The end of a world

 
Column The old-timers are resigning, readers are leaving, the volume is dwindling, the advertisements are dwindling: crisis as an opportunity at Le Monde? It's the last one anyway. Jürg Altwegg on the deep crisis at the prestigious newspaper Le Monde. 
The legend of Robin Hood does not end well. The heroic warrior shoots one last arrow and is buried where he fell to the ground. An employee of the newspaper Le Monde drew Robin Hood. Last May, he emailed a strategy paper from his new bosses in the editorial office and management to the public: 129 jobs were to be cut. Almost a third of the editorial positions will be cut. The hardest hit is culture, which will only have two pages a day. The weekly literary supplement will have to do without two editors and many flat-rate staff. Its size will be reduced from twelve to eight and then four pages. The newspaper, which has already successfully slimmed down, will become even thinner: a thousand pages per year will be cut. The dear competition took it on board and gave it the necessary echo. May was almost as stormy at Le Monde as it was forty years ago, when the course was set for a new company.
General meetings, leaflets, strikes. The employees, usually lone fighters, even took to the streets. Le Monde was not published three times. The editorial team regularly reports on the internal conflict on the Internet and in the newspaper - the Libération article has also been adopted.
A world is coming to an end. The employees now only have a majority on paper in the company, whose structure is extremely complicated, barely manageable and even less controllable. There are many reasons for the crisis: The paper, which has a reputation for arrogance, has angered readers. The long-standing management team has accumulated a huge mountain of debt of around one hundred and fifty million euros with its acquisition strategy. The newspaper is in the red every year. Any other company in this situation would have had to file for bankruptcy or would have been sold.
Two buyers who already have minority stakes are waiting in the wings: The Spanish newspaper El Pais and the magazine publisher Hachette, which is owned by Sarkozy's special interest Arnaud Lagardère. The latter would be a serious blow to independent journalism in France. Lagardère has publicly accused the new editor-in-chief of Monde, Eric Fottorino, of incompetence. The cost-cutting measures would only accelerate the decline. Lagardère (El Pais also repeated the willingness to buy at the stupidest moment) has thus above all incited the editorial team's willingness to compromise.
The latter has now agreed on the strategy paper published by Robin Hood. They are relying on the Internet. Le Monde has the better solution here than Le Figaro and Libération, which are not doing much better. Lemonde.fr has long been in the black thanks to the reputation and expertise of the print editorial team. And perhaps the mixed calculation, which is currently not working out mainly due to the costs of the printed newspaper, will soon be correct.
Conversely, the Internet has freed Le Monde from arrogant autism. Blogs and chats are an exemplary way of exploiting the possibilities of interactivity. For six euros a month, you can read the entire content of the daily newspaper and access 25 articles in the archive. That's the price of four printed editions. However, Le Monde cannot yet be financed with this income from the Internet. Le Monde will only be saved when all subscribers and newsstand buyers of the world newspaper switch to lemonde.fr. Then there will no longer be a printed edition. The paper is already a luxury.
Eric Fottorino can't really imagine that yet. After all, the editor-in-chief is not interested in preservation at any price. He wants to lead Le Monde into the future as a brand. It stands for quality journalism, which all of the country's elites have always followed. But this will not be possible without further rounds of savings. By the beginning of July, many candidates had volunteered for voluntary redundancy thanks to generous severance packages. Even some of the paper's noble feathers and renowned editors. It is the generation of the sixty-eight who can only imagine a newspaper in print. This may be an opportunity for the new concept, but a lot of experience and prestige will be lost.
When Robin Hood informed the public, he chose his pseudonym carefully and as a symbol of the savings plan: The injured hero was supposed to be bled by his cousin. But she cut his artery.
Jürg Altwegg is a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
in Geneva.