Champagne corks popped in a Paris city room last week to greet the birth of a major French daily: Le Temps de Paris. For competitors, the cork-popping sounded the opening barrage in an all-out circulation war. The new afternoon paper, a fat (for France), 40-page tabloid with heavy backing from businessmen (initial investment: about $4,000,000), set out to combine the dash that is all too common in the French press with the responsibility that is all too rare. After readers snapped up its first press run of 480,000, Le Temps began printing 500,000 daily.
The country's biggest paper,...
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