The Rising of the Journalist-Managers: Changing Institutional Logics in the Field of French Journalism? Leads to Analyze the Change of the French Daily Hard News Press Business Model

The purpose of this paper aims to point out and highlight the specific features of a segment of the French media landscape: the daily hard news press. For two decades but dramatically for a few years French daily newspapers face a big turmoil that mainly concerns economics and management issues: continuous readership erosion, decreasing advertising revenues, continuous growing costs of circulation, etc. According to some practitioners and scholars, the classical business model of this segment of press appears now to be inquired or even redefined in order to face new challengers and market needs. In fact some hard news newspapers are involved in a process of redefining their business model. We can indeed rise up some beginnings of an economic and managerial change within those newspapers: a "managerialization process". We assume this managerialization could be mainly personified and carried on by journalist-managers. However this institutional change appears to be implemented through various forms considering each newspaper and slowly because of strong and structuring patterns shaping this field. In this paper we would to point out the beginnings and assumptions of this slow managerialization process and propose the leads to analyze the institutional change of the business model of the French daily hard news press, in a short and middle-term forecast. Previously we would highlight insights of the specific business model of the hard news press, then insert this process in the environment of the French media field and the specific culture of this field that compose some strong constraints to major institutional change.