PaidContent reports: Up to 100 newspaper titles in Italy are facing closure because of the government’s subsidy cuts — down from €170 million a year to €53 million.
The include Liberazione, a communist daily; L’Unita, the paper founded by Antonio Gramsci; Il Manifesto, an independent left-wing paper; and Avvenire, a popular Catholic daily. But the bulk of the closures will involve local papers across the country.
According to the Financial Times’s report, The subsidies are now viewed as a wasteful abuse of taxpayers’ money to prop up a declining industry with limited readership (Liberazione publishes about 5,000 copies).
The cuts, ordered by the previous government of Silvio Berlusconi, have been confirmed by Mario Monti’s administration.