One Europe: The Dream of Unity : Media : Hold the Presses! Nobody’s Ready for a Single Newspaper : Language is no the only obstacle to creating a pan-European daily. The most obvious problem is that no one seems to want one.

As the weekly European struggled for survival amid the ruins of media mogul Robert Maxwell’s empire, the English-language newspaper printed a valentine from one of its dwindling number of readers:

“My jazz magazine is French, my sport journal German, my trade journal Swedish, my daily paper Swiss-Romanche,” wrote Lars Wallentin, “but best of all, my newspaper is European! Don’t give up; Europeans need you.”

Do they, really?

The notion of a pan-European press is one that editors and advertising directors are quickly dismissing as unity blurs the Continent’s economic borders. An inherent parochialism, along with steadfast language and cultural barriers--not to mention costs--are seen as insurmountable problems for creating a national European press.

“Don’t confound the emergence of the united states of Europe with the United States of America,” cautioned Theo Sommer, editor of Germany’s intellectual weekly, Die Zeit. “We will always be much more variegated, colorful and polyphonic,” he said. “It will not be a melting pot.”

Die Zeit was part of an ambitious pan-European publishing experiment championed by former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt more than a decade ago. “The Voice of Europe” was to be an English-language weekly with articles culled from a dozen of Europe’s most-respected newspapers.

“In the end, the effort collapsed, because no one wanted to put up the money and the task of translation took a lot of time and proved more difficult than imagined,” Sommer said. “I may be totally wrong about this, but in the next 15 to 20 years, there will be no integration of the European press,” he predicted.

Sommer cited as proof the possibly apocryphal tale of how Britain’s Guardian newspaper was suddenly selling 25,000 copies a day in Hamburg immediately after World War 2. “Everybody wondered why,” Sommer said. “When they sent someone to investigate, they found that most copies were going straight to the fish market.”

Nearly 50 years later, the climate at least is less contemptuous.

Several major publishing houses and influential European newspapers have formed joint ventures and cooperation agreements, lending new flavor to existing publications. During the Persian Gulf War, for example, readers of the Guardian found a Spanish reporter’s translated accounts of the siege of Baghdad under a type of loose news cartel involving 18 papers in 15 countries.

Every Friday, the Guardian runs commentaries and articles culled from partners such as Italy’s La Stampa or Le Monde of France. The articles are translated by an outside firm hired by the Guardian. “The idea is . . . to hold up a series of mirrors to aspects of European life and thinking for a British readership,” said Martin Kettle, editor of the supplement.

In addition, the paper prints 20,000 copies of a slimmed-down international edition in Frankfurt. “It’s definitely worked with the readers,” Kettle said, “but advertisers are slow to catch up, unfortunately.”

Michael Palmer, a Paris-based professor of communications and co-author of the book, “Media Moguls,” agrees. “The argument you often hear is that the pan-European advertiser doesn’t exist,” he said.

Even English-language newspapers that have found a relatively small editorial niche on the Continent--the London-based Financial Times and the Paris-headquartered International Herald Tribune, for example--have been largely unable to establish broad advertising bases.

“It’s mainly very limited corporate-image advertising, such as airlines and banks,” said Hugh Stephenson, a professor at The City University Graduate Centre for Journalism in London.

Advertising aside, Stephenson added, there is still a clear north-south European division of journalistic tradition. “Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden . . . all have an Anglo-American tradition of facts first,” he said. “Journalism in Italy, France, Spain and Eastern Europe comes from a very literary tradition,” Stephenson added, and their essay style “spills over into news.”

Maxwell’s foundering European, recently sold to twin British tycoons, made its debut two years ago as the unapologetic cheerleader for European unity. Relying heavily on stringers, the color weekly claimed to have reached a circulation of around 250,000 before Maxwell’s death late last year.

Charles Garside, a former deputy editor recently given the job of editor and general manager, insisted that the European “will be taking a somewhat different tone,” but declined to elaborate.

“The European was misconceived,” said the Guardian’s Kettle. “It was not a wicked thing, just a bold thing misconceived and run by a megalomaniac.”

Franz-Olivier Giesbert, editor of France’s daily Le Figaro, argues the minority view that European papers already are cosmopolitan enough. “All big newspapers like ours are already European,” he said. “When you write for Le Figaro, you know it will be read in Spain, too.”

At the London stockbroker Panmure Gordon and Co. Ltd, publishing analyst Ericde Bellaigue does not find the lack of pan-European paper distressing. By definition, he said, such a publication would “either be a homogenization of origins or a rather insipid publication that would have to be of general interest and non-contentious.”

Karsten Schmidt, director of international operations for Rupert Murdoch’s media group News International, considers the parochial attitudes of European readers “very hard to overcome.”

In a joint venture with the German publishing giant Burda, News International last year launched a popular daily tabloid, “Super,” in eastern Germany. “It is written and sold only in eastern Germany,” Schmidt said. “It shows how parochial the attitude is even within one country. If we went to western Germany with ‘Super,’ we would have to change it, go with a different attitude.”

Even more disparate are the tastes and interests of Europeans at opposite ends of the Continent, he said. “The differences between Greece and Denmark or Portugal and Estonia are gigantic--culturally, linguistically and ideologically,” he said.

Bronwen Maddox, a media analyst for the Financial Times, recalled a survey done by Young and Rubicam a decade ago. “They found that the only internationally recognized symbols are boy meets girl, a baby’s smile and a traffic jam,” she said.

“People want very specific things from their newspapers,” Maddox said. “They want to know what’s going on in their own patch.”