Le Monde on the Brink

"In France, firing a printing plant employee is hugely expensive. The gent is paid €50,000 per year, works 32 hours per week and 164 days per year. Firing him costs about €466,000 – that’s a French government estimate..."

When I had the unpleasant task of considering layoffs at a French subsidiary we used to budget about 2x annual salary for severance expenses. The 9x number quoted in the article is amazing if true... In those circumstances I would work very hard to avoid making full-time hires.

"An excessive reliance on public subsidies which account for about 10% of the industry’s entire revenue." I was shocked to find this out. More information here (not sure how reliable it is) http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/DF_media-prt.shtml

The problem is I don't consider "Le Monde" as a quality newspaper anymore: why would I buy it? What's its added value compared to information I cat get for free? It has a very serious tone but is in fact a very consensual newspaper (and usually gets really conservative as soon as elections approach; just look who is controlling it…). More concerning, it brings very few relevant in-depth analysis with historical context and involvement and doesn't differenciate itself enough from all the rest. I subscribe only to "Le Monde Diplomatique" which is the only newspaper which still brings some insights and reports going beyond just annotated events which that I can find anywhere.

    The core newsroom’s reluctance to support the digital strategy.

This is interesting as my impression is much of the newspaper industries decline as a failure in business leadership and that the newsrooms had just been following orders or unable to effect change.

This suggests that newsrooms, Le Monde's at least, have been resisting the move to more online readership. I wonder what the reason is, there must be an entrenched section of old school editors and writers who still don't understand the online economy. Not something I expected of journalists.

Here's the problem: almost all newspapers self-identify in a way that prevents any degree of substantial change of their core business. To them the thought of changing enough to survive in the modern, online, world is no different than the prospect of winking out of existence after running out of money, both appear to be death from their perspective.

This doesn't touch on the often numerous labor related legal straight jackets most big newspapers operate under. This combination explains why so many newspapers have simply continued operations unchanged until suddenly dying, in just about any other industry there would be a lot more innovation in play when so many papers are staring down near certain death in the next few years. Ultimately I think the end result is that the successor to the newspaper will not come from the newspaper industry but will sprout up from elsewhere.