The Demise of French News

As far as I know, French News started out as a loi 1901 publication for the Dordogne and expanded from there. Founded in 1987, its final readership was around 70, 000. A fifty-six page monthly newspaper of national and regional news for “Residents and Lovers of France”, it had a bit of everything: cookery, wine, gardening, nature notes, even church services in English, and horse-racing. In 2005, it won the Médias et proximité award.

The regional pages were FN’s strength. My French husband used to say that French News gave him in one go what it would take half a dozen French regional papers to tell him. And what no French national paper even attempts. Of course, it was uneven, you got news of provincial France next to events purely for Anglos, but that was its charm, and one of the editor’s aims was to encourage “la mixité”.

When I was taken on board by editor Miranda Neame back in March 2007, I met with a friendly and hard-working atmosphere that made one forget the wretched pay. We were at it weekdays and weekends. Emergency emails came for more copy on the Poitou-Charentes pages or a sudden trip off to Bordeaux to cover Xavier Bertrand when the Gironde correspondent was in the UK…you never quite knew what each month would bring, but it was full of excitement and became a way of life.

By last June, I had also taken on the Paris pages, managing to cope with a trip up from time to time. Then FN plus my NUJ card got me accreditation for the EU informal transport conference in La Rochelle, where I was the only English-speaking journalist present. I had the run of the ministers, very few journalists spoke English, and they were only interested in Dominique Bussereau, so I was able to interview Ruth Kelly and the Irish minister for transport too. That was September. And September was my best month. The following week the entire UMP show turned up for its “Campus” on Royan football pitch (it is still recovering from Dati’s and Pécresse’s stilettos, and no matches have been played on it this season). A magnificent photo opportunity and all good experience for inexperienced me. In the end, that was all it proved to be… within two months, the chop came.

We were all nervously checking our bank accounts and starting to calculate just how long it had been since we’d last been paid when, mid-November, we were told that the December issue might be the last. We made a final effort for it to be a good one. December 1 came and went. Nothing in the Maison de la Presse. By December 4, where the FN space was full of copies of Connexion, I knew full well what had happened. In the end, most of our work appeared on the French News website, but was never printed. A four page paper was printed just for subscribers, and that was it.

For the twenty-six correspondents that I managed to contact in December, Jim was very helpful and wrote on our behalf to the liquidators, but we are not optimistic. Sums owed date back to last August and range from a few euros to 6000 euros for one contributor. But correspondents are not a priority when it comes to liquidation.

Of course, all the time we were busy with FN many of us weren’t seriously looking for other markets, we were just happy to have found something to write about in rural France of interest to an English-language paper. There are others around. French Entree, an online publication, doesn’t pay but it gives you high visibility on the Internet. Paris branch member Gemma Driver introduced me and I am trying to see what it generates. Connexion, which is now eighteen months old, was a strong competitor and now holds the printed field, though it has no regional pages, and regular FN readers are missing that. Apparently they are thinking of doing a separate Dordogne paper. Anyway, they are advertising for qualified journalists living in Dordogne. I hear talk of other publications in the pipeline.

I am still in touch with Miranda, who explained to us that from September she had had a real cash-flow problem, needed to cut back on staff, but that no bank or administration would help her out financially in the present crisis. She told me a couple of weeks ago that she has had three offers to date. One looks interesting and she is crossing her fingers. If anything happens, I’ll let you know.