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Staff Fire Le Monde Publisher Who Told The World After 9/11: “Nous sommes tous Américains (We are all Americans)”

You had to really look for it to find it, but there it was on Le Monde’s back page – a short blurb announcing that journalists, who wield the tremendous power of being able to veto shareholders in choosing the newspaper’s director, have voted out Publisher and Editor Jean-Marie Colombani, known as JMC.

A shareholder-editorial committee meets today to figure out the next move which probably will be to appoint someone who will not act so much the “monarch” as did JMC over his 12-year reign. He lost out in trying, unopposed, for his third six-year term.

He is credited with saving Le Monde from bankruptcy in the 1990s via a plan that allowed select financiers to buy no more than 2% of the newspaper’s shares, he made the newspaper a more interesting, dynamic read, but he also went on a spending spree just as newspaper profitabilities started their decline and the solution to that was to fire hundreds of staff, and bring in new capital from the likes of industrialist Arnaud Lagardère.

Today, 47% of the shares are held by outside shareholders – Lagardère’s Hachette Group owns 17%, and Prisa, owner of Spain’s El Pais, owns 15% while Le Monde’s staff ownership has dropped to 13.1%. JMC has urged more outside capital to stem expected losses of €40 million ($30 million), but staff fear that will dilute their ownership even more. In spite of a relaunch, Le Monde’s circulation fell last year to a seven-year low of 350,000 copies a day.

His “Nous sommes tous Américains” editorial after 9/11 caught the world’s notice because France, and Le Monde, were known not to really be “that” close to the US, and yet here it was, France’s most influential cultural intelligentsia icon, printing, “How not to feel, as in the direst moments of our history, deep solidarity with this people, and this country, the United States, of whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, thus our solidarity?”

Even with the outside capital that represented interests that were not so left-of-center as Le Monde’s tradition dictates, JMC was able to maintain the newspaper’s editorial outlook. In this month’s Presidential election JMC typically supported Ségolène Royal, the socialist candidate.

The shareholders all supported JMC for a third term except the veto-carrying journalists. They said their vote was not against the newspaper, but rather its management style. - May 25, 2007

Keywords:French newspapers,Le Monde

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