The paper press continues to suffer during the coronavirus crisis. While containment has logically led to a drop in sales of newspapers per issue, daily newspapers are again experiencing serious distribution problems. For more than a week and this Thursday, May 21, many kiosks have not been delivered to daily newspapers and subscribers from several regions have been deprived of their newspaper - and in particular Parisien and Aujourd 'today in France. In question: a social conflict which led to the blocking of distribution centers in the provinces and of several printing works.
Hit hard by the digital revolution and the global fall in sales of the paper press, the company Presstalis, which distributes the vast majority of daily newspapers and magazines in France, has undergone several rescue plans in recent years. But these were not enough: Friday May 15, Presstalis was placed in receivership and its subsidiaries SAD and Soprocom were put in liquidation. The latter, which served nearly 10,000 points of sale on French territory, had more than 500 employees. In addition to these 500 job cuts, there are those (around 150) planned at the Paris headquarters of Presstalis and in the distributor platform in Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis).
To express its anger against these redundancies, the Syndicat du livre-CGT de SAD blocked several printing works, in particular forcing a large part of the daily newspapers and the management of Le Parisien and of Aujourd 'today in France to give up the manufacture of newspapers which n anyway could not have been distributed.
Negotiations that "move forward"
Presstalis has set up a continuity plan today to allow buyers of Today in France in the regions to have access to their daily lives. In the coming days, this plan should make it possible to find newspapers and magazines more widely at press stores.
At the same time, negotiations, hitherto deadlocked, "are advancing" around the future of Presstalis between the two main shareholders of the distributor, the cooperative of daily newspapers on the one hand and the cooperative of magazines on the other. The daily newspapers, joined by a large number of magazine publishers, propose a plan to take over Presstalis which will ensure the continuity of press distribution in France. "We have established a business plan that would perpetuate the situation until 2022," says one of the players in the consultation.
