It takes a strong person to buck the digitally-focussed news industry trend away from print, and instead commit tens of millions of dollars to a belief in that platform’s future.

Such a man is Édouard Coudurier, fourth-generation newspaperman and president of France’s Télégramme Group, which three years ago, committed some 20 million Euros (A$32.9 million) to installing a new printing press.

What possessed them, I wanted to know, an evolved and modern company with digital and broadcast interests as well as involvement in events, some of them world-famous?

The opportunity to find out what was behind the decision GXpress had reported in October 2021 finally came up this year, when I had the opportunity to visit the company in Morlaix in north-western France, and spoke to technical director Olivier Berthelot about the project on which he had worked with Coudurier. You’ll find the technical story here.

But first a little history. The Télégramme’s website traces its history back to the late 19^th century and its first publication under the name La Dépêche (The Dispatch) but the real story begins with the liberation of France at the end of World War II, a period in which all the country’s newspapers had been closed.

Elder brother Hubert Coudurier, born in 1958, had worked as a journalist for news agency AFP, France 3, and was famously the publisher of a book (Amours, Ruptures et Trahisons) about the love life of then president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Three years his junior, Édouard Coudurier took the chair of Télégramme’s board in December 2001 on the death of his father Jean-Pierre Coudurier.

With Liberation in 1944, the newspaper had restarted as Télégramme de Brest et de l’Ouest, but from Morlaix, 60 km away, to which it had moved three years earlier to protect itself from the bombings that would raze the naval city. And grown, so that by the end of the 1980s, it had 550 employees including 130 journalists, and a circulation of more than 176,000 copies.

Diversification started with a free weekly, Télé-hebdo, combining a TV guide with classified ads, and then its own radio station and a 1985 Minitel videotex service, leveraging the French system that preceded the internet.

When the internet “tornado” arrived a decade later, Le Télégramme was among the first French dailies to put all of its content online every night.

A new Swiss-built 70,000 cph Wifag OF370 offset newspaper press replaced the elderly Harris lines, and supported the launch of a tabloid Sunday edition in 1998, with a second press installed in 2001.

With this foundation, the group evolved with a stake in employment site regionsjob.com (now HelloWork) and a “new formula” and format for the print daily.

Diversification also saw it acquire a number of other companies including Pen Duick, the organiser of the world-famous Route du Rhum yacht race, and later OC Sport – best-known for the Transat race, as well as for outdoor sports and running events – and invest in regional television and musical events.

Its website says the 150 million Euros turnover company now has shareholdings in 44 companies, sells nearly 400,000 copies per issue, combining all its publications, and has 5.5 million monthly unique visitors on its sites. Eight major nautical and musical events draw three million cumulative spectators.

A revamp of the Télégramme and its website saw the newspaper named France’s best daily newspaper in 2015, and be honoured for the “best digital innovation” the following year. Further investment has included a new 1600m2 multimedia newsroom in Morlaix, opened in 2017, with “cockpit”, TV studio and collaborative workspaces.

And in a year in which the Route du Rhum celebrated its fortieth anniversary and an OC Sports team won the Volvo Ocean Race, investment in the newspaper continued with installation of EidosMedia’s Méthode multichannel editorial system.

But like almost every other newspaper in the world, print circulations were falling… although not as fast as for some other dailies, and the big questions were how far would they fall and how soon.

That 95 per cent of the paper’s revenue still came from print concentrated minds, but with paper and energy costs rising dramatically, and staff costs high, it required some lateral thinking.

With the support of his management team, Édouard Coudurier first explored and then took the decision to invest heavily in a future for print, spending twice as much on a new press as it would have cost to update and automate the two Swiss presslines which had been at the core of the paper’s production.

Here, Olivier Berthelot takes GXpress through the thinking that brought them to that decision, and gives us the opportunity to view the results.

Peter Coleman

Pictured (from top): Signage outside the Morlaix print site; Le Telegramme reappears in 1944; Édouard Coudurier with OC Sport chief executive Hervé Favre and Jacqueline Tabarly at the 2020 launch of a new partnership to see the Transat yacht race start from Brest; an investment in print – the new manroland Goss press