ABSTRACT
In France the refreshing liberalism of the 1881 law on the press was seen as an encouragement to journalists with commercial flair to set up business and launch popular newspapers on a large scale. The fate of France-Soir, sold for one symbolic franc to Georges Ghosn, a relative newcomer in the field of newspapers, is a good illustration of the slow erosion of the national press. Founded after the Liberation of Paris in 1944, like other well-known titles such as Le Monde and Le Parisien, France-Soir became the archetypal French popular daily under the stewardship of Pierre Lazareff who left his mark on popular journalism even among broadcasting journalists. The national press is faced with diminishing advertising revenues, tapped by TV channels both public and commercial. In 1998 the number of subscribers to any one of the three satellite TV operators such as Canalsatellite, Television Par Satellite (TPS) and AB Sat had gone up by half to 1.7 million.
