WSJ.com - Paper Founded by Sartre Finds Itself Trapped Between Being and Nothingness:
The 63-year-old boss of France's main left-wing newspaper has been battling instead to salvage his own job -- in collaboration with Edouard de Rothschild, banker, horse-racing enthusiast and scion of one of Europe's grandest capitalist dynasties.
On this peculiar and sometimes-prickly partnership hangs the fate of Libération, a newspaper set up in 1973 by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and a cluster of young radicals, among them Mr. July, dedicated to the utopian dreams of the 1960s. A founding manifesto promised to "depend on the people, not on advertisers or banks."
Like most manifestos, it didn't long survive initial contact with reality.
The paper, now a pillar of France's mainstream media, has drifted from its original Maoist moorings and into the orbit of the market forces it once vowed to avoid. Like newspapers the world over, Libération has been hammered by the Internet. Its biggest single shareholder is Mr. Rothschild, a New York-educated MBA who last year invested ?20 million, or about $25 million, for a 38% stake.
And like newspapers the world over, the French fish wrap is facing tough times and an uncertain future:
Libé, as Mr. July's newspaper is widely known, has been convulsed by internal turmoil that echoes the angry emotions out on the streets of Paris and other French cities. The protesters this month forced the government to junk a new labor law that was meant to encourage companies to hire more young people by making it easier to fire them. Though they often mimicked the slogans and tactics of the 1968 outburst, their goal isn't to change the world but rather to stop it from changing.
"Everything that French society is suffering...we are suffering, too," says Mr. July, who has run the paper since 1974. The print media, and France in general, he says, suffer "existential anguish."
Vive La France! Book your trips to Paris now.
Confronted with mounting losses at Libération, Mr. July in November announced a plan to cut jobs and outsource some of the paper's services. The cost cutting, says Mr. July, was "an ice-cold bath for everyone."
The first strike in the paper's history followed. Mr. Rothschild wrote an open letter, saying that he understood the staff's "stupefaction" but warning that cuts were "unfortunately inevitable." The paper's accelerating losses risked eating up his entire investment in a year, he said. Left-wing reporters circulated a petition that blamed Libération's troubles on an editorial line "that flirts too often with 'good sense.' " They called instead for a radical stance of "causes, utopias, desires and provocations."
Causes, utopias, desires and provocations with little evidence of good sense? I know a local newspaper with an editorial line they might be much more comfortable with.
It was in that period that Joe Napolitan claims to have become the first person to describe himself as a political consultant (Perlmutter, ed. Manship Guide to Political Communication, pg19). herald
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