18. Girardin Reform

the press needed to reform the financial Emile de Girardin At the heart of his plan lay the calculation. The newspaper brings losses, because the cost of each copy exceeds its retail price. It is necessary to turn a newspaper into such an enterprise, which, by increasing the volume of production, would reduce its cost. From his publishing experience, Girardin already knew that the number of those who were able and willing to read a newspaper significantly exceeded the number who could buy it. By lowering the price of a subscription, you can expand the circle of readers and therefore increase circulation. However, the same experience showed that the increase in circulation in these conditions can only be limited and is not yet able to cover all the costs of publishing a newspaper. The largest item of expenditure was the tax, the so-called stamp duty, which accounted for more than half of them. Therefore, presenting his plan to the head of government, Casimir Perrier, in 1831, Girardin included a clause on the abolition of taxes on newspapers. At first glance, his request looked naive: it was too well known in what relations the government and the press were, and it was difficult to expect that the government would want to alleviate the situation of the newspapers that so violently attacked it. However, Girardin offered here his soothing explanation: the government should not be afraid of the emergence of new newspapers, since the more there will be, the less will be the influence of each of them separately, because they will neutralize each other in the competition. This argument of Perier did not seem convincing to him, and Girardin finds another way out: a part of the expenses must be covered by the profit from paid advertisements. Placing such announcements in the newspaper has been practiced for a long time, but in order to pay for them sufficiently, it was necessary to interest clients with a wider audience. And the starting point of the Girardin reform was an increase in circulation by reducing the price of a subscription to a newspaper. That was how the idea of ​​a “cheap newspaper” was shaped.