Staff at France’s Libération yesterday voted to renew a strike against planned job cuts for a third straight day, plunging the ailing left-leaning daily further into the deepest crisis in its 30-year history.
”It’s poisonous,” a veteran journalist on the paper said. ”People are very wound up. I’ve never seen them so determined — there’s never been a three-day strike before. They realise not just the identity, but the future of the paper is at stake.”
Founded in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre and other Maoist luminaries — including current editor, Serge July — it acquired an importance as the house organ of the free-thinking left out of all proportion to its circulation, which never exceeded 200 000.
Although the radical and irreverent paper’s future has rarely been secure, its design and layout are still much appreciated in the newspaper industry worldwide: Libération revolutionised the use of typography and photographs. In subject-matter, too, it broke new ground.
But prospects are bleak, with the paper losing more than â,¬500 000 (about $590 000) a month and shedding readers (circulation shrank by 10% over the past 12 months, against 3% in the French newspaper market as a whole, to just 134 600 copies).
Earlier this year, the paper was forced to accept a â,¬20-million cash injection for ”development projects” from an unlikely partner, Edouard de Rothschild, scion of a banking family not known for its Maoist sympathies. The investment gave Rothschild a majority 38.9% stake, although the 350 staff retain a right of veto.
Then on Monday, July unveiled an ”optimisation” plan involving 52 job cuts, including 28 in editorial departments.
Libération has known voluntary redundancies before, but never sackings. ”The only management proposal is to amputate 15% of the workforce,” the three unions on the paper said in a joint statement on its otherwise closed website.
Editor July has said it is in such dire straits that cost-cutting is ”inevitable”. Along with other projects, including a beefed-up Saturday paper with supplements and a merged editorial team working on the website and the paper, he hopes it will allow Libération to break even by 2007.
But the truth is that the paper is facing not just a financial but an identity crisis. ”Once the newspaper for a whole generation, does Libération still have anything to say today?” asked its rival, Le Monde.
Libération has lost touch with many of its former readers, shedding 30 000 in the past four years. Those that remain are getting older (only 28% of Libération‘s readers are aged from 15 to 34, and less willing to pay â,¬1.20 a day for a sardonic, sometimes shrill take on the news that suited the 1970s but is ill at ease in the 2000s. The free papers Metro and 20 Minutes have also hurt.
The paper’s attention-grabbing front pages were legendary. On November 16 1978, the paper reported the death of the film star Jean Gabin thus: Gabin is dead, (President) Giscard is in the shit, the Beaujolais is good, France carries on.” For the more radical left, ,i>Libération has sold out. For the more moderate, modernising centre-left, it is self-contented, elitist, sometimes arrogant, too often irrelevant. The personality of July, the revolutionary turned talk show guest who this year penned a much-criticised editorial condemning the mainly leftwing French voters (and Libération readers) who rejected the EU Constitution as ”xenophobic” and ”populist”, crystallises many objections.
”There was a time,” said Jean-Marc Peres, one disillusioned former reader, ”when Libération asked the right questions, the important questions, when it really pushed. Now it’s just bitter, snide, as lost in the desert as the rest of the French left it pretends to understand. It still has some great writers. But I don’t often enjoy reading them any more.”
As Rothschild undoubtedly spotted, Libération has become a powerful — and potentially highly profitable — brand. But as a contributor to a blog on the left-leaning weekly Nouvel Observateur‘s website put it, the only way he can exploit it is to ”replace everyone there with new faces. That would really be worthy of May 1968.” – Guardian Unlimited Â