Italy: Newspapers “La Repubblica” and “La Stampa” earlier than sale | EUROtoday

It was a full of life birthday celebration that the left-wing day by day newspaper “La Repubblica” organized over the course of days final week. The event was the fiftieth anniversary of the primary problem of the paper on January 14, 1976. The newspaper, which was edited in Rome, recalled the journalistic highlights of its historical past in richly illustrated particular pages. There have been the standard congratulations from politics and society. Leo

President Sergio Mattarella and Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri got here to the official birthday reception and exhibition within the Testaccio cultural heart – housed in Rome’s former slaughterhouse. The politicians have been welcomed, amongst others, by John Elkann, the 49-year-old scion of the Turin entrepreneurial dynasty Agnelli and favourite grandson of the legendary Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli. Elkann heads the supervisory board of the Italian-French automobile producer Stellantis and the sports activities automobile producer Ferrari. He can also be a managing board member of the funding firm Exor, through which the household holding firm of the Agnelli heirs bundles its varied investments. These investments embrace the media firm GEDI, which, along with promoting companies and net portals, radio stations and a TV music channel, consists of varied magazines and newspapers, together with the nationwide newspapers “La Repubblica” and “La Stampa” from Turin (based in 1867, owned by the Agnellis since 1924).

Elkann desires to divest from quite a few enterprise areas underneath the GEDI umbrella. Above all, he now not enjoys the media investments, however moderately losses of 45 million euros yearly. Since the incorporation of “Repubblica” in 2019, the GEDI Group is alleged to have collected losses of 350 to 500 million euros. Only three well-liked radio stations have been in a position to enhance gross sales lately. Most of the group’s newspapers – particularly the nationwide ones – are infamous loss-makers. The falling circulation and promoting income of printed merchandise can’t be compensated for by promoting digital choices – that is the standard aporia of the newspaper and journal enterprise virtually all over the place on the earth.

The irony that the exhibition about “Repubblica” was entitled “A History of the Future” and was on show in a former slaughterhouse shouldn’t have been misplaced on the editors and publishing individuals who protested towards Elkann’s gross sales plans on the sidelines of the opening: they accused the Exor and GEDI boss of main “Repubblica” and “Stampa” to the slaughterhouse and turning the papers into historical past with no future.

It is undisputed that the historical past of the “Repubblica” is larger than its current and doubtless additionally its future. The paper was based by the journalist legend Eugenio Scalfari (1924 to 2022). He started his profession as an ardent fascist and ended it as a salon leftist who was welcomed by the aged Pope Francis in biblical age to talk about world affairs and instantly mishandled the background dialog as an (unauthorized) interview.

Scalfari strived for and achieved opinion management on the left for his paper after the tip of the Italian Communist Party in 1991. The “Repubblica” reached its greatest time – with circulation of as much as 700,000 copies day by day – within the epoch-making battle towards its “favorite enemy” Silvio Berlusconi. The lack of significance of the paper that started round 2010 was accompanied by a shrinking of the circulation to round 120,000 copies immediately, round a 3rd of that are digital. To today, nonetheless, the editorial group stays influenced by the political biographical and journalistic habitus of the founding father Scalafri: the extra violent it’s to combat fascism, the additional it sinks into the previous and the much less probably it’s to return within the current.

The growth of “Stampa”, a newspaper with a classically liberal orientation in economics and politics, has not been any higher than that of “Repubblica” and quite a few different newspapers. On the opposite: the losses within the print enterprise are even much less offset by the digital enterprise that’s beginning up at “Stampa”. The paper now has a circulation of round 95,000 copies, of which just about 11,000 are digital gross sales. There have been strikes within the editorial and publishing homes of “Repubblica” and “Stampa” since Elkann’s intention to promote turned identified months in the past. Like different nationwide newspapers in Italy, particularly the Milanese newspaper “Corriere della Sera”, which has the very best circulation with virtually 190,000 copies, “Repubblica” and “Stampa” nonetheless present surprisingly complete international reporting.

Italian media are at the moment reporting that the sale of “Repubblica” to the Greek media consortium Antenna Group is imminent. Since the loss of life of the corporate’s founder, Minos Kyriakou, in 2017, who was initially profitable as a shipowner and protection contractor, the group has been led by his eldest son, Thodoris Kyriakou, born in 1974. The MBC Group from Riyadh has held round 30 % of the shares in Antenna since 2022, which in flip is managed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF. Whether the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, who can management the usage of funds from the fund, has one thing to do with the deliberate takeover of “Repubblica” by the Greek Antenna Group is the topic of untamed hypothesis in Italy. It can also be potential that the Greek firm, which has worldwide experience within the tv and radio enterprise, is primarily fascinated with GEDI’s radio stations and would solely take possession of “Repubblica” as collateral profit, so to talk.

For “Stampa”, which Elkann initially wished to promote as a bundle with “Repubblica”, the gross sales discussions don’t appear to have progressed that far. The Antenna Group made it clear early on that it had no real interest in “Stampa”. The northern Italian consortium Nord Est Multimedia (NEM) is alleged to have lately made a gross sales provide for the Turin paper. NEM had already taken over a number of northeast Italian native and regional newspapers from GEDI in 2023. That was simply 4 years after Elkann and GEDI expanded their portfolio of regional newspapers to incorporate “Repubblica” because the nationwide flagship.

At the time, Elkann, now accountable for the nation’s two most essential left-liberal nationwide newspapers, was satisfied “that quality journalism has a bright future as long as it can combine authority, professionalism and independence with the requirements of its readers.” This perception didn’t final lengthy. It has collapsed because of the financial realities of nationwide print journalism within the digital age.