PARIS - Join the Paris morning rush and it's easy to get the impression that newspapers here are doing just fine. Across the French capital, subway riders leaf through the headlines as they hurtle toward the city center.
Trouble is, a lot of them haven't paid for their copies. Metro, a Swedish-owned free newspaper, and its imitators have taken the market by storm since their arrival two years ago, and a growing number of commuters no longer bother to buy a newspaper.
But freebie papers are just one of several blows to such illustrious French titles as Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation, as the once-proud industry struggles to overcome its worst ever financial crisis.
Many traditional papers have been losing money for years, squeezed between falling circulation and advertising revenues on the one hand and expensive, heavily unionized printing services on the other. The growth of free Internet news - Google launched its French news site last year - has made things even worse.
Now, in a sign of how desperate things have become, the country's leading left-wing tabloid has just announced plans to sell a sizable stake to a Rothschild heir. Edouard de Rothschild - whose banking fortune makes him synonymous with starchy conservatism for many people - confirmed Monday that he plans to finalize his acquisition of a 37 percent stake in Liberation for $27 million by the New Year, becoming its main shareholder.
Rothschild has said he plans to build a media company with Liberation as its core.
Liberation is not the first major daily to turn to big business for a bailout. Defense tycoon Serge Dassault took control of conservative broadsheet Le Figaro earlier this year, raising concerns in some quarters about the future independence of the French press.
Liberation isn't likely to be the last to bring in new private partners. Le Monde, which has cut editorial sections and dozens of jobs, is in talks with possible investors including Lagardere SA, a defense company which also owns the magazine and newspaper publisher Hachette Filipacchi Medias.
France's traditional newspapers, like those in most other countries, have long been losing ground to more digestible television and radio news.
Attempts to lighten up content often meet strong resistance within France's determinedly literary newspaper culture - which takes pride in a legendary exposDe penned by a novelist, Emile Zola, in 1898. Headlined "J'accuse," it denounced a high-level plot to frame Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus for spying and set in motion the process that led to his release from prison.
Internal dissent over Le Monde's recent turn toward a softer editorial style has added a sense of identity crisis to the financial woes of the center-left broadsheet, where last week's resignation of executive editor Edwy Plenel threw fresh doubt over the paper's search for a partner willing to inject $67 million into its finances.
Serge July, Liberation's founding CEO, says Rothschild's investment will fund improvements in the paper's pricing, distribution, editorial and online operations and insists the new ownership will do nothing to cramp the paper's left-wing credentials.
Liberation was created in the aftermath of France's 1968 student uprising, in association with the intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.
Staff representatives have also backed the deal, pending a vote, after receiving guarantees on the paper's independence and the preservation of their veto on management decisions.
But despite assurances, some nagging doubts remain.
"On a symbolic level, it's shocking," said Pierre Defassiaux, an official at the SNJ, the main French journalists' union. "It just shows how difficult it's becoming to sustain an independent press in France."
Sensitivities about media independence were heightened by Dassault's acquisition of Socpresse SA, owner of Le Figaro and dozens of influential regional titles.
Soon after promising full editorial independence, the defense baron cautioned editors against publishing stories that endangered French "commercial or industrial interests," according to notes taken by staff - who also claimed that stories about his company, Dassault Aviation SA, were inexplicably dropped.
"Even if you try to create a clear wall between editorial activity and business interests, self-censorship inevitably creeps into the process," said Aidan White, head of the Brussels-based European Federation of Journalists, which campaigns for tougher press ownership rules. "That's very worrying because it's pretty corrosive."
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