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France's National Dailies are in Trouble
Catherine Field
International Herald Tribune Saturday, October 16, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/15/news/edfield.html
PARIS - Those who care about democracy and public awareness in France can only wring their hands as they watch the country's national newspapers wither away. In a country of 60 million, there are just four national news dailies of any significance - Le Figaro, Le Monde (this rag is rabidly anti-American), Libération and Le Parisien, a tabloid also sold in the provinces as Aujourd'hui en France.
All four have sharply retracting circulations, Le Figaro and Le Monde less than 350,000, a fraction of the equivalent papers in Britain and Germany, while the other two have sales not even half that figure. And all four are hemorrhaging money. One (Le Figaro) has acquired a new owner to anguished cries that the paper risks becoming his mouthpiece. Le Monde and Libération are wondering frantically how to replenish capital without damaging editorial independence.
Among the smaller dailies, two niche titles seem to be holding their own - the Catholic La Croix and financial paper Les Echos - while the century-old Communist paper L'Humanité appears to be on its death bed. In a bid to avoid closure, France-Soir has just been bought by the Franco-Egyptian Raymond Lakah. From 1997 to 2003, the sales of national dailies have tumbled 12 percent, according to the monitoring agency EuroPQN.
The national dailies have never been particularly strong - according to some statistics only one in four of the population reads a national daily newspaper. Their provincial cousins are more vigorous: Regional newspapers accounted for nearly three-quarters of French newspaper sales by value last year. Weekly news magazines like Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Point and L'Express are also big players.
More ominous, though, is the competition from free-sheets and from the Internet. That change of news-source habits could be the death knell for the daily newspaper industry. With it would go a pillar of public life, for daily newspapers, despite their flaws, are a vital source of information and connection between citizens and their government and to the world beyond.
But does the decline have to be terminal? No, if publishers lower their costs (maybe they should outsource labor to Turkey or India) and tackle the unique opportunities and problems thrown up by newsprint - and if editors deliver a product readers actually want.
The biggest challenge is the cost of printing and distribution, an area where conservative union barons and cosseted workers have long held sway. The unions press demands on pay and rostering that drive up prices, enforce early deadlines - making for stale news - and often arbitrarily throw the switch to keep an issue off the streets.
In Britain, behavior of this kind crippled daily newspapers until the mid-1980s, when the print unions were smashed by Rupert Murdoch. Can France engineer reform without trauma, or is profound change only possible through confrontation?
The ingredients for the two options are already there. On one side, the demise of one or two national dailies would focus minds and encourage peaceful but profound change. On the side of potential conflict is the emergence of Serge Dassault, a tough-minded industrialist (what bs obfuscation; Dassault is a weapons manufacturer: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/27/business/media/27paper.html?ex=1098072000&en=8ab03259d1162284&ei=5070), as the new boss of Le Figaro. Which way will it go?
What flows from cost reform is editorial change. Daily papers need to deliver fresh news and comment and analysis that is timely and bright, rather than turgid, remote pieces written weeks after the event. And the product should reach people's doors before they leave for work in the morning.
If the product is right, it should be a lot easier to revive the French daily newspaper than the doomsters say. After all, newsprint has a lot to offer: Buying and reading a paper is associated with reflection and relaxation, whereas TV news is superficial, and Internet news is usually read hunched at an office desk. And a newspaper may be old tech, but nothing beats it for user-friendliness.
A few years ago, French bakers had a very smart marketing campaign for bread. To stem its decline, they focused on it as something sensual, with a unique savor, a cherished essential with different varieties and regional roots, created in scorching ovens at dawn by a devoted artisan. With that, bread changed from something bland and predictable to something special.
But this campaign succeeded because the product was there and was not a marketing ploy, and so people could rediscover bread for themselves.
That should be a useful lesson for French dailies. There is rich potential for reviving the daily national newspaper for reminding people of its unique role as a provider of news that is within easy reach, as a source of mental sustenance and even of companionship. But for this to succeed, the product must first exist.
Zhukov said:This is a positive development.
