Struggling to pay its debts and with staff relations at an all-time low, France's most famous daily is fighting to keep control of its future
WHEN LE MONDE'Ssumptuous headquarters in Paris opened in 2004, it was to house a media empire. Just four years on and the national newspaper group is struggling to pay for the architectural masterpiece - which it rents for €1 million a month - amid mounting losses and falling sales. Instead of hosting a multimedia empire to keep France's prestigious paper of record independent, the building has been the scene of the group's first strikes over company policy and the worst crisis in its 64-year history.
Le Monde's 340 staff have been given an ultimatum: unless enough apply for redundancy by next Monday, the paper will lose the independence that has marked it out from its privately owned competitors. Unions have estimated that between 90 and 130 people - one fifth of the editorial staff - will have to leave to help make the savings of €9.4 million demanded.
Relations between workforce and management are at an all-time low. Michel Delberghe of the CFDT, the biggest union representing journalists at Le Monde, says: "We don't deny that the paper is in extreme difficulty - the whole market in France has gone up in smoke - but we contest that cutting the workforce is the only solution."
How did things get so bad for France's biggest-selling national newspaper? Le Monde's travails are partly self-inflicted and partly a result of endemic difficulties in the French newspaper market. The centre-left paper lost €20 million last year and has debts of €150 million. Management has decreed that, without drastic cuts and a major reorganisation, it risks falling into administration by 2012 when half of its current debt - €75 million - must be repaid. Shareholders could then move in to take control away from the journalists. Le Monde's unusual structure means that staff control 52 per cent of the holding company and elect their directors and editors.
If the €9.4 million target is not met, more staff will be selected for redundancy in September ahead of a planned revamp of the paper. If the restructuring fails, two shareholders that already own about 34 per cent of the company's website are expected to step in. One is Prisa, the Spanish media group that publishes El País. The other is Arnaud Lagardère, head of the defence company and media giant, Lagardère Media, which includes the magazine publisher, Hachette Filipacchi Médias.
"The president's rich industrialist friends already own so much of the media - newspapers and television included - that this would be a disaster," says one journalist at Le Monde. "A takeover like that would destroy everything the paper is."
Le Monde's circulation has dropped to 320,000 from 398,000 in 2003. Advertising revenue has halved since 2001 and the newapaper has not been profitable for seven years. Over the past decade, it has adapted its once austere format of no pictures and often turgid text, adding photography, hiring the best investigative journalists and boosting its arts reporting. When Jean-Marie Colombani became editor in chief in 1994, backed by the chairman, Sarkozy supporter Alain Minc, he decided that the paper would have to build its own media empire or be swallowed up by a larger rival. A majority of staff supported his policy of acquiring new titles.
Le Mondebrought on board Prisa and Lagardère to inject the capital it lacked. But unions now argue that its acquisitions - which ranged from the successful regional paper, Midi Libre, to religious publications and bookshops and the niche film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma - were disastrous and are the cause of the company's huge debts. Some of the biggest titles have been sold and others are set to follow. Colombani was voted out by staff in May 2007.
Eric Fottorino, who has spent his working life at the paper and became editor in chief in January, is widely respected. When he suggested compulsory redundancies in April, Le Monde was hit by three days of strikes. His planned revamp in the autumn consists of making Le Monde lighter during the week and beefing up the supplements at the weekend, as well as selling off smaller titles.
Some of Le Monde's problems are shared by the industry. The total circulation of French national newspapers is eight million, half that of the UK and one-third of Germany. Patrick Eveno, a media historian who has written a history of Le Monde, argues that low newspaper readership in France is not cultural, pointing out that in 1914, the French read far more newspapers than the British. But after the Liberation in 1944, when 90 per cent of papers were banned, mostly on the pretext of collaboration, the new titles were blighted by an obsession with politics.
The biggest-selling national daily title in France is the sports paper L'Équipe. The regional press, which delivers a diet of sport and hyper-local news, is booming, with sales that far outstrip the nationals.
The cost of printing is much higher in France than Spain or Germany, and managing the 35-hour week in an industry such as journalism is also difficult. Journalists at Le Monde, for example, have around 12 weeks' holiday a year, once their lieu hours have been counted.
So can anything be done to prevent the paper being taken over? Some are optimistic. Eveno says that Le Mondehas survived several crises over the past 20 years and has always managed to keep staff control. Beatrice Gurrey, chairwoman of the staff association, which holds a controlling share of the parent company, insists a solution will be found that safeguards the paper's independence and structure. "We don't want to let ourselves be dictated to by the outside and we have always been vigilant against that." That vigilance will be severely tested over the coming months.
Guardian Service