Six titles with problems

The daily newspapers in Romania haven’t followed the audience’s taste to the same extent that markets such as women glossies have. The latest editorial content and team changes give the opportunity of a forecast for every title.

Top 3 Libertatea, Jurnalul National and Evenimentul zilei confirm the saying that on the developed media markets in Romania the first three players have a safe evolution. The massive exodus from Libertatea hasn’t yet affected the sold circulation of the newspaper, Jurnalul follows a stable trend after the Logans campaigns, as the second newspaper, and Evenimentul also keeps its position.

România liberă The appointment of Dan Cristian Turturică as a development director might speed-up things, but Turturica’s latest project, Prezent, has been a failure. România liberă’s relaunch has been postponed several times, and the change of the newspaper’s site [RO] – the only one noticeable after the appointment of Emil Hurezeanu as a general director several months ago – determined a certain amount of laugh among the Internet publishers in Romania.

Gândul and Ziua will continue their descending trend, in spite of some graphic face-lifting. The 20-30 thousand sold copies of both demand substantial transformations, and not cosmetic surgery. The confirmation of Sorin Roşca Stănescu as a director at Ziua, as well as the fact that Cristian Tudor Popescu (Gândul) has asked and got from his owner Adrian Sîrbu the creation of a separate print division for his newspaper, tend to suggest no dramatic change will take place.

Adevarul and Cotidianul sell roughly what Ziua and Gândul sell, but they have as an asset some managers that can brag with good results in previous employments: Răzvan Corneţeanu, Adrian Halpert and Dragoş Stanca. It is yet to be seen whether the first two will confirm on the quality segment the reputation they got with tabloids. The third is to get along with the directors swamp created in Sorin Ovidiu Vîntu’s media structure.

Averea might become the second important tabloid of Romania, unde the name of Click, due to the team that left Libertatea. However, the team hasn’t shown it would do something very different from Libertatea, and this kind of approach might be problematic.

All the titles outside the Top 3 will go through big difficulties, due to the battle for journalists [EN] that is currently fought on the Romanian media market. Probably, we won’t see any spectacular transformation at any of the six titles above earlier than in six months or one year.

(Originally published [RO] on Saturday, November 25th, in “Evenimentul zilei”)

Note: The distributed circulation top of the Romanian market is, according to BRAT [RO], the Romanian ABC, the following:

1. Libertatea (Ringier Romania): 250-270.000 copies
2-3. Jurnalul national & Evenimentul (Intact-Voiculescu, Ringier): 60-80.000 copies
4. Romania libera (Dan Adamescu/WAZ): 60.000 copies
5-8. Gandul (Sîrbu), Adevarul (Patriciu), Ziua (PetromService, allegedly Vîntu), Averea (Patriciu), Cotidianul (Vîntu): 20-35.000 copies (Cotidianul is unaudited).

No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment