PLIGHT, From Our Own Correspondent Paris, May 8.
All the Paris newspapers and many provincial dailies as well (with the exception of those which prefer to confine themselves to a single sheet) have by mutual consent raised their price to 15 centimes, or three half pence at the normal rate of exchange. Before the war, nearly all of them were published at a halfpenny. One of the features of the Paris Press, as in other Continental capitals, has always been that, apart from @ few which devote their attention to the collection of news and constitute real newspapers in the English sense of the term, there are scores of organs each representing the political views of some section of French public. life.
These "journals of opinion," as they are called, have already been very badly hit by the great increase in the cost of labour, paper, ink and other necessaries, and now that they are obliged to raise their price to three times the pre-war figure very few of them are likely to survive. Some of them have already been forced to go further and charge twopence a copy. Taking only one item of the daily bill of a newspaper into consideration, the price of paper, it is obvious that journals with small circulations and scarcely any advertising revenue, which were able to exist when hundred kilos of paper cost from 25 to 30 francs, must be driven out of the field when the price is 320 francs, as it is now.
At a recent meeting of newspaper proprietors, the manager of one of the biggest Parisian daily newspapers stated that by selling at a penny a copy he was losing £4,000 a week, and that no company, no matter how large its reserves, could exist because these economic conditions will stifle the free expression of opinion and place too much power in the hands of a few wealthy. concerns, which will inevitably be "tempted to give undue support to the financial interests which keep them going. The creation of newspaper trust will be encouraged and the disclosure of abuses hampered. The public will inevitably get the impression that the freedom of the Press is only to be found in such journals the Socialist organ the "Humanité" which frequently takes its readers into its confidence and appeals to them to keep the paper going. The outcome can only be favourable to the revolutionaries and dangerous to existing institutions.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.