Thank you. I filed a document for you that we're going to distribute to you after the meeting, if I understood correctly. I'm going to read it to you so that everyone has the information.
First of all, thank you for inviting me to be with you today. Thanks in advance as well for your attention to my presentation, the purpose of which is to prove three points: first, that La Liberté is an essential instrument necessary to maintaining the community's vitality; second, that the newspaper is facing specific challenges to its ability to continue carrying out its mission; third, that the federal government can play a larger role in supporting papers like La Liberté in their development efforts.
I said that La Liberté was an essential instrument in maintaining vitality. The presence of a French-language newspaper in a minority community is virtually a barometer of its vitality. The more self-sufficient a community is in a number of respects, the more it is able to have one or more newspapers serving it in French.
In Canada, the minority press situation is complex and diversified, but, in all cases, the existence of a newspaper is seen as an essential tool to the development of that community.
In Manitoba, the French-language newspaper is called La Liberté. It was founded in 1913. Since 1970, it's been published by Presse-Ouest Limitée, with a seven-person board of directors. Presse-Ouest itself is a private company and a subsidiary of Société franco-manitobaine. So this is an arrangement that has made the newspaper a real private for-profit company, but with a strong community affiliation. La Liberté is, in all respects, the newspaper of the Franco-Manitoban community, and the mission of its staff is to produce the best possible newspaper every week, thus providing the best service to that community. Our goal is to establish the best balance among all the aspects of the management of a newspaper in order to offer our clientele a high-quality product. La Liberté has a staff of seven persons, plus two people who work on special projects. We also publish the Journal des jeunes 10 times a year.
A survey conducted in May by the CROP firm of Montreal showed how important the newspaper is for the Francophone community: for example, when asked how important the newspaper was for the Francophones of their region, readers rated its importance 9.3 out of 10. It also appears from that survey that the readership of La Liberté is faithful and committed to its newspaper, that it reads it every week and spends an average of 31 minutes doing so. More than 90 percent said the newspaper's various headlines interested them. More than 90 percent of readers thus tell us they read the news concerning Manitoba, concerning Francophones, cultural news, etc. But the survey also shows that that readership gets very little news in French. Manitoba Francophones watch more English-language television, listen to more English-language radio, read more English-language books and surf the Internet more in English than they do in French. There are obvious reasons for this behaviour that are directly related to the influence of the society in which they live. However, this finding shows how the community newspaper is even more important. The paper is a genuine and essential link with French-language culture and, in certain cases, is the only link these people have left. La Liberté is thus a privileged way for them to get informed in French and a window on their own community life.
Readers read La Liberté the way you gather news about family members. That's true because, last week, I was at the home of one of our advertising clients, who told me he had looked through the paper and seen pictures of 14 people he knew. That's what people do when they read a newspaper like ours.
We're lucky to have the support of our readers, but we're also in a precarious position, because the conditions in which we produce the paper are getting tougher from year to year. Maintaining the paper's tradition of excellence requires an ever greater effort. La Liberté is facing the same challenges as the majority newspapers, or the dailies, that is to say greater competition for the advertising market, constant changes in the technologies with which we produce the paper, the presence of the Internet, ongoing expenses for technological updating, the need to plan intelligent marketing strategies to preserve and expand our markets, increasing difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff, increasing difficulty remaining competitive in the job market. When we go to conferences and occasionally meet people who publish newspapers like ours, but for majority groups, that is to say Anglophones who publish weekly or daily newspapers, they talk about exactly the same concerns as ours. The difference is that, in dealing with these problems like everyone else, we have fewer resources. The following seem to be the most strategic areas for securing the newspaper's future, and we want to address them over the next few years.
There are human resources and staff training. La Liberté doesn't have the financial resources to be competitive in the job market. We have significant staff turnover.
For example, the starting salary for a journalist has increased by barely $2,000 since 1990, whereas the cost of living has risen sharply.
La Liberté doesn't have the necessary financial flexibility to provide regular and adequate annual pay increases or to hire more staff.