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Europe
Is this the end of Le Monde?
2008-06-24
We really do need a graphic for schadenfreude ...
When Le Monde's sumptuous headquarters in Paris opened in 2004 - with its glass facade inscribed with the words of Victor Hugo and a dove symbolising press freedom - 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 €1m 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 savings of €9.4m demanded by the company.
As Admiral Potemkin so famously observed, "That which ceases to grow begins to rot."
Posted by:Steve White

#9  Sark's election presaged the demise of Al Jazeera-on-Seine.
Posted by: doc   2008-06-24 13:51  

#8  LOL, BP -- Good one!
Posted by: Scooter McGruder   2008-06-24 12:45  

#7  Shareholders could then move in to take control away from the journalists. Le Monde's unusual structure means that staff control 52% of the holding company and elect their directors and editors.

I think I may have identified part of the problem.
Posted by: Excalibur   2008-06-24 12:28  

#6  It's the End of Le Monde as we know it,
and I feel Fine!
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2008-06-24 11:10  

#5  Le Monde is dhimmi central in Euromedia. Their journalists aren't trusted; Le Figaro delivers news with a commitment to reporting the truth. Victor Hugo would hardly like modern France, although he would support the Sarkozy regime. Good riddance.
Posted by: McZoid   2008-06-24 04:07  

#4  who cares? It's all just a scramble for the lifeboats now. It's all agenda driven crap, written by people whom everyone believes to be drunks, misfits, dropouts and lowlifes (as written in that other rantburg article today) and few take seriously anymore.
Posted by: Sninert Black9312   2008-06-24 03:58  

#3  A few notes about "Le Monde"'s founder Hubert Beuve Méry: durig the War he told France's eleites hould preserve themselves in order to be available for reconstruction. Translation: The serfs will do the dying and at the end of war they elite will emerge for the sharing of the spoils.

Also before D-DAY with Geman boots still soiling French soil his obesssion was how to presve France from contamination of American ideas.

(Note for a5089: Both quotes are from the "Histoire du Vercors résistant"

The third note about Le Monde is that in 2002 they made a secret blank vote betweeen journalists and about fifty percent of them voted for the trotskist (ie left of communists) candidate. Let's remember that trotskists ever thought of inforamlation as weapon and not as a way to enlighten people's decisions.
Posted by: JFM   2008-06-24 03:00  

#2  We don't want to let ourselves be dictated to by the outside

Elitist media pricks. Die in a fire.
Posted by: gromky   2008-06-24 01:58  

#1  A strike? Mon dieu.
Posted by: Seafarious   2008-06-24 01:22  

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