“Toward the end of August, the Mafra media group will cease independent publication of the newspaper Lidové noviny in printed form. Subscribers of Lidové noviny will be offered Mladá fronta DNES daily without price change, plus access to exclusive paid online content on iDNES Premium for 1 crown until the end of 2024,” Mafra said in the report.
According to the server E15 regarding 40 people will lose their jobs due to the end of Lidové noviny. Mafra has decided to end the operation of the newspaper despite the fact that several leading Czech businessmen have shown interest in it in recent months, the server added.
The lidovky.cz server will undergo a change, the published author’s contributions will be expanded on the website, while more opinion texts will appear. According to internal surveys of the media house, readers prefer comments and glosses, which are traditional for Lidová noviny.
“The most successful supplement of Lidové noviny Orientace, thanks to which thousands of readers subscribe to the newspaper on Saturdays, will become part of the Saturday edition of Mladá fronta DNES from September,” added Mafra.
Lidové noviny is one of the most famous Czech dailies, first published on December 16, 1893 in Brno. They probably experienced their most famous era during the time of the Czechoslovak First Republic, when its editors included well-known Czech writers, including Karel and Josef Čapková or Eduard Bass, who later became their editor-in-chief. In 1989, the renewed LN became one of the symbols of the Velvet Revolution.
Last September, the Mafra publishing house was bought by the Kaprain group, which took over the media house from the trust funds of former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO). In addition to the discontinued Lidové noviny, the publishing house also publishes the dailies Mladá fronta Dnes and Metro or the weekly Téma. It also operates, for example, the news websites iDNES.cz, lidovky.cz or the timetable search engine iDOS.cz.
No one appealed, the takeover of Mafra and Synthesia by Kaprain is valid
Economic