheekiness and freedom that the public appreciated far beyond the capital and even the country's borders.
So are they degenerating into mere paper dragons? Will French intellectuals have to switch to other channels, such as the Internet or the still very popular
popular special interest titles? For some time now, the impression has been spreading that Libé in the morning, Le Monde in the afternoon and Figaro magazine at the weekend are no longer compulsory reading for Parisian citizens. Today, most people are happy with a quick-read that is also successful in Switzerland. A sign of the times: the existential crisis of their former favourite papers also illustrates the decline of the revolutionary Parisian debating spirit and salon culture, which served as a benchmark and source of inspiration for the rest of civilized mankind for 200 years. So wake up, Mesdames et Messieurs les Maoistes - the capitalist press system in Paris is in danger!
> Stefan Brändle is a correspondent for various German-speaking countries.
Daily newspapers in Paris.
