The global newspaper crisis is reshaping the German print media business with talks underway on the uncertain future of one of the country's most respected dailies. The 12-year-old Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) - the German offshoot of London's Financial Times - is facing an uncertain future as its current owners, the publishing house Gruner + Jahr, considering whether to close the newspaper or line up a buyer for the struggling Hamburg-based paper.
As has been the case with print media around the world, the newspaper industry in Germany is battling to find its footing in the digital age, with both readers and advertisers moving to abandon traditional outlets and switching to online media services. This has left significant sections of the media business in Germany with a declining and ageing readership, mounting deficits and dwindling ad volumes as they struggle to plot a new course for their publications.
The crisis threatening to engulf FTD comes a little more than a week after another German newspaper, the left-leaning Frankfurter Rundschau said it was filing for insolvency. The paper's chief executive, Karlheinz Kroke, pointed to what he said had been a "massive slump" in job market advertisements over the last eight months as a cause of the paper's problems.
The Frankfurter Rundschau could face closure in January with the loss of 487 jobs if its owners - the Cologne-based media group M. DuMont Schauberg and a media offshoot of the Social Democrat Party, - fail to find buyer for the newspaper or draw up a new business plan for the daily. The newspaper's labour representatives warned that the end of the Frankfurter could also place at risk its associate newspaper in Berlin, the Berliner Zeitung.
Figures released month by the IVW group, which monitors the distribution of advertising in Germany, showed total sales of daily newspapers slumping by 3.4 per cent in the third quarter when compared with the same period last year. The Sunday editions of newspapers, however, have fared somewhat better. But sales of internet editions of newspaper titles have been on the rise amid the boom in smart phones and tablets. The IVW said visits to online media sites rose month on month by 8.86 per cent in October. However, the plight of the Frankfurter Rundschau also underlines another aspect of the crisis facing the print industry around of the world.
According to the newspaper analyst Horst Roeper part of the Frankfurter's problems stems from its ambitions to broaden its readership base by transforming itself into a national daily. But what newspapers in other countries have discovered is that the end result of taking to the national media stage is that any pickup in sales from a wider distribution area is not compensated for by the decline in local readers and advertisers, who are more focused on regional news. The media commentator Micha Brumlik believes the difficulties facing Frankfurter Rundschau also in part reflect the changes in the population in Frankfurt where the inner city is dominated by younger people who work in the city's financial sector.
"There are not any more readers fundamentally interested in the left-liberal theories and themes of the old Federal Republic of Germany," he told German radio. Gruner + Jahr is one of Europe's most successful magazine publishing houses with a turnover last year of about 2.3 billion euros and stable of publications, which includes the news weekly Stern and the women's glossy Brigitte. But what the group's board is now considering is whether to close down or to sell off parts or its entire economic and business publications offshoot, which in addition to the FTD includes magazines such as Capital and Impulse. This could result in the loss of more than 200 journalists' jobs.
A spokesman for Gruner + Jahr told dpa that the company planned to tell both the employees and their union representatives on Friday how it saw the future the economics and publishing unit. The threat to the FTD comes despite the high marks the newspaper has won for its quality journalism. The award-winning paper devoted a whole page of its Thursday edition to letters from readers praising its reporting over the years.