Sad to watch but the national newspapers in France are dying slowly, the internet and the local medias are eating their shares fast, and a strike was never a good solution when at this time
France is a big country, quiet, calm and really nothing to write home about. No excitement and a blessed peace. Basically its quite a frustrating place for a journalist, as obviously there is no real news.
The local newspapers are much more popular then the national and the free Metro morning and evening newspapers provide all the relevant headlines and keeps you from falling asleep and miss your station.
But behind these the truth is that the national newspapers are collapsing. The Liberation is hardly breathing and will be closed down within few months, while most of the relevant journalists already fled from this sinking ship (thats sells less then 150,000 copies all over France !!) Le Monde and Le Figaro are struggling with a low distribution and financial problems and actually all the famous and proud French traditional journalism is collapsing.
Whose fault is it ? Certainly not the readers, they had enough of philosophical editorial they need news and fast, the world is changing fast and the French leading newspapers didn't adjust. The whole media is led by dinosaurs that refuse to acknowledge the change. And like a drunken captain they sink with their ships.
The Internet is covering the gaps but the traditional thinking of the major leading journalists in France prevent them to catch the idea of the Internet and they still run their newspapers websites the way they run a printed paper.
But whenever the situation is bad then comes the unions (this time the printing and distributors) and hit another blow on this miserable industry. Unlike Rufert Murdoch that beat up the same unions in the UK, the French journalism world has no strong figure to count on, no support from the government and actually nothing to offer. The unions as always cut the branch they are sitting on too often, they damage whatever they touch and every strike like this result in more and more closed businesses and unemployments.
By and by, when the Liberation management wanted to try health measures and tried to fire 28 people, some of them begged to go ! The newspaper union decided on a strike. Solidarity is fine but stupidity isn't, they all knew the newspaper is dying, they all knew that the owner is furious because he knows he has been cheated when purchasing it, but the fact that they wanted to try to heal the newspaper is a blessed and welcome step in many places. Not in the Liberation, the result is that this newspaper will closed down faster, and all the journalists will be fired with no chance to find a job (because they were too late to go).
