CLERMONT-FERRAND, France — Le Courrier des Volcans has been printed every morning since 1919, through two wars, a German occupation and the arrival of television, the internet and the smartphone. On Jan. 5 it will become something else: a newspaper printed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, with a daily edition that exists only on screens.
Groupe Centre-Presse, which owns the Courrier and five other regional dailies across central France with a combined circulation of about 310,000, announced the change on Monday. It follows similar moves by publishers in Belgium, Norway and Denmark, and it is the first by a major French regional group, in a country where the regional daily remains, for many older readers, the paper of record for their town. The group’s circulation was 600,000 in 2010.
“The numbers are not complicated,” said Anne-Sophie Berthelot, the group’s chief executive. “Printing and delivering a paper now costs more than half of what it brings in. The postal service is ending early-morning delivery in rural areas next year, which would have meant our readers in the Cantal getting the morning paper at 2 in the afternoon. Three days a week we can deliver with our own vans. Seven days we cannot.”
The group has 140,000 digital subscribers, up from 40,000 in 2020, and says they now generate more revenue than print subscriptions. Newsroom staffing will not be cut, Ms. Berthelot said, though 85 jobs in printing and distribution will go. Advertising, which once filled the back half of the paper, has long since left for the internet; print advertising now accounts for 11 percent of the group’s revenue, down from 55 percent two decades ago.
Journalists are of two minds. Julien Vacher, who represents the Courrier’s 60 editorial staff for a journalists’ union, said the logic was sound and the execution rushed. “A daily paper is a promise that the town will be looked at every day,” he said. “The company says the promise is now kept online. For our readers under 50, fine. Our readers over 70 did not sign up for a website.”
Marcel Chassagne, 81, a retired schoolteacher in Riom, has taken the Courrier for 58 years and reads it at his kitchen table with coffee. “They tell me I can read it on the tablet my daughter gave me,” he said. “I can. I will not. On the days there is no paper, I suppose I will just not know what happened.” Two readers’ associations have called for a boycott, which Ms. Berthelot said she understood and did not expect to change anything.
Delphine Royer, who studies the media economy at a university in Lyon, said France had held out longer than its neighbors because of state press subsidies, about 300 million euros a year, that are partly tied to print circulation. “The subsidy slowed the decision. It did not change the ending,” she said. “Norway got there in 2019. Belgium in 2023. France has now joined. The question is which group goes to two days, and when someone goes to zero.”
The last daily Courrier will carry a front page, Ms. Berthelot said, that the newsroom has already begun to argue about.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section B, Page 12 of the European edition with the headline: France’s Regional Newspapers Are Giving Up on the Daily Print Edition.
