Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Le Temps, the main serious newspaper in French-speaking Switzerland, is making several changes to cope with a sharp drop in advertising revenue, cutting 7.5 percent of its editorial staff (10 jobs). It says the subscription price will be raised for 2010. The newspaper says that the advertising revenue decline, which has hit the entire industry, is the worst in 60 years and requires dramatic action. GenevaLunch spoke with another newspaper editor from the region Monday, who said more cuts can be expected at other newspapers in the region in the next two months. Le Temps notes that it was able to keep the job cuts at this level because of offers by several staff to reduce the number of hours they work.
Le Temps editor Jean Jacques Roth explains in a lengthy editorial that subscriptions and newsstand sales rarely cover more than one-third of a newspaper’s revenues but in the past few years costs have risen due to competition from free newspapers’, readers’ rising expectations for coverage, development of web sites, and in the case of Le Temps, good growth in readership.
Heidi grows up: Swiss Farm Calendar wins top industry award for glamour
Heidi's friends, all grown up, too - Swiss Farm Calendar, boys
Hirgiswil, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The popular annual Swiss Farm Calendar, which sells out by Christmas, has just taken the top 2009 award in the glamour field given by the industry’s Calendar Marketing Association. The photographer was Claude Stahel and the calendar is published by Magic Fox Media, a corporate and calendar publishing company based in Hirgiswil.
Click on images to view larger
To view the rest of 2009: Swiss Farm Calendar images, girls, boys
Title: Fantoche: Animation film festival
Location: Baden
Link out: Click here
Description: This is the only festival devoted exclusively to the full array of animation techniques, content and media.
Start Date: 08 Sep 2009
End Date: 13 Sep 2009
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The Swiss Federal Council (cabinet) has told Parliament it does not want the country’s political parties to advertise on television or radio in the run-up to elections, nor does it want to see it pursue legislation to enable this. The decision comes as a result of debate since 2005 over a move to better balance political advertising by giving the parties equal broadcast time.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Four police officers in Geneva are detailed to the CFF rail service and the Tribune de Geneve, in a feature article, accompanies them on their daily round to better understand how they work with cantonal and city police as well as the CFF rail security guards. By the end of 2010 Switzerland will have 20 more police officers covering railway stations and the rail system, in ensure adequate security. There have been a number of incidents in rail stations in recent months.
Crowd at the Malley sports centre in Lausanne waits for the Dalai Lama to begin Wednesday conference
Dalai Lama, listening to Tibetan music group in Lausanne
Update 14:20 Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Sellout crowds of 12,000 for two days of conferences offered by the Dalai Lama, in Lausanne and briefly in Geneva 5-6 August, heard the Tibetan spiritual leader talk about “Understanding our minds and the causes of happiness” but he reserved for the media, whom he met with at length, his appeals to have more light shed on the violence in Tibet in March 2008.
image: WhmSoft
Legendary US broadcaster Walter Cronkite has died, age 92, at his home in Connecticut. Cronkite represented, for many Americans, an era of reassuring television news that has been replaced by multiple news sources and multimedia. Cronkite’s son Chip announced that his father had died of complications of dementia.
The International Herald Tribune/NY Times summarizes the role he played: “From 1962 to 1981, Mr. Cronkite was a nightly presence in American homes and always a reassuring one, guiding viewers through national triumphs and tragedies alike, from moonwalks to war, in an era when network news was central to many people’s lives.”
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mouammar Qadaffi, Libya’s leader, is out to “take apart” Switzerland, Swiss public radio and television are reporting today. The result will be to make it far more difficult for a meeting between the leaders of the two countries to take place. Two Swiss men have been detained by Libya for a year, following an incident where Qadaffi’s son Hannibal was arrested in Geneva, 15 July 2008.
Washington, DC (GenevaLunch) - The US Justice Department has e-mailed major US media to deny a story that appeared 23 June in the New York Times, calling the report that the government plans to drop a lawsuit again Swiss bank UBS “simply untrue.”
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – SSR, Swiss public broadcasting company, will lose its director general, Armin Walpen, and its deputy director general, Daniel Eckmann, at the start of 2011. Walpen has confirmed that he will retire 31 December 2010 and Eckmann earlier announced that he will leave at the end of January 2011, a month later. SSR will begin the search for its new senior management team at the end of August 2009.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – SSR, the Swiss Broadcasting Company, is freezing salaries effective the end of 2009, as well as new hires, part of a series of measures to economize in the face of a growing deficit. The company announced Tuesday 23 June that the state-supported system will see its deficit grow from CHF200-790 million by 2014 without larger subsidies or revenues.
The salary freeze will allow the company to save CHF30 million a year, but it still needs to find another CHF40m a year to remain financially healthy.
Update 22:55 The protests by thousands in Iran over disputed election results continued during the weekend despite a call Friday by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to end them. The Iranian government said Sunday that 10 more people had died, bringing the death toll to 19, and dozens more were injured, but journalists, including foreign media, are “are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran” reports Reuters. Amnesty International says that numbers are “perilously hard” to verify.