Freedom of information exchange is the best guard against a uniformly liberal international media.
The Great Firewall of China
How Google Caved in to China's Authoritarian Government While Spouting Do-gooder Cliches at the Same Time.
by Michael C. Boyer
09/30/2004 12:00:00 AM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/699bevot.asp
"WE BELIEVE a well functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high quality information. Google therefore has a responsibility to the world," co-founder Larry Page declared earlier this year in the company's letter to prospective shareholders. But is Google all that different from the much-maligned "old-economy" firms that put profits before people?
Consider China. Back in 2002, the Chinese government temporarily shut off its citizens' access to Google. Use of the search engine was eventually restored within the semi-authoritarian country because, according to Google's other co-founder, Sergey Brin, "There was enough popular demand in China for our services." Asked in a recent interview if Google ever negotiated with the Chinese government to have access restored or agreed to any conditions, Brin responded, emphatically, "no." "However," Brin noted, "other search engines have established local presences there and, as a price of doing so, offer severely restricted information." Then he carefully threw the Chinese a bone: "To be fair to China, it never made any explicit demands regarding censoring material. That's not to say I'm happy about the policies of other portals that have established a presence there."
Brin failed to mention that access to Google within China is subject to rigorous restrictions. A report released this month by the respected online watchdog OpenNet Initiative details the disturbing--sometimes unique--limitations that China places on Google users within its borders. Google users within China can't search for certain keywords--for instance, "falundafa" (Falun Gong). Nor do Google users in China have access to the Google cache, a historical record of the Web's pages.
As if this level of censorship weren't enough, the current issue of Britain's preeminent scientific journal New Scientist, asserts that Google may be "supporting Chinese Internet controls" by making sure that contentious news stories are omitted from search results using the just-launched Chinese version of Google News.
Given the choice between compromising search results and being absent from a market of millions of Chinese users, Google has chosen the former. Despite this overt attacks on Google's potential to do good, the company's executives, including activist co-founders Page and Brin, remain silent. This is hardly in keeping with their self-proclaimed "responsibility to the world." Surely such a responsibility requires Brin and Page to demand that China agree to unfettered access to its services--or else.
Google's decision not to rock the Chinese boat likely has as much to do with its recent public stock offering as it does with anything else. Casting out China's 87 million Internet users--over half of whom are under the age of 24--would hardly have made good business sense. In fact, Google is doing all it can to "serve" the Chinese market. This summer, Google acquired a share of Baidu, China's largest independent Internet search engine. Baidu's search technology is hardly free and unbiased. It currently prohibits its users from searching for some 40,000 keywords.
Google's willingness to be long on democratic pronouncements but short on meaningful actions--or, at the very least, words--that encourage change in the world's largest non-democratic nation smacks of corporate doublespeak. This is not unfamiliar. In the 1970s, numerous multinational corporations--automakers, banks, oil--did business with Apartheid South Africa. Their pretense was an old one: that economic engagement would encourage change from within. A quarter of a century later, in 2002, the victims of Apartheid filed multi-billion dollar class-action lawsuits against IBM, Ford, Citigroup, British Petroleum, and other multinationals. Their rational? "It's simple," one Apartheid victim said. "This is a lawsuit against institutions that collaborated with a system that had been declared a crime against humanity." At least BP defended its South African operations by arguing that they demonstrated to white South Africans that integration and profits can go hand-in-hand, and that they empowered black professionals.
That's a defense Google can't employ. Google executives say that they believe societies deserve "abundant, free, and unbiased access to high quality information." But as long as access to Google and its partners is censored in China, its services are doing little to serve that end. China, too, plays fast and loose with human rights. True, countless other U.S. corporations do business with China's semi-authoritarian government. But they are not complicit in a campaign to deceive China's citizens, nor do they tout themselves as global do-gooders.
"Sometimes the 'Don't be evil' policy leads to many discussions about what exactly is evil," Brin said recently. "One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information." Exactly. And Google has the power to play hardball. If popular demand for Google in China is so massive, why sit idly by as the Chinese obstruct access to information?
