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...Although American papers are facing a direr situation at the moment, their managers have been so much more flexible and innovative in responding than France's rigid media," Texier says. "Besides, American dailies started with far bigger markets and much more money than French papers did, so their margin for recovery is larger too." That may leave the French wishing they could go even further in promoting a peculiarly Gallic solution: more holidays...
...That may sound like peanuts to U.S. papers loaded down with hundreds of millions in debt as they battle plummeting ad revenues and the continued advance of Internet rivals. But while French papers haven't closed down like some American ones, they do face troubles of their own. Overall daily circulation has plummeted from a postwar high of 6 million to just 1.5 million today. The financial situation of most French papers has become so dire in recent years that the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided to augment annual state subsidies to the sector, which amount to between...
...Sarkozy has also proposed luring younger people to newspapers by offering to pay for home delivery of any title of their choice for one day a week during the year of their 18th birthday. Since such schemes aren't likely to do the trick for French papers, it makes sense for publishers to search for ways to eliminate costs before they occur. After all, the free handout dailies - another source of woe for traditional papers - long ago stopped publishing during year-end holidays and summer vacations, when readership volume dropped...
...react to falling ad revenues and the threat from the Internet," says Jean-Clément Texier, a media expert and founder of the Compagnie financière de communication consulting group in Paris. "Of course, readers initially react by saying it's a terrible move that breaks French tradition and deprives them of their paper. But since a huge portion of French dailies come in the morning mail - which doesn't operate on holidays - will anyone really miss getting those obsolete papers a day late...
...Probably not, since papers offer full news coverage anyway on their websites, as Libé did Thursday. That migration to the Web risks trapping French dailies in a dilemma their U.S. peers are already caught in: a proliferation of Internet-savvy readers unwilling to pay again for the original paper product. Indeed, Texier thinks whatever its current agony, the U.S. newspaper industry stands a better shot of coming out of this period alive than its French counterpart. (Read "How to Save Your Newspaper...