AFP, published on Friday 07 August 2020 at 14:17
“We accompany the end”, breathes in the heart of the printing press an employee responsible for publishing the daily Le Monde, which like all major newspapers has greatly reduced, subcontracted and automated its production.
From the “cathedral” of Tremblay-en-France (Seine-Saint-Denis), the editions of Figaro, Echos and 20 Minutes come out every morning, and every afternoon that of Le Monde, ie 800,000 copies per day on average .
The racket of the presses has calmed down: the paper circulation of the national daily press has been halved in ten years. And the Covid-19 health crisis accelerated the fall.
In Tremblay, “we were at -70% during confinement, and there we remain at -30% compared to a normal summer”, announces Gilles Dechamps, operational director of “The Printing” of Tremblay, the aptly named. “The decrease that we had planned over five years is likely to be achieved over three years,” he underlines.
At Roissy airport, a stone’s throw away, the airlines, which received 8,000 to 15,000 copies each day, are now doing without.
The huge bright and air-conditioned hangar, built in 2009 by Le Figaro, benefits from cutting-edge technologies. One-ton rolls of paper arrive in the hundreds every day, handled day and night by three robots.
At the foot of the two huge rotary presses, seven employees are enough to print and package the newspapers, against the double ten years ago.
Every morning, around thirty pages from Le Monde arrive at 10:30 am at the latest, sent in digital form from the newspaper’s headquarters, Gare d’Austerlitz. Computers break them down into shades of black, cyan, magenta and yellow.
Four plates are engraved per page, one for each color, then mounted on the press cylinders. The machines start up, wasting a few hundred copies to adjust.
One of the first is picked by a technician, who checks the density of the inking. Page 7 is still unclear.
Shortly after 11 am, the noise becomes deafening: the sheets scroll on the ceiling, the presses reach 60,000 copies per hour. These ultramodern devices no longer use water, and very little solvents, they bend, cut, add supplements.
The resolution is finer, the colors more dense, qualities appreciated for rendering photos and especially advertisements.
– Target: 1pm –
Outside the building, around sixty drivers are waiting to load their vans. Objective: deliver newspapers to newsstands at 1 p.m. at the latest in Île-de-France. For other regions and subscribers, copies are given to France Messagerie (ex-Presstalis), La Poste or deliverymen, to be dropped off the next morning at the latest.
Near his Mercedes van, Abdel, 66, is waiting for twenty packages, after having toured the morning papers. Close to retirement, he remembers the time, only 15 years ago, when “it didn’t stop. Big trucks, day and night, we kept going”. Sold at nearly 350,000 copies per day in 1979, printed under its headquarters in the ultra-center of Paris, Le Monde sold in June to less than 110,000 paper copies.
“Before, we could not do without,” said one of the transport managers. “Today, everyone has the news on their smartphone and the newspaper has become a luxury. The future is the subscription: there are less losses, less delivery costs”.
With the decline in sales, publishers who traditionally own their printers are outsourcing more and more.
The Imprimerie de Tremblay now covers all of France for its four newspapers, with the exception of the South, served by another site of the Riccobono group, between Nîmes and Montpellier.
After the sale of Tremblay by Le Figaro in 2011, Riccobono took over the printing of Les Echos, then of Le Parisien et du Monde, which closed its structure in 2015. At the end of July, the company bought 100% of the printing plant in L ‘Team in Ile-de-France and 51% of those located near Lyon and Toulouse.
The family business, with 11 printing plants and more than 700 employees, now prints almost all national newspapers (Liberation, L’Opinion, L’Humanité …), numerous magazines and advertising media.
The regional dailies, for their part, have so far kept their printing presses. Their publishers are asking the State for 120 million euros to speed up their reorganization.
And jobs are melting as cathedrals close. In this sector almost 100% acquired by the Syndicat du Livre-CGT, the departure plans follow one another, with strong departure bonuses. Even before the Covid crisis, Tremblay’s printing plant went from 140 employees to around a hundred.
“Young people in the industry can wonder about the future,” said Gilles Dechamps. “But I dare not imagine that one day there would be no more paper at all. There could be a degraded form, perhaps, to four editions per week. Or small satellite printing plants, established on everything the territory (…) The paper still has a few years ahead of it “.
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