The Incredible Shrinking Mediascape
Sellouts, layoffs and losses: German newspapers are in the throes of their severest crisis ever
"Today's issue is our last." And so, Bertram Eisenhauer, editor of the F.A.Z. English Edition, said goodbye on Saturday to 30,000 readers two years after the project was launched as a supplement to the International Herald Tribune. But being forced to shut down its English edition may be the least of the problems facing the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's most respected daily newspapers.
Saturday was also the last day of publication for the paper's Berliner Seiten, a special section and pet project of FAZ editor Frank Schirrmacher that saw some of Germany's top writers reflect at length on the political and cultural goings on in the nation's old and new capital. And for the first time in its history, the FAZ will be laying off staff. According to a lengthy article in Die Zeit examining "the worst financial crisis in [newspaper publishers'] history," of the 750 journalists at the FAZ, ten percent may soon be clearing their desks.
The FAZ is not alone. Its main transregional rival, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, is looking for ways to cut costs by 15 percent. The Axel Springer Verlag, which has just merged the staffs of Die Welt and the Berliner Morgenpost, may cut as many as 1400 jobs. 20 percent of the staff at the Frankfurter Rundschau may soon be on the way out. And so on.
A shock of another sort hit Berlin this week. Since the fall of the Wall, the city has been the number one battleground for major publishers, all of fighting for the same prize: the daily newspaper for the capital. Gruner + Jahr, the media holding company in which Bertelsmann has a 74.9 percent stake, is throwing in the towel, selling off all its regional papers -- among them, the Berliner Zeitung. The winner is the buyer, the Holtzbrinck Verlag, which publishes the Berliner's primary competitor, the Tagesspiegel.
Holtzbrinck weirdly promises to keep both papers up and running, allowing them to focus on what are still two very different readerships: Berliners in the west, who favor the Tagesspiegel, and in the east, who prefer the Berliner. How? By combining and streamlining departments that handle ads, sales, accounting, that sort of thing. It's a promise few believe will hold.
What's happening to newspapers in Germany is, of course, happening all over. With the economy hurting, advertisers, the source of about two-thirds of most papers' income, are pulling back. Since there are fewer jobs on offer all around, fewer classifieds are sold as well. Plus, sales are down as younger readers turn to TV and the Net for news updated minutes ago rather than news as of last evening's press time.
It's too early to say that a particularly European newspaper culture is dying; but perhaps too late for the papers to realize how drastically it's changing.
Elsewhere
"Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his rival Edmund Stoiber have accepted the invitation... to parade their views next to pictures of bare-breasted models." Kate Connolly explains the appeal of the one paper in Germany that will undoubtedly weather this crisis. The 50-year-old tabloid is sleazy, nationalistic and the biggest-selling daily in the country: Bild.
Also in The Guardian: "Voicing anti-German sentiments may be the last 'acceptable' prejudice. The confidence that Britons have, even in the company of strangers, to articulate their disdain for an entire nation without fear of contradiction or contempt is both staggering and intriguing."
"Spamming journalists with e-books was probably not the best start to a campaign against piracy." A post to the Spectre list reveals both the ridiculous antics of Suhrkamp Verlag and a way to read a deliberately inflammatory novel for free (see Your Novel is an Execution).