Paris (AFP)
The future of the paper press will be partly played on Friday before the Commercial Court of Paris, which will say if it accepts the offer of the national newspapers to save from liquidation the main French press distributor, Presstalis, again strangled by the debts.
The Paris Commercial Court said Tuesday morning that its judgment was under advisement at 3 p.m. Friday, Presstalis told AFP. The distributor declared himself in insolvency on April 20, weighed down by colossal losses.
Its shareholders, daily newspapers and magazines, clashed for several weeks around the future of the distributor, without finding any compromise. Presstalis' survival is essential for certain publishers, the distributor holding the results of their sales in kiosks over several months, while others prefer to see it sink to move to another system.
Led by Louis Dreyfus, president of the daily newspaper distribution cooperative and of the World Management Board, the French daily newspapers propose to take over 265 of the 910 employees that Presstalis has, that is to say 120 of the 209 positions of the head office, and 150 of the 193 positions of the platform. form of Bobigny, which manages the distribution of daily newspapers, according to Le Monde. But not the teams from the SAD subsidiary, which distribute newspapers outside of Paris.
SAD employees launched a warning shot Tuesday morning by blocking printing works, from Gallargues (Gard) to Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), preventing the distribution of newspapers over a large part of the territory. "The fight is just beginning, we will not let go," launched the Syndicat du Livre-CGT on Twitter.
The daily newspapers proposed their plan Monday evening in extremis. During one last weekend of negotiations, two of the main groups of magazines had not validated a last joint proposal: Prisma (editor of Current Woman, Geo, Capital, Here, Gala ...) and Reworld (Closer , Auto Plus, Full Life, Grazia ...).
This project submitted by the president of the magazine cooperative Frédérick Cassegrain provided for the establishment, in the long term, of a single messaging service with Presstalis' competitor, the MLP.
Presstalis management supports the daily papers' proposal, which it describes as "realistic". The Ciri (Interministerial Committee for Industrial Restructuring), which framed the discussions, must still specify to what extent it will support the distributor, who is going through his third major crisis in less than ten years.
Discussions must continue during the week: the resized cooperative proposed by the daily newspapers could not reach equilibrium without distributing a few magazines, the volume of daily newspapers having fallen sharply in newsstands in recent years.
Le Figaro and Le Monde sold less than 40,000 paper copies each per day on average in 2019, out of more than 600,000 copies in total, including digital. Liberation sold 13,000 copies, L'Humanité less than 5,000. Only the sports daily L'Equipe and Le Parisien-Today in France still sell a lot at newsagents, in addition to the regional press.
In recent years, magazines have migrated en masse to the MLP (Messageries lyonnaises de presse). Several small groups, including SoPress (Society) or FGH (Le Un) were also authorized by the sector regulator, Arcep, to join their competitor on Tuesday.
For MLP president José Ferreira, "publishers no longer trust Presstalis". The MLPs, who had been approached to take over Presstalis, ultimately did not submit an offer.
Presstalis called on all publishers Monday evening "to participate actively in the discussions" of the coming days to "finalize an enriched and structuring offer for the sector".
"A part" of the magazine press could accompany the offer of daily newspapers, assured Frédérick Cassegrain, also director of operations of CMI France (Elle, Marianne ...).
© 2020 AFP