Two figures underline both the injustice and the incoherence of the French government's policy when it comes to helping the press. The circulation of print newspapers continues to collapse as digital platforms grow in popularity, to the point where retail sales of national dailies are barely more than 150,000 a day. Yet the government has just decided to release 30 million euros in a one-off grant to help newspapers facing a steep rise in production costs – in particular print editions. This aid is on top of the ongoing annual payments given by the state to newspaper publishers.
Once again, this is good news for the ten or so billionaires who are in fact the owners of the printed press in France.
It was a joint statement dated December 14th 2022, and signed by several ministers, that brought the glad tidings to the print publishers – in other words, the billionaires who control the largest newspapers. It stated: “Bruno Le Maire, minister for the economy, finance and industrial and digital sovereignty, Gabriel Attal, minister of state in charge of public accounts, and Rima Abdul Malak, culture minister, are announcing aid of 30 million euros to the press publishers most hit by the increase in certain of their production costs.
“This increase challenges the press's ability to fulfil its essential mission of informing the public which contributes to the constitutionally-important objective of pluralism. Faced with these extra costs, some press publishers have been forced to reduce the pagination of their publications and to pull the publication of special and one-off editions.”
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The choice of words here (“reduce the pagination”, “pull the publication of special and one-off editions”) clearly indicates that the government's priority is to provide help to the 'print' press, and that the 30 million euros in aid is aimed at compensating for the steep rise in production costs.
Should there be any doubt on the issue, one just has to carry on reading the joint communiqué. In particular we find this: “This budget of 30 million euros will be financed in the main by a budget aimed at the press which has not been spent in the context of the economic recovery plan and by 5 million euros freed up in the amended finance law following an amendment from the Member of Parliament Denis Masséglia.”
If one goes to the National Assembly website and reads the wording proposed by this MP from Emmanuel Macron's governing Renaissance party (formerly La République En Marche), it states quite clearly: “An amendment of 5 million euros for the benefit of schedule 180 Press and Media was unanimously adopted by the finance committee during an examination of the budget for the project as set out under PLF [editor's note, the finance bill] 2023. It involved support for the press sector because of the very large increase in the cost of paper and energy.”
So it is indeed the 'print' press which is being considered here and not the digital press, among which there are many new independent media created over the last 15 years, including Mediapart.
No indication has been given either by the government or the MP concerned as to the criteria for being awarded the money, other than that the beneficiaries must be publications that are recognised by the “Commission Paritaire des Publications et Agences de Presse”, the state body which decides who can be treated as a press organisation for economic reasons. But one is left to understand that those who are appreciative of the government will once again be well looked after.
Main beneficiaries are billionaires
This concern on the part of the government and the Macron-supporting group of MPs at the National Assembly towards the newspapers owned by the very wealthy is clearly unjust, and for one well-known reason. Leaving to one side the context of the cost of living crisis linked to the war in Ukraine, which has seen the price of energy and many raw materials, including paper, soar, this privileged group is already the section of the press that has benefited the most from state aid. Indeed, the injustice borders on the indecent, as it is the wealthiest who are the most generously provided for.
The latest available figures, which relate to 2021, and which the government discreetly published last September after an unjustifiable delay, clearly show this.
Out of 92.8 million euros of direct aid given that year, the Les Échos-Le Parisien newspaper group, owned by luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault, was top of the list, with an award of 15.8 million euros. In second place came Le Figaro group owned by the Dassault family – of aviation and defence industry fame - on 7.7 million euros; in third position was Le Monde, owned by telecoms and technology billionaire Xavier Niel and his business associates, with 7.5 million euros; and in fourth position was Libération, which at the time was owned by telecoms and media billionaire Patrick Drahi, with 6.7 million euros.
GRAPHIC BELOW: Fifteen private groups between them receive 80% of the financial aid given to the press in France. This graphic shows the press groups that received at least a million euros in public aid in 2021, classified according to the amounts paid.
The resulting figures are damning: four billionaires alone, who have no need of help from the state, shared between themselves some 37.7 million euros out of the 92.8 million euros of aid that was given. One can understand why Mediapart, along with the independent online press body the Syndicat de la Presse Indépendante d’Information en Ligne (SPIIL) of which it was a co-founder, has always supported the abolition of this form of direct aid. Instead, it argues, the state money should be redeployed in the form of indirect aid, to help the entire press ecosystem, through a reduction of VAT or sales tax which would allow readers to buy either print or digital newspapers at a reduced price.
