MUNICH — Long after newspaper audiences started defecting to the Internet in other Western countries, Germany still looks like a bastion of print.
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.
...
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.
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