Liberation is a daily newspaper first created in 1978 by J.P. Sartre. Originally at the extreme left wing of the French political scheme but through the decades it has shifted to a more leftist, labor-style orientation. The paper has been facing financing issues that have been undermining its original motivations and ideology: being the left-hand daily newspaper in France, free from advertising and independent from shareholders. Libé is currently loosing money and readership. Its directing team-shareholders and paper director-has been revolving for some years. Since 2007 under the control of E. de Rothschild, Libération is expecting to enjoy a new stability and to experience a new success thanks to innovative changes. Yet, it also has to face competition from free daily press and lately redesigned other French broadsheets such as Le Monde, Le Figaro or La Tribune.
[...] Aim: show that the newspaper needs its readership and likes it, get interested in what they think, want, deserve. By instance, why not organizing: ( Concours de rédaction of an article, reward by a price. ( Concours de photographie (Concours de caricatures? Need to be more visible: ( Advertising campaign in the streets: Libération is far too much discrete! ( Distribute free issues in universities and schools: best way to get the young readers to be faithful on a life time. [...]
[...] Focus group We meet a small group of 5 persons, aged 19 to 23 and asked them a dozen semi-directed questions the weekend before the presidential elections. They mostly reckoned they were particularly reading the news lately and paid more attention to them because of the elections. Image Libération is regarded as the direct opponent to Le Figaro: on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Le Monde is regarded as a centrist paper. Yet Libération is considered a bit centrist and closer to Le Monde than to Le Figaro. [...]
[...] In order to create a balanced sample, we tried to maintain parity between both types of respondents (almost 50 50) Following the aims of our field study, our sample is composed mainly by young people (having in general between 20 and 22 years old), most of them are still in college. Our field study took was the HEC campus and at the heart of Parisian young students' world: La Sorbonne, Sainte Genevieve library and Quartier Latin. This allowed us to have a broad vision of the young people's market, because on the one hand HEC students are often right wing oriented, business minded and can easily compare Libération with others newspapers as Le Figaro or Les Echos. [...]
[...] We thought that interviewing a kiosk manager could be an interesting way to know the behaviors and uses of young daily buyers. We proceed to a short interview on the spot. the Young buy the newspapers? According to him, the young represent about 20% up to 30% of his clients in a day. That is surprising since his shop is in quartier Latin, a quartier overcrowded by students from various institutions (la Sorbonne, Cujas, medical school, prepartory classes, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, ) ( Maybe young readers do not automatically buy daily newspaper because they can find it home. [...]
[...] What do the young actually think of Libé? Which political orientation do they give to Libé? What are the broadsheets/ magazines young people read? What appeal them more than reading the news every day/ every week? What strategy should be implemented to make them read more the news and Libé in particular? How can we explain that one young people chooses Libé as his daily newspaper and another does not? How does Libé's readership regard itself? Hypothesis: Youngsters are still interested in written press and politically engaged journalism. [...]
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