Media in Germany – Background

The consequences of the Allies’ licensing practices after 1945 can still be felt today. The quality national newspapers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the Welt and the Frankfurter Rundschau, still enjoy a certain prestige – regardless of their commercial success. Also characteristic of the print sector are the handsome circulation figures of the newspapers which issue local editions in metropolitan areas such as the Ruhr region, Cologne, Hamburg and Stuttgart, where the FAZ and the Welt are also represented with nationwide Sunday editions. The boulevard press is also influential: the Bild-Zeitung, for example, still has over three million readers every day.

Nevertheless, German newspaper publishers are also struggling with falling circulation, reach and income from advertising because of the Internet. Although free newspapers, which are making life hard for publishers in Scandinavia and Switzerland, haven’t been able to penetrate the market in Germany, newspapers, just like public radio broadcasters, are having problems getting young people interested in their contents since they consume most of their media on the Internet. The major search engines like Google and Yahoo offer news on politics, the economy and society free of charge that others have spent costly time researching.

In light of this development, the quality national newspapers have expanded their online activities substantially. Their goal is to raise their profile and make up for the losses in the print sector. In particular the political magazine Der Spiegel, as well as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Kölner Stadtanzeiger, focus on constant updates in the online segment in order to shore up their umbrella brands in the print market. The problem is that at the moment there is no reliable system for recording the number of people visiting the online versions, which would provide the advertising industry with hard data like the sales figures available for print editions. The online editions are free of charge so that they can compete on the market, and in some cases they offer the same content as their printed counterparts.

At the same time the quality national newspapers have managed to avoid the crisis in the print sector (so far). While the quality regional papers were losing two percent of their circulation per year because of a shrinking readership (in 2008 it was 20.4 million), the national market leaders saw their figures increase. The Süddeutsche Zeitung sold almost 450,000 copies on average every day, the FAZ about 366 000 copies (2nd quarter 2008). In contrast, the downswing of the boulevard press continued. The Bild-Zeitung, published by Springer, used to sell over 5 million copies, but now has a circulation of 3.4 million. This development is hardly surprising against the backdrop of the tabloidization of news on TV, even on the public broadcasting stations. This in turn led to publishing groups like Springer or WAZ switching to other business areas and making profits with newspaper projects in Eastern Europe.

Structurally speaking, the market tends to become more concentrated in times of crisis. It is dominated by groups like Springer (Welt, Bild, BZ), Gruner + Jahr (Stern, Brigitte, Financial Times Deutschland), Holtzbrinck (Zeit, Handelsblatt) and Bauer und Burda – groups which are also active as book publishers and at private TV and radio providers. In the same way as globally operating groups appeared on the television landscape, like Rupert Murdoch’s involvement in the pay-TV channel Premiere or the investment group Permira (in ProSieben.Sat.1), finance groups like Mecom invested in German regional papers (Berliner Zeitung, Hamburger Morgenpost) with high revenue expectations. It was perhaps no surprise that excessive demands on returns are hard to reconcile with time-consuming research and quality standards.

Another significant factor concerns the varying responses to the print products. Opinion-forming quality newspapers and magazines from the ‘old’ Federal Republic are still finding little resonance in the East German Länder even almost 20 years after the fall of the wall. Vice versa Super Illu is hardly known as an opinion-maker in West Germany. In addition, the concentration on just a few publishing groups has tended to check journalistic ambition between Halle and Dresden. Lastly, publishers from the ‘old’ German Länder also make sure that the figures are in the black. Springer merged the editing departments of the Welt and the Morgenpost for cost reasons, the SZ stopped its regional edition for the Ruhr region, as did the FAZ its radio ambitions for and Die Zeit its media section. The fate of the quality newspapers in times of tighter budgets and higher profit expectations remains to be seen.