Thursday, November 09, 2006

Trouble In Camelot

Libération PropagandaStaffel is asking the French government to bail them out. Never mind the ethical and business implications of this, nor the idiocy of thinking that a government should subsidize one part of a society’s political ideology and not another, nor the inevitability that the product will be one huge journalist thrill ride.

You’ve got to love the causes:

- People don’t buy the paper: it’s expensive, and the only hard news they run are wire stories.

- They don’t run it like a business. Le Monde is part of a larger publishing operation including magazines. Libé has a magazine, but it’s about as popular as the paper. The insuffrable staff would neither thin out or become more productive, and were unaware of just how it is one runs the means of production to begin with.

- Classifieds and advertising: they don’t have enough because their circulation sucks, and unlike a “real” Marxist society, they can’t use compulsion to keep eking out business.

- Distribution: their greatest single cost which they can't create do much about. Basically, they have a Union problem. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.

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