When Elisa Cammarota gets home from school, she tosses off her knapsack and reads her newspaper from front to back.
Anthony Azoulay does, too, though he focuses on articles about soccer and large photo spreads.
Both Elisa and Anthony are 10 years old and entering the fifth grade in fall — and both are regular subscribers to one of the most popular daily newspapers in France.
On a recent morning, the two children sat at a large rectangular table with several of the newspaper’s editors. The paper, Mon Quotidien (My Daily), invites several of its readers twice weekly to help edit the paper, except for the front page, choosing stories that will be featured in its seven other pages.
The national editor, Caroline Halle, was proposing an article about a school in Britain that had bought hawks and falcons to drive off a plague of seagulls that were dirtying the premises.
Alternatively, she proposed news of how divers had recently found bottles of French champagne that King Louis XVI had sent to the czar of Russia, but had gone down when the ship transporting them sank in the Baltic Sea.
“How did Louis XVI end?” asked Olivier Gasselin, 40, the paper’s deputy editor.
“Guillotine,” Elisa shot back, without raising her eyes from the notes she was making.
Francois Dufour, 49, the paper’s editor and founder, proposed an article that he thought would elicit a chuckle and the children’s approval: British newspapers were reporting that scientists had discovered which came first, the chicken or the egg. He was greeted by stony faces. The chicken, he said, hoping to stir some reaction from the children. The youngsters scribbled some notes, and the group went on to other business.
“We propose, they choose,” said Halle, 34, who joined the paper nine years ago after working at an Internet news site.
In an age when many children are addicted to computers, iPods and iPads — and when newspapers are feeling the pressure — Mon Quotidien appears to be an anomaly, all the more so in the journalistic climate of France.
Despite great journalistic names like Le Monde and Le Figaro, the French read ever fewer newspapers. On a per capita basis, only about half as many papers are sold in France as in Germany or Britain, and readership is especially low among the young. Only 10 percent of 15-to-24-year-olds read a paid-for newspaper in 2007, the last time the government took a survey, down from 20 percent a decade earlier.
In fact, the French government was so concerned with the decline in newspaper readership that it detailed plans last year for a program called Mon Journal Offert (My Complimentary Paper) to offer 18 to 24-year-olds a free yearlong subscription to a newspaper of their choice. Though the program quickly reached the 200,000-reader limit the government had foreseen, there was little sign that readers continued their subscriptions once they had to pay.
None of this deterred Dufour. In the early 1990s, he and two partners made a considerable profit from a line of quiz cards, called Les Incollables in France and Brain Quest in the US. With that money, they decided to start a daily newspaper for 10 to 14-year-olds, and in 1995 Mon Quotidien appeared. Such was its success — by the third year, circulation reached 50,000 copies — that they founded two more dailies: Petit Quotidien (Little Daily) for seven to 10-year-olds, and L’Actu (roughly translated as The Headlines), for 14 to 17-year-olds.
“What I made in the States I invested in France,” said Dufour, youthful with a shock of blond hair and a passion for golf.
“We’re like a local newspaper, with three regions. They’re completely different in what you read,” he said.
The papers, which appear every day but Sunday, are lively and colorful mixes of news, photos, cartoons and quizzes. A recent issue of Mon Quotidien featured a front-page photo of Paul the Octopus, which successfully picked the winners of the 2010 World Cup soccer games. Another featured a tiny new car at the Berlin auto show that folds up for easy storage in tight spaces.
Particularly popular are the cartoons by Berth, who lives in Besancon, near the Swiss border, and communicates with the editors through Skype.
A drawing of his accompanying the folding-car article depicted the vehicle emitting strange noises when folded. A bystander remarks, “Not only does it fold, it talks, too!” To which another replies: “Nonsense! That’s the driver stuck inside.”
The combination of content and deft marketing has driven circulation of the three papers up to 165,000.
“It’s rather well done,” said Francoise Dargent, a literary critic at Le Figaro whose two older daughters, 11 and 13, are avid readers. “It’s a way for kids to stay informed, and forms a good attitude toward reading.”
Still, there is no sign that Mon Quotidien and its sister papers breed long-term newspaper readers. With each successive age group, the number of subscribers diminishes. Petit Quotidien has 75,000; Mon Quotidien, 60,000; and L’Actu, only 30,000.
While Elisa devours her Mon Quotidien every day, her mother, Carine Abes, 46, who works in social services, does not subscribe to a newspaper.
“I listen to the radio, I read books,” Abes said.
Dufour concedes that he “buys” most of his circulation.
“Every September, we ship 15 million free copies to every teacher in France, 30 copies each. That’s 90 percent of the 5 million euros [US$6.5 million] that we spend for direct marketing,” he said.
Youngsters get to know the papers in school, then pressure their parents for a subscription.
At that level, the papers remain profitable, but driving circulation up further would produce a loss, he said.
The papers are sold by subscription only, not at kiosks, because that would raise distribution costs, Dufour said.
Moreover, he is sticking with the newspaper format, resisting the tug of the Web.
“We do nothing on the Internet,” he said, though Mon Quotidien does have a free five-minute news show online. “The parents wouldn’t pay for it.”
Dufour says he cannot predict Mon Quotiden’s future.
“That may change with the iPad,” he said. “Parents never pay for more time on the Internet; the question is, will parents think the iPad another nonpaper paper, or another Internet driver?”
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