Print Media Bastion May Be Giving Way

On any train, plane or bus, readers unfurl broadsheets that still do justice to the word, thick with advertising. More than 72 percent of Germans who are older than 14 read newspapers regularly, according to the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers.

So it came as something of a shock when, at the end of last year, news of trouble emerged at several German newspapers and other news organizations. In October, DAPD, a news service, filed for bankruptcy protection. In November, Frankfurter Rundschau, one of the first dailies to begin publishing in occupied Germany after World War II, took a similar step. In December, The Financial Times Deutschland shut down.

Is the newspaper industry in Germany about to go the way of its counterparts elsewhere in the developed world?

Perhaps. Certain technologies, including the Internet, have taken longer to catch on in Germany than elsewhere. Advertising has already declined sharply at German newspapers; perhaps now readers will move on, too.

“I would be very surprised if there were no crisis,” said Norbert Bolz, a professor of media science at the Technical University of Berlin. “There is a structural crisis. But I have to say, honestly, how surprised I am by the success of the main media houses in dealing with this.”

Analysts say the shutdowns and bankruptcy filings at the end of last year were prompted largely by factors unique to the individual publications and organizations.

The German news agency business, for example, is unusually crowded. DAPD, cobbled together from the German-language service of The Associated Press and a former state-owned East German news agency, competes with a larger service, Deutsche Presse Agentur, as well as several other German-language news wires.

Frankfurter Rundschau, which is still publishing as its biggest shareholder, DuMont Schauberg, seeks a rescuer, has been hobbling along for years. A decade ago, it was bailed out by the state government of Hesse, and a publishing arm of the Social Democratic Party now holds a 40 percent stake.

The FT Deutschland, which was started in 2000 by two publishers — Pearson of Britain and Gruner Jahr, which is controlled by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann — was never able to mount a convincing challenge to the dominant German business daily, Handelsblatt. Pearson sold its stake to Gruner Jahr in 2008.

The downturn in print advertising has affected German papers, but they have largely been able to compensate by raising their cover prices. Over all, newspaper revenue was flat last year, according to the publishers’ group — a relatively buoyant performance, given the slide elsewhere. The number of newspapers in Germany actually increased in 2012.

In an effort to head off further declines in advertising, the publishers of four German national papers — Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit — formed an alliance this month to promote their appeal to marketers.

Publishers have also persuaded the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to introduce legislation that could result in a new source of revenue: licensing fees from Internet companies like Google. The measure would authorize the publishers to demand fees from search engines or aggregators that link to their articles. The publishers’ success in lobbying for the measure, which is bitterly opposed by Google, demonstrates their continued clout, analysts say.

The troubles at Frankfurter Rundschau, FT Deutschland and DAPD “are not an indicator of a dying print market,” said Steffen Burkhardt, a media researcher at the University of Hamburg. “Publishers in Germany are in a fantastic situation compared with print publishers in other markets.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/business/media/print-media-bastion-may-be-giving-way.html?partner=rss&emc=rss