March 28, 2024

Axel Springer’s New Focus on Digital Draws Cries of Betrayal

BERLIN — The publisher Axel Springer’s role in Germany’s postwar history — from building its high-rise headquarters close to the Berlin Wall to antagonize the Communist authorities on the other side to denouncing the student movement in 1968 — has earned it respect and disdain in equal turns.

What has never been disputed since the company’s namesake, Axel Springer, founded the company in 1946 with a daily newspaper and a program guide, is the publisher’s role as a bastion of print media in Germany, and more recently, Europe.

So when the publisher announced on July 25 that it was selling off two regional newspapers and several magazines to focus on digital products, the news was met with howls of outrage and accusations of betrayal from German commentators and reporters.

“The company is in the process of transforming itself from one of Europe’s most renowned publishers to a conglomerate concentrated on digital media,” the German Journalists’ Association said in a statement.

“Journalism? Not with us,” the left-leaning daily Taz, a longstanding rival of the more conservative Springer publications, wrote in a headline about the sale.

The print media in Germany have been largely immune to the upheavals that have racked the newspaper industry in much of the world, retaining more than 45.5 million readers, or slightly more than half of the population in 2012, according to the Frankfurt-based group Media Analysis.

So that a leading publisher could divest itself of several of its most traditional printed publications in the name of an electronic future was as shocking for many here as the Graham family’s decision to sell The Washington Post to Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, the online retail behemoth.

Springer said its decision to sell the regional newspapers Hamburger Abendblatt and Berliner Morgenpost, the popular Hörzu TV program guide and several women’s magazines was very different from the Grahams’ decision to sell The Washington Post.

“We sold moneymaking publications to a traditional publisher,” said Tobias Fröhlich, a spokesman for Axel Springer. “For us, it was a question of where we saw the potential for growth.”

The sale of the Springer publications to the Funke MedienGruppe, previously the WAZ Gruppe, for about 920 million euros, or $1.2 billion, still requires approval from Germany’s antitrust authorities.

For Springer, the growth lies in digital media. The company operates several online portals, including the real estate site ImmoNet.de, the StepStone online employment market and a shopping site.

Springer insisted that journalism would remain at the heart of its business. The sale, the company said, would allow its two main publications, Bild and Die Welt, to grow, partly by expanding its presence online through multimedia and digital storytelling. Together, those publications made 514 million euros in profit for the company in 2012 and accounted for about 15 percent of total sales.

The company’s actions increasingly reflect the shifting focus on the digital world.

Last year, Bild sent its editor in chief, Kai Diekmann, to Silicon Valley to make contacts with the heads of major digital media firms. He even exchanged his tie and slicked-backed hair for a much more tech-friendly look, complete with hoodie and a beard.

The company announced its plans in May to build a Media Campus near its Berlin headquarters to house its digital subsidiaries and to attract and train young reporters in digital media.

Last week, several Springer publications allowed Google to display parts of articles on its news search pages, despite a new copyright law that took effect Aug. 1.

But the bankruptcies of the news service DAPD and the daily Frankfurter Rundschau last year, as well as the closure of The Financial Times Deutschland, has raised concerns among the German news media.

“They are worried about their own future,” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote about journalists in an article that explained the hopes that had been pinned on Axel Springer’s chief executive. “With Springer’s split from its newspapers and print magazines, an illusion has also burst: the illusion that Mathias Döpfner and his company could show the industry the way in how to bring old newspapers and print magazines successfully into the digital era.”

On Tuesday, while German publications were more muted in their lamentation over the sale of The Washington Post, Die Welt lauded the move. In an editorial published online, it compared Mr. Bezos to the leaders from the Industrial Revolution.

“Today customers want to be participants, they want to have control and make decisions for themselves,” Die Welt wrote. “Now, Bezos is beginning to review structures in the news business that date from the 19th century. The decision is not premature.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/business/media/axel-springers-new-focus-on-digital-draws-cries-of-betrayal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss