On July 31, 2024, the Saint-Denis Commercial Court issued a decision to liquidate the “Journal de l’Île de La Réunion” — a daily newspaper that had been published since 1951. It is the second La Réunion newspaper to “physically” disappear from newsstands after “Témoignages,” created in 1944 and whose paper version ceased to be printed in 2013. And there is no doubt that “le Quotidien” will soon follow, given the difficulties encountered recently. The court had anticipated this situation when addressing journalists on April 4: “Now it is up to you to see with the buyer what he can do. If there is any salvation for the newspaper, it will be through everyone’s efforts. In its current form, this is one to two million euros of additional liabilities per year, a total impasse.”

This fact will not prevent these different titles from maintaining or reappearing on the digital web, improperly described as "dematerialized". It serves as a reminder of the very great fragility of the written press - and not only in La Reunion Island - conceived as a media of industrial civilization, since the end of the 19th century. Our societies have been experiencing for several decades now a shift into what some analysts call "the post-industrial era" and the many upheavals induced by this phenomenon call for real paradigm shifts, which must be anticipated. And this is true in many areas.

Missed opportunities

Press historians will doubtless note later that, since the difficulties posed to "Témoignages" in 2008-2013, the other titles of the written press have missed at least two opportunities to reinvent themselves. The first time was when "Témoignages" participated in a project to "pool three" printing and distribution costs, to make new economies of scale. The project failed.
The second time was when the Commercial Court advised them to merge in order to continue to publish, one as a daily, the other as a weekly magazine. Here again, their lack of adaptability proved prohibitive.

A new framework of thought

Of course, it is easy today to blame their lack of vision for the future. But this fact is precisely what must now force us to think about the future of our written media. What "press" will we need? Where will the levers, vectors and means of its production be? What will be the place of the journalist’s profession in the continuous buzz of a flow of "information" of all kinds, dominated by social networks? For whom, for what stakes, continue to produce a newspaper?
These questions arise today in the context of the upheavals affecting Reunion society as well as the rest of the world.
There are of course, in a first circle, all the questions relating to the narrow political and institutional framework in which the vital forces of Reunion are increasingly strangled. But this framework itself is subject to all the shocks that shake all the industrialized countries to which we are attached. One only has to see the quagmire into which the European Union has plunged itself...
All the paradigms of the domination of these historically imperialist powers are being called into question and no one controls anything anymore.
And when we want to try to find solutions to the problems—all intertwined—that assail us, we must now try to do so in a systemic way and not by isolating them from each other: climate, energy, resources, food, transport, education and cultural expressions of peoples, communications, etc.
This is probably the most stimulating thing to think about today, in La Reunion as elsewhere. To take just one example: youth employment must be considered while the entire social field of “work” needs to be rebuilt.
Thus, the press, like everything else, must reinvent itself. Indeed, the fact of appearing on the internet is as fragile as everything else, dependent on external supplies that can stop from one day to the next, or become so expensive that they would become inaccessible.
Let us conclude that the proprietary press has had its day. When the PCR calls for a spirit of responsibility, it wants to involve everyone in defining the common future. There is no doubt that a participatory, mutualist and supportive press will find its account there!

by Pascale David