Tough times at Le Monde

Correction appended

PARIS: During their second strike in a week, journalists at Le Monde streamed out of the newspaper's nine-story headquarters in ghostly masks and rumpled white T-shirts painted with numbers from 1 to 129.

The numerals - equal to about a quarter of the 600 employees on the staff - denoted the number of journalists that management was seeking to lay off at the unprofitable 63-year-old institution as part of a revival plan which the top executives have likened to a doctor cutting off a limb to save a life.

"We are facing an extreme emergency," said Laurent Greilsamer, assistant managing editor of Le Monde, who started his career at the newspaper more than 30 years ago. "To understand what's happening to Le Monde, it's necessary to talk about the arrogance of newspapers. It's necessary to talk about Le Figaro, Libération. It's necessary to talk about the daily national French press."

With plunging advertising revenue and static circulation, Le Monde is emblematic of the general turmoil within the French newspaper industry, which is heavily subsidized by the state and has steadily lost readers to breezy, independent new competitors online and free newspapers like Metro. Even as French newspapers have transformed in a chase for readers, advertising has declined and electronic news sites - including that of Le Monde - have failed to fill the gap in income.

L'Équipe, the broadsheet sports daily that once had the largest circulation of any newspaper in France, was dethroned this year after newsstand sales fell 8 percent. Le Figaro, the new circulation leader, announced 80 job cuts to cope with weak advertising and €10 million, or $15.73 million, in losses last year. And seeking to raise cash, L'Humanité, formerly the daily of the French Communist Party, has sold its headquarters building.

"No one wants to change a system that is completely - according to our analysis - catastrophic," said Philippe Manière, a former journalist and director of the Institut Montaigne, a research organization that developed a "Marshall Plan" of proposals to save the press, among them making state subsidies conditional on a three-year period of reforms to modernize printing and distribution. "We expected some interest from the public decision-makers. In fact, they are not interested. It's a habit they have."

Historically, the French newspaper culture has been relatively weak compared to other Western countries - 181 of 1,000 people subscribe to newspapers in France compared with 371 in Germany and 274 in the United States, according to figures from the World Association of Newspapers, which is based in Paris.

In that tepid market, Le Monde has reeled from crisis to crisis. It has not made a profit in more than seven years. Daily circulation of 354,000 has fallen almost 9 percent since 2003, according to the OJD, the press observer that tracks French newspaper circulation. The company lost €15.4 million in 2007 and wracked up deficits of more than €180 million over the past seven years, the Le Monde chairman, Eric Fottorino, wrote in a column published Saturday, warning that "never have Le Monde's finances been more dire."

Two years ago, Lagardère, the French media and aerospace conglomerate, and Prisa, the Spanish media group that owns the newspaper El País, offered some relief by each buying stakes in Le Monde worth a combined €50 million.

Both companies have signaled that they are prepared to invest more in exchange for increased influence. But for now, their money is unwelcome at Le Monde, a paper with a unique culture in which the journalists wield considerable power.

Le Monde - created in 1944 on the orders of General Charles de Gaulle to be the "conscience of France" - has a complex shareholder structure in which the staff of journalists holds a 60.4 percent stake in the company while Prisa and Lagardère each hold stakes of less than 18 percent. The journalists' stake allows the staff to weigh in on financial and management decisions, including the selection of the chief executive.

Last year, they stepped in to push out the former chairman, Jean-Marie Colombani, whose pricey drive to build Le Monde into a press group with purchases of other publications raised the company's debts.

Patrick Eveno, a historian at the Sorbonne who has written extensively about newspapers, said that the paper has embarked on a "reverse strategy" with plans to shed those publications; it recently sold its regional newspaper group led by the flagship Midi Libre.

Eveno said he considered the job cuts necessary for the newspaper's survival, given the high costs of publishing a French newspaper and falling advertising revenue. "The journalists think that they need to be numerous to be make a good newspaper, but it's important to think about the quality and not the quantity to make a good newspaper," he said. "It's not a formula where the numbers always count."

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