What we really need is daily newspapers owned by left-wing political parties and/or supported by individual subscriptions of people in a mass movement (the latter of which is more difficult), but as Jim Cullen of _The Progressive Populist_ said, it's cost-prohibitive to put out a daily (in print) in the States. The JCP still has a daily called _Akahata_ [The Red Flag] -- with the circulation of about 700,000, I believe. Italy has _L'Unita_, _Liberazione_, and _Il Manifesto_, but....
***** Who Will Pay the Price of a New United Europe? by David Bacon
ROME, ITALY (1/15/98)
...L'Unita followed the PDS wing of the split in the old PCI. A daily with a huge circulation, it's been the envy of other western communist parties for years. The annual festival for the paper still draws over a million people. It is an institution, not just of the Italian, but of the European left.
Pivetti warns, however, that sometime this coming year L'Unita will lay off half its 300 workers. The "Mattina" editions, started to serve readers with local news in cities like Florence and Milan, will likely be discontinued. This can't help but be a bitter irony, not just to the papers' staff, but to millions of Italians who loyally supported Europe's most widely-read communist periodical through thick and thin. The PDS won the government, but they may lose the paper.
"The PDS can't carry the paper the way the old party did," Pivetti says. When the Italian Communist Party dissolved, party subsidies ended which had helped to pay L'Unita's bills. "Now we will have to make it on our own, just from sales, subscriptions and advertising," she explains. Whether the paper will survive in a chilly new market-oriented world is a question no one can answer. While it certainly has a loyal readership, it's hard to imagine department stores and big corporations paying for pages of ads....
<http://www.igc.org/dbacon/Unions/05italy.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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