This one-off grant of 30 million euros is thus clearly part of the existing and odious state habit of sucking up to billionaire press barons. But this time another factor leaps out too, and that is the inconsistent logic behind the aid, as can readily be seen.
First of all, we learn from reading the Renaissance MP's amendment that the five million euros that were released for the press came from taking an equivalent sum from a grant that was initially supposed to fund the book publishing industry.
In the “summary account” of the reasons behind the move, it states: “This amendment thus proposes transferring 5 million euros from the new budget package that was supposed to be released for schedule 334 Book and Cultural Industries to schedule 180 Press and Media (action 2, press aid) in order to support a press sector facing soaring costs in paper and energy.”
The reasoning seems unclear: if this is about helping certain industries to overcome the shock of the rise in paper prices, why should it be done at the expense of the book sector which is just as affected by these production costs?
The collapse in retail newspaper sales
But the main absurdity lies elsewhere. For according to information that Mediapart has gleaned from industry sources, the historic shift from the 'print' press to the online press has reached such a level that average sales in newspaper kiosks of daily national titles have fallen to around 150,000 copies a day.
This figure, which is doing the rounds of newspaper publishers, is in fact not very hard to verify. It is true that if one looks at the official figures on the website of the newspaper circulation body the Alliance pour les Chiffres de la Presse et des Médias (ACPM), there are no statistics that directly show this.
But under the category “paid circulation in France” one can find the number of copies sold monthly for each national daily; the last available figures are for October 2022. And for each title there is also an infographic showing what proportion of a publication's sales for the period 2021 to 2022 comes from digital formats and what proportion comes from print formats, including retail sales and home deliveries.
For example, in the case of Le Monde, one finds that the “paid circulation in France” in October 2022 was 479,720, out of which retail sales represent 5.94% of the total, against 78,64% for online versions, 9.37% for home delivery print sales and 6.05% for subscribers.
Even if the statistics on the sales formats are not that recent, we can more or less deduce that retail sales – mostly kiosk sales – of Le Monde amounted to around 28,495 copies a day in October 2022. And if one performs the same calculation for all the national daily titles (Le Monde, Le Figaro, L’Équipe, Les Échos, Libération, La Croix and L’Humanité) what is the final tally? It comes to precisely 152,555 copies sold a day in kiosks.
It is not very hard to gauge the collapse in kiosk sales over time. In comparison with this figure of 152,555 average daily sales in October 2022, the same daily titles sold 1,335,000 copies a day back in 1990, according to figures published at the time by the media distribution company the Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne (NMPP), and reported by Le Monde.
One can therefore see the other astonishing aspect of this policy of state aid to the press: at a time when the online revolution is radically changing our reading habits, the state, which hinders the new independent press on the internet as much as possible, throws money an an ageing print press, which is in the process of vanishing as the online press grows.
Even if we add the sales of Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France to these national daily sales figures – a publication which has a hybrid status, carrying very little national news and being mostly regional in nature – the circulation number rises to 256,629 copies sold a day in kiosks. This hardly changes the overall picture: the French system is seeking to shut the door on new entrants to protect the domain of a few billionaires. It's the opposite of a strategic state: it's a short-sighted and colluding state.
In reality, the national daily press and the regional daily press have been trapped in a deadly logic for more than two decades. As the shift towards online accelerates, the 'print' versions see more of their readership disappear each year, which forces them to keep on putting up prices. This then accelerates the loss of readers as the prices become unaffordable, especially for younger readers. Meanwhile, each year the publishers ask the government to come to their aid financially.
The start of 2023 neatly encapsulates this downward spiral. The state is in fact increasing its aid to the 'print' part of the sector, while at the same time every newspaper is going up in price, as Le Monde recently reported. “Buying the print version of Le Figaro, Les Échos and also Le Monde will cost 20 centimes more, their price rising to 3.40 euros,” it writes. “La Croix and Libération will go up by 30 and 20 centimes respectively, to 2.70 euros. As for [sports newspaper] L’Équipe, the paper will go up by 10 centimes (to 2.30 euros in the week and 3.30 euros on Saturdays with the magazine) from January 2nd.”
Meanwhile, the state is not planning any support for the online press, where the most recent titles could be badly threatened financially by inflation and the resulting rise in wage bills.
Can one imagine Napoleon III, at the height of the transport revolution in the middle of the 19th century, seeking to put a brake on the expansion of the railways and massively funding stagecoaches? Of course not. But in Emmanuel Macron's France the desire to anticipate the whims of a few very wealthy people leads to such stupidities, by throwing taxpayers' money out of the window.
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter