Lidove noviny (LN), the oldest Czech daily in print, is to close down the print version by the end of August.

LN’s publishing house Mafra announced in a press release on July 16 that “considering the development on the market” and “internal surveys” Mafra “decided to strengthen the opinion content” of the web version.

The changes come less than a year after the Agrofert conglomerate, set up by the Czech opposition leader and billionaire ex-Prime Minister Andrej Babis in the late 1990s, sold Mafra to former PPF manager Karel Prazak's Kaprain group, as bne IntelliNews reported last September.

The iconic Saturday intellectual supplement Orientace (Orientation) will become part of the Saturday edition of LN’s sister daily MF Dnes, accused by critics of backing Babis’ populist ANO party and serving as its mouthpiece.

“I see this as a loss and also a symptom of how we don’t know how to behave towards our own cultural heritage. Attaching it [Orientace] to MF Dnes is a truly sad ending,” commented Matej Metelec, editor of A2, a bi-weekly covering culture and politics.

Metelec told bne IntelliNews that during interwar Czechoslovakia, LN’s “blend of journalism and literature created a model, which has become an ideal of writing here [in Czechoslovakia and later Czechia] in the following decades.”

LN was founded in 1893 and the lengthy list of its editors includes world-renowned Czech writer Karel Capek. LN’s renewal at the end of the 1980s became one of the symbols of the crumbling communist regime, which ended in 1989.

Agrofert purchased Mafra in 2013, which is seen by Czech media experts as a milestone year during which local business actors took over much of the media ownership landscape, which mirrored the populist surge in the country and which is now seen by international media observers as one of the key risks to media plurality in the country.

Last year’s sale of Mafra to Kaprain took place alongside Kaprain’s purchase of the Synthesia chemical plant and was seen as Babis’ effort to diffuse his conflict of interest after the tighter legislation on politicians’ involvement in the media was passed by the Czech parliament last year.   

The end of LN’s print version also comes a month after changes to Mafra’s supervisory board, which is now chaired by Kaprain’s marketing head Jakub Dlouhy and another member is Jan Dienstl, a business partner of energy oligarch Pavel Tykac, who was openly interested in purchasing Mafra from Agrofert prior to its sale to Kaprain.