http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jMYtLJV_oGyGm7De9_uOKj0W2IKgD95SVKVO1
Sarkozy offers new help for French print media
By LAURENT PIROT – Jan 23, 2009
PARIS (AP) — The French state will help provide free newspaper subscriptions to teenagers for their 18th birthdays, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced Friday. But the bigger gift is for France's ailing print media.
Sarkozy also announced a ninefold rise in the state's support for newspaper deliveries and a doubling of its annual print advertising outlay amid a swelling industry crisis.
Sarkozy argued in a speech to publishers that the measures are needed because the global financial crisis has compounded woes for a sector already suffering from falling ad revenues and subscriptions.
In a speech to industry leaders, Sarkozy said it was legitimate for the state to consider the print media's economic situation.
"It is indeed its responsibility ... to make sure an independent, free and pluralistic press exists," he said.
This is sensitive territory for Sarkozy, who has been accused of cozying up to media moguls and exerting influence over them. He is also no stranger to heavy criticism in the country's often opinionated newspapers.
In measures to take effect next month, the state will increase its annual support for newspaper and magazine deliveries to euro70 million ($90 million) from euro8 million last year, and spend euro20 million more a year for its advertisements in print publications. The state will also defer some fees the publications face.
One of Sarkozy's solutions to help the industry is a pilot program that will give teenagers celebrating their 18th birthday a free, yearlong subscription to any general news daily of their choice. The publisher is to give the newspapers away, while the state pays for the deliveries.
That initiative appeared designed to assuage industry fears that young readers don't share the same appetite for print media that their parents and grandparents have, denting current and future revenues....
*Okay, this newspaper activity is gonna seem pretty weird and farfetched by American standards – why is Sarko flushing state money into miserable failing newspapers? But Sarkozy never acts on whimsy. He's surely got his reasons – some open, some not so open.
*Obviously he can buy the favors of the press by subsidizing them, but no, it can't be that simple. There's no doubt the French press will bite his hands for doing that. So that wouldn't pay off directly. Furthermore, I don't think he much cares. He's perfectly content to have them bark aloud so long as they fear. And they do fear, and after this event, they're gonna fear a lot more.
*Since he's a former Minister of Communications, obviously Sarkozy knows the realities of the press and its economics. I'm thinking that Sarkozy suspects that France may possess the last newspapers on Earth. At least, the last semifunctional newspapers that aren't wholly-owned by the loathsome likes of Rupert Murdoch or Aleksander Lebedev, offshored freebooters who are literal enemies of the state.
*Where is the planet's news supposed to come from? Where is Google supposed to link, if not to newspapers? Google doesn't generate the news. Except for the analog press and a little bit of failing TV, there's no viable business model for generating news. If we were gonna have a profitable digital news model, that would have shown up by now. It's about as likely as cold fusion.
*And it's not just *news* that newspapers supply – they also supply *celebrity.* Google-juice is still for the likes of Ron Paul. Newspapers tell the public who is in power. Who they are supposed to adore.
*I'm surmising that Sarkozy concluded that the sudden collapse of other nation's newspapers may play into his hands. The loss of newspapers reveals whole sets of cavernous black holes in the social order. A sudden, bewildering, massive coverage-failure. A run on the starmaking machinery: a liquidity-panic for fame.
*In other words, the press performs a useful function. And to be a world leader without one?
How? How, exactly?
*If London's press is the toy of the KGB, while Paris still has working publications with a real press corps... Why would anybody seriously bother about "Tony Blair" again? Are they supposed to read Tony's tweets and join Tony's meetups? Tony is not in office now, he lives on political celebrity, on his reputation. With that out of reach for him, Tony is over.
*But is Sarkozy over, in these conditions? Why no. While political rivals are scrabbling with bloody fingertips for a few grams of serious public attention, Sarkozy still has a regional empire of conventional media. He therefore looks like the only civilized grownup left on the Continent. The others have become non-events, they're in the deepest-darkest reaches of the savage, caterwauling jungles of digitality, in a situation something like Zimbabwe.
*That media situation clearly wouldn't last forever – but just say it lasted five years. Would he ever need more time than that?
