Media in Germany – Panorama

With a “Slow Media Manifesto” (2010), bloggers in Germany want to swim against their own stream: they want to create islands of slowness in an increasingly accelerated media landscape. Goethe.de spoke to one of signatories, Sabria David.

The Internet, Web 2.0 and social networks absorb the minds of their users at a breath-taking pace. Many therefore withdraw entirely from the spell of the screen. But renunciation, according to Sabria David, is not the solution. In her view, it is rather a matter of finding an “appropriate response to the media revolution” and to use and design media more in accordance with standards of sustainability.

“Sustainability” as media value

In 2010, together with Benedikt Köhler and Jörg Blumtritt, David published a manifesto with 14 theses at their blog www.slow-media.net. The authors thereby hooked up with the international Slow Food movement, for which human dignity, decent living, enjoyment and quality are all inseparable. The central concept of the Slow Media manifesto is thus sustainability – exploitation, superficial consumerism and the fast buck are incompatible with sustainable media.

Examples of sustainable, “slow” media, in the opinion of the Slow Media advocates, are the magazines brand eins and Spektrum der Wissenschaft (the German edition of Scientific American). Their appeal, according to the bloggers, extends far beyond the time of their publication and the individual reader, who recommends the magazines to others, whether in their printed or their online versions. Media users sense the spirit in which a medium is produced and are therefore willing to pay more for it. One function of the Slow Media blog is to find exactly such examples and make them more widely known.

Two sides of the quality coin

Mrs David, why the Slow Media Manifesto?

At present, the media landscape is divided into two fronts. The “paper faction” believes that the guarantor of good journalism is the printed newspaper. For the other faction, the solution for the quality problem can lie only in the Internet. We want to introduce a third option. Because quality isn’t a question of print or Internet. Against this background, we came together to draft a position paper from a cross-media perspective.

Criticism came primarily in the first week during the hype: for one, from people that could or would detect no quality deficit whatever. And then from Internet advocates, who thought we had spoken out against the Internet. Our work has shown the latter group that we don’t demonise the Internet, but rather want to improve it. Some of our most vehement critics have now in fact become supporters.

Sustainable effect abroad

One year Slow Media Manifesto. What effect has it had?

The media debate is now being conducted more constructively – the front of supporters and opponents of the Internet has started to soften. In view of the media revolution that we are facing, we won’t get very far by using ideological arguments. Today we have up to 35,000 visitors per month. So sustainable effects have also increased for us, and to us they are far more important.

What do you mean?

Readers translated our manifesto into French, Italian and Russian. Users abroad have taken up the ball and continued the debate in their home countries. The discussion that we initiated has been carried on in blogs, picked up by daily newspapers and studied at universities – for example, in the Department for Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund.

The manifesto has been discussed in seminars at a media university in San Francisco and at universities in Australia. We’ve got feedback from Norway, Japan, Turkey and Israel. These are sustainable results.

“Long-term reader loyalty pays off”

On the Internet you get most information for free. In what circumstances are users willing to pay for quality content?

There are many workable models for sustainable media. For example, in 2008 the tri-quarterly magazine XXI came on the market in France. The goal from the beginning was to finance the magazine without ads, through readers alone. Sceptics said that no one in the Internet Age was about to pay 15 € per issue. But the editors were able to convey to their audience that quality costs a little, and now XXI has 50,000 readers.

So this works when you provide quality and build up a close relation to the readers. Fast sales alone don’t create bonds with the reader. Those who want to create sustainable media, however, will initially have to advance costs. Long-term loyalty doesn’t pay itself out with the first issues.

Not without Twitter

How do you yourself deal with the overwhelming multiplicity of media?

It’s a question for the future how you can manage to find those media that suit you and pick out the things that are relevant and really interesting. No one can consume everything that is now being offered in media and their content.

Everyone has to decide for himself among which media and forms of digital communication he will distribute his energies. Me, I wouldn’t want to do without Twitter, for example. I’d prefer to give up TV.