Avid readers in a heavily subsidised market

At first glance, tiny Luxembourg’s population appears spoilt for newspaper choice. A country with a population of a medium-sized city (460,000) wakes up to eight nationally distributed dailies.

These papers join more than ten weeklies and a similar number of monthly magazines. Luxembourgers are avid readers - 60% report reading a newspaper every day and 80% report reading one regularly - though the survey does not distinguish between Luxembourgeois media and the dozens of foreign newspapers sold here.

The two leading publishers compete aggressively for advertising and readership. When Editpress Luxembourg, in collaboration with Swiss publisher Tamedia, announced its free commuter paper L’Essentiel, last October, Saint-Paul Luxembourg brought out its own version, Point24, a few weeks later.

Both free papers are aimed at young people - based on research showing that 61% of under-24s do not read existing papers - and French-language commuters from France and Belgium (120,000 commute daily into Luxembourg - most speak French).

The flagship publication of the Saint-Paul group is the conservative Luxemburger Wort, with a 80,000 circulation. Like most Luxembourgeois papers, it is in German, with some French and the occasional Luxembourgish article - no translations.

A key draw for Wort readers are its two or three pages of family announcements and death notices. Its main competitor, Editpress’s Tageblatt (24,000) used to copy these advertisements directly from the Wort. Tageblatt, which recently lost a court battle over this practice, now publishes such ads for free.

The remaining papers get smaller and smaller. Two French-language paid-for dailies started in 2001 as forerunners of today’s free-sheet experiment (La Voix from Saint-Paul and Editpress’s Le Quotidien) have circulations around 8,000. Dailies Lëtzebuerger Journal (5,000) and Zeitung vum Lëtzebuerger Vollek (1,500) are even smaller.

Since 1976, the Luxembourgeois government has subsidised paid newspapers in the name of supporting editorial diversity. The subsidies amount to about €10 million a year.

Joseph Lorent, secretary-general of Luxembourg press council, says that without this subsidy, Luxembourg would have at most one or two daily papers. He disagrees with suggestions that the Luxembourgeois government gets an easy ride in exchange.

"They don’t expect a right of inspection or interfere," he says, describing the system as a simple counting of pages of editorial, leaving out the ads.

But Mario Hirsch, director of the Institut Pierre Werner and former editor-in-chief of the prestigious weekly d’Lëtzebuerger Land, argues that the subsidy has not achieved its goals.

"What is really now subsidised is not quality but quantity," said Hirsch. "So, the more pages you print, the more money you get from the state."

Luxembourg’s papers are not neutral - all are linked, through ownership or affiliation, to a political party. Saint-Paul newspapers support Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker’s centre right Christian Social People’s Party. The publisher’s main shareholder is the local Catholic archdiocese. Editpress and its newspapers have ties to the Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party. The Journal is linked to the Democratic party and the Zeitung to the communist party.

Hirsch says that despite this diversity, Luxembourgers are not getting a good standard of journalism.

"[Because of] the partisan origin and ownership of, especially, the daily papers, they have a blurred view of what goes on in Luxembourg," says Hirsch.

Mike Koedinger, chief executive of Mike Koedinger Editions, Luxembourg’s third largest printing operation, which produces paperJam, a glossy monthly business magazine, mostly in French with some English, points out that Luxembourg’s media occasionally agree that a story just is not worth talking about.

In 2001, a book by French investigative reporter Denis Robert alleged that Luxembourg-based Clearstream Banking was engaged in money laundering and tax evasion. Koedinger says that the local press largely ignored the story, out of a sense of protectiveness to the company.

"It’s just national interest and the author, his work was not so well known, so it was easy to not take him seriously," says Koedinger.

For now, Luxembourg’s media-watchers are speculating on the fate of the two new free dailies, both launched with much fanfare and large - for Luxembourg - print runs of 60,000. As free papers, they do not qualify for subsidy. It is still unknown if they have enough of a market to attract advertisers. Since the vast majority of commuters drive, they cannot read the papers. And the youth market can be hard to please.

• Mike Gordon is a freelance journalist based in Luxembourg.

At first glance, tiny Luxembourg’s population appears spoilt for newspaper choice. A country with a population of a medium-sized city (460,000) wakes up to eight nationally distributed dailies.