An increase in postal prices prompted the board of directors of the region to dismiss all of its staff on Monday. The Surndretted company has not however said its last word.
Its majority shareholder and president Jean-Claude Vagnières announced Monday to seek “actively tracks with partners to avoid seeing the title disappear definitively”. In the meantime, he confirmed on Tuesday in Keystone-Att that the last issue of the daily will appear on Friday.
Pierre Dessemontet, Co-Syndic d’Yverdon-les-Bains and member of the Executive Committee of the Association for the Development of the North Vaudois (DNAv), expresses its lively regrets: “It is the whole of a district of nearly 100,000 inhabitants which is found without a local media. It is a huge part of the municipal news that will no longer be covered”.
A “desertification” of the Region News
He expresses his strongest misunderstanding concerning the decision of the Federal Communication Office: “A simple change of postal provider lowers the press aid from 600,000 to 500,000 francs”.
Pierre DESSEMONTET fears a form of “desertification” of regional news. Although the city is able to increase its advertising presence in a local media, it cannot compensate for the announced structural deficit.
The Yverdon Co-Syndic also does not set any requirement as to the form that the media must take in the future, leaving the freedom to abandon the most important paper format that is that local news is covered “.
The canton of Vaud takes note
Through the voice of its president Stéphane Constantini, DNAV has contacted the newspaper’s writing to inform him that it was available to find an outcome favorable to the situation, as was communicated to Keystone-ATS. However, DNV “does not have financial means which can come to fill the additional distribution costs of the region.
All the actors consulted say they are saddened by the disappearance of the media. The canton of Vaud expresses its “regrets” in a press release, and hopes to safeguard this title as well as its 19 jobs (14 full-time equivalents (EPT)). DNV finds “harmful for the whole region” the emptiness left by the disappearance of this media.
