France's New Daily

Champagne corks popped in a Paris city room last week to greet the birth of a major French daily: Le Temps de Paris. For competitors, the cork-popping sounded the opening barrage in an all-out circulation war. The new afternoon paper, a fat (for France), 40-page tabloid with heavy backing from businessmen (initial investment: about $4,000,000), set out to combine the dash that is all too common in the French press with the responsibility that is all too rare. After readers snapped up its first press run of 480,000, Le Temps began printing 500,000 daily.

The country's biggest paper, France-Soir (circ. 1,300,000), leaped to the challenge. With a staff strengthened by 14 new hands, France-Soir jumped from 14 to 20 pages, splashed pictures on its front page, and plugged a contest offering 50 million francs ($142,857) for the best characterization of "the ideal Frenchman." Little Paris-Presse (circ. 160,000) boosted itself from 14 to 16 pages and put in a crossword-puzzle contest. Stuffy, neutralist Le Monde, small (circ. 166,000) but influential, fought the new opposition with a front-page editorial: "Big newspapers capable of exercising an influence on public opinion should not be byproducts of industrial enterprises."

"Why Don't You Invent?" Though Le Temps' backing comes from executives in top business firms, e.g., Michelin tires, Citroen, Esso Standard Oil, the backers (as Esso Standard Oil took pains to point out in its own case) went in as individuals, not corporations. Nevertheless, the bugaboo of business control of newspapers is a real one in France. When some 60 dailies cluttered Paris kiosks in the 1920s, bankers and munitions makers kept newspapers like mistresses. By World War II, big business had a firm grip on the major Paris dailies. Afterward, millions of angry Frenchmen blamed business for the papers' sellout to collaborationists.

Since the liberation, la presse pourrie ("the rotten press") has been largely reformed in the dominating hands of such professionals as France-Soir's tiny, dynamic Managing Director Pierre Lazareff, 49, who worked in the U.S. during the war for Manhattan's Daily Mirror. In the last ten years, the French capital's dailies, which now number 14, have also undergone what the French consider increasing "Americanization," i.e., more news and features, less opinion.

Yet the press still commands little esteem from Frenchmen. By U.S. standards, most papers are typographically jumbled, abound in inaccurate and slanted, misleading stories. Foreign correspondents in Paris soon get over the shock of having officials suggest when information is unavailable: "Why don't you invent something?"

Specialties. While some rivals tried to link the new paper to the discredited tradition, Le Temps set its sights high in the better postwar tradition of French journalism. Under Philippe Boegner, 46, a veteran of France's top picture magazine, Paris-Match (circ. 1,500,000), as well as newspapering, Le Temps pledged its independence of any party or clique. Domestically, Le Temps takes a politically conservative line; abroad, it is friendly to the U.S. and Western unity. One of Boegner's innovations is an editorial page separate from news columns.

To recruit readers, Le Temps offers a shrewd combination of its opposition's specialties: a double page of foreign news (rivaling France-Soir), lots of features from birth control to Stalin's crimes (to compete with Paris-Presse), three pages of financial news (to offset Le Monde). Right from the start, the new paper's circulation topped that of Le Figaro (circ. 475,000), the morning bible of France's upper middle class. Whatever its own future, Le Temps' spectacular start put the whole Paris press on its mettle.

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