Iran has complained of Western interference in its internal affairs.
The BBC’s resident correspondent has been asked to leave, a Dubai TV station office remains closed and 23 local journalists and bloggers have reportedly been detained. The streets of Teheran were reportedly quiet Sunday, but there were reports of gunfire in northern suburbs, home to many followers of opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi, who has called for more protests. Al Jazeera, BBC, The Globe & Mail, NPR, Xinhua
Zurich, Switzerland (romandie/ATS, Fre) – NZZ, German-speaking Switzerland’s main serious newspaper, said Wednesay 17 June that it will cut 20-25 jobs among its IT staff as part of plans to merge some of its operations. The cost-cutting measure will not touch the editorial staff. NZZ laid off 24 employees (20 fulltime posts) in late 2008. The newspaper also said it is studying sharp increases in subscription rates and the possibility of charging for some of its online content, notably financial reporting and commentary by its best-known journalists.
NZZ posted a loss for the first quarter of 2009, with advertising down by 30 percent from January to the end of March. Its Internet operations are operating at a loss that is currently CHF3 million, reports ATS. (2007-2008 figures). The Zurich newspaper is the latest media group in Switzerland to announce job cuts, in a string of actions to try to turn around the hard-hit newspaper, magazine and online news business.
Morges, Vaud, Switzerland (Le Temps, Fre) – Eight cartoonists from Lebanon are guests of honour at the Morges Festival sous rire, an annual humour fest in Vaud. Le Temps online carries a sample of their views of their country.
Swiss news weekly L’Hebdo magazine’s 2 June edition features on its cover the murder trial of Cécile Brossard, accused of killing her lover, wealthy French banker Edouard Stern, in 2007. GenevaLunch, a partner of l’Hebdo, brings you the English version in two parts, with an introduction by GL editor Ellen Wallace.
French version © 2009 l’Hebdo
English version © 2009 GenevaLunch (may not be reproduced in part or whole without written permission). Translation: Sean Ecker
Background: The trial of Cécile Brossard for murdering Edouard Stern opens in Geneva 10 June, and is expected to run to 19 June. With 30 journalists accredited, it will likely remain in the headlines for the length of the trial. She has admitted to murdering her lover, divorced banker Edouard Stern, one of France’s wealthiest men, who was 50 at the time of his death in February 2005. The killing – four gunshots at his luxurious apartment in central Geneva – sparked enormous media interest at the time. The story was a hot mix: money, world travel, an on-again off-again affair he had with a woman 16 years his junior who came from a middle-class small-town French background while he came from generations of banking wealth, and then there was the death scene, with the victim found dressed in a head to toe latex suit that was part of their sadomasochistic sexual games. And then tales of his manipulative behaviour began to eke out, while other observers questioned his killer’s words.
The trial adds to this two well-known lawyers and public curiosity about the woman who committed the crime. Swiss media have already warmed up for the trial: the Tribune de Genève writes of obscure plots, disinformation being spread and swissinfo (in French) relates a tale of passion, power and sex. Suisse Illustré asks, diabolical Mata Hari or fragile woman? TSR, which is putting three journalists on the story, has a video blog to follow the trial.
The story according to L’Hebdo:
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss federal Competition Commission has decided to look more closely at the situation that will be created by a morning newspaper distribution agreement that could leave almost no competition in German-speaking Switzerland and parts of French-speaking Switzerland. The commission concluded after a preliminary review that further study is needed. Tamedia, NZZ and La Poste are seeking to cut costs by joining forces to distribute papers.
In another development linked to the increasingly difficult situation of Swiss media, several hundred journalists took to the streets in Zurich and Bern Tuesday 26 May over editorial staff job cuts announced by Tamedia.
Yellow-bellied singing toads, Pays de Gex, France
Pays de Gex, France (GenevaLunch) - Prince Charming lives in a pond in the Pays de Gex, where he leads the good life of a French frog (aka toad) who won’t be invited to the kitchen anytime soon. Read all about him and other creatures who live in Shirley Curran’s pond, in Gardener in the sky, a GenevaLunch blog which is starting up again now that the winter is over. Shirley, who provides the Jura part of the GL ski reports in winter, and who writes about books and crosswords on the Book my place blog, is the guest blogger this week on the garden blog.
You can now subscribe by rss feed to any of the blogs, including the new food and restaurant one by Jonell Galloway, The rambling epicure, and New to Geneva, by events editor, GL reporter and all-around curious person Laila Rodriguez. The subscription box is top right on the page, by the search box. You can either get the feeds by e-mail or through a separate reader.
One less free newspaper: .ch
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – And then there were three. The Swiss German free paper .ch folded yesterday, leaving 69 journalists to look for work, and reducing the field to three free papers in the German-speaking part of Switzerland: market leader 20 Minuten, along with News and Blick am Abend.
Continual rapid news updates and social networking tools like Twitter can cause further indifference to human suffering, some studies show, reports CNN. The media give too little time for the brain to digest violence and suffering in one story before they bombard the viewer with the next and this can have implications on their morality, according to a University of Southern California study. Twitter sees itself as a solution to information overload because the viewer can step in and out of the information flow at will, according to CNN.
