French Polynesia: Newspaper’s days were over

The closing down of one French Polynesia’s two daily newspapers after more than 50 years of publishing has raised questions about the future of printed news media.

Les Nouvelles de Tahiti, one of the Pacific’s oldest newspapers, printed its last edition on Friday.

The 16 journalists at who had been working at Les Nouvelles de Tahiti are expected to be absorbed into the staff of its larger sister paper, La Depeche de Tahiti.

Journalist Alex du Prel, who began his career as a cadet with Les Nouvelles, said television and the internet are the main reasons for the paper’s demise.

“The problem has been lingering for quite a while and sales from both dailies have been constantly reducing,” du Prel said.

“Printed press is becoming less and less important. It’s being replaced by internet and electronic media.”

He says about half of Tahiti’s tiny 270,000 person population is made up of under 22-year-olds, who are not engaging with traditional print media.

“They’re watching TV or they’re on their iPhones,” he said.

“Of the others, most of them are Polynesian people who are still in the oral tradition, so it’s a micro-market.”

Les Nouvelles had a very small distribution at just on 2000 copies per day.

Du Prel says the end would have come sooner, but there were political reasons to keep the paper afloat.

“Les Nouvelles has been kept alive for many years, 20 years, to prevent a competitor from opening another daily newspaper – and this is why the government from 1990 until 2004 used to buy publicity all the time within Les Nouvelles,” he said.

Du Prel says Les Nouvelles’ closure poses a real danger to media diversity and freedom in French Polynesia.

“Until 2004, Les Nouvelles and La Depeche were singing the same songs, so there wasn’t much difference between the two,” he said.

“After Flosse lost power it became a different newspaper, it was exposing quite a few scandals and corruption problems and so on, and we’re going to lose that.”