Newspapers disappearing
Updated 14 April 07:45 Lake Geneva region, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Everyone knows banks are in desperate shape. Curiously, few people seem to realize that the newspapers bringing them this news are in equally dire straits. And it’s not just newspapers: it’s the news industry.
The Boston Globe is the latest US newspaper in the hangman’s noose, with staff told at the start of April that it is likely to lose $89 million in 2009. Its owner, the New York Times, can no longer afford to keep it alive, given the New York paper’s own $57.8 million deficit at the end of 2008. Other city newspapers in the US are lining up on the scaffold. Already hung: the Seattle Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, two of the nation’s oldest papers, both now closed and others such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, filing for bankrupty.
The US debate over the real impact of the Internet on print media
The closings and threatened ones are sparking a lively debate over the need for newspapers and the media in general in an Internet age, and where the news industry is headed. The problem isn’t just the Internet: US newspapers’ advertising revenue fell 16.6 percent in 2008.
Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post jumped in this week over plans announced by Associated Press (which is owned by its member newspapers) for an industry initiative to protect online news. For Huffington, the argument is about whether journalists “embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.”
It’s a debate that is beginning to reach Switzerland but here, for now the discussion appears to be more about media surviving commercially by developing non-news business while still offering journalism. This is not a new debate – think of the media owners in the US who’ve had baseball teams – but in a small country with little competition, the changing role of the media bears examination.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Tamedia, which is scheduled to buy out the Swiss business of Edipresse if the competition commission approves the deal, has published less than rosy results for 2008: a 30 percent fall in profits, to CHF105.8 million. The company’s sales rose 21 percent to CHF895.7m, but this was due mainly to absorbing Bern-based Espace Media Group.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – SSR, the Swiss public broadcasting company, will combine TSR and RSR, its television and radio units in French-speaking Switzerland, as well as its television and radio in German-speaking Switzerland. The move is designed in part as a response to a group 2008 financial loss of CHF79 million, reports TSR, citing an SSR press release, but also as a longer term response to changing audience habits and technical developments in journalism.
Cartoonist Patrick Chappatte
A reminder to our readers who have subscribed to the rss feed: you’re missing out on our home page Chappatte cartoons, which can’t be included in the feed (as well as our blogs), so do visit the site regularly to add a good laugh to your day!
Also please note that while automatic feeds should include all stories posted, the e-mail versions occasionally miss a story and updates.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Radio Cité, the former religious radio station in Geneva, which was saved from bankruptcy by a CHF1 million annual investment by Genevan Viviane de Witt’s Fondation de Chênes, has seen its audience slipping steadily since January 2007, from 1.9 percent to 1.3 percent of the French-speaking Swiss market. It was granted a license as a community service station in October, one of five stations given licenses in the Lake Geneva region, of 14 federal licenses assigned in October 2008 after months of suspense. The others are commercial stations.
Real Time Rome 2006: cell phones as football starts
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – “For too many years we believed technology would solve problems,” and now we’re learning that’s not quite true, architect-engineer-designer Carlo Ratti says. It needs a helping hand from humanity, it turns out, or in one of the most moving (literally) projects he’s worked on, helping feet: sustainable clubbing in Rotterdam takes human energy from the dance floor, pulls it down and turns it into the electricity used for interactive visuals and to light the dance floor.
Ratti told a crowd during the Lift09 conference in Geneva last week (25-28 February) that some of the most creative thinking about sustainability is coming from individuals and small businesses.
Updated 14:15 Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Edipresse, the largest media publisher in western Switzerland, will sharply cut back the work it gives Publicitas, one of the largest agencies that sells advertising space in the country, at the end of 2009 when their current contract ends.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - People who don’t want to fight the traffic around Geneva once the Geneva International Motor Show starts can watch it all on television, available online for the first time in 2009. The web TV show will air daily at 10:00 from 2-16 March on Salon Auto TV. The show itself runs from 5-15 March.
Lausanne, Switzerland (romandie/ats and 24 Heures, Fre) – The downturn in the Swiss mass media market continues, with the announcement, 23 February, of January figures for ad sales, on which media depend for the bulk of their revenues: down 8.7% compared to January 2007, to CHF249.5 million. Edipresse, the Lake Geneva region’s largest media publisher, announced it will lay off 25 staff, representing 16.5 fulltime equivalent jobs, at its Bussigny printing operation, at least in part because of fewer advertising inserts.
Geneva, Switzerland (Le Temps, Fre) – Fans of Patrick Chappatte, whose cartoons are carried by GenevaLunch, can now find his long comic journalism report on Gaza online. Le Temps published the report in its print edition earlier this month.
GenevaLunch welcomes Ago Cluytens, who will regularly share as a Guest Blogger (his first post is now there) his ideas on branding and marketing, from his blog Branding Through People. In the next few days you will also see a new blog starting on GenevaLunch, “New to Geneva? Me too,” the perfect helping hand as you settle in.
