Germany – where news still matters

Despite all the recent upheavals in the media, Springer Press’s flagship Bild Zeitung still sets the agenda in Germany, even if it often is wrong, half-wrong, or downright mendacious.

It reaches 12 million readers a day, or one in five Germans above the age of 14. It has regional editions in Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, but also Mallorca, the Canary Islands, Verona, and Istanbul, with printing facilities in Hong Kong.

And even if its circulation is gradually dwindling (down from 4.4m in 1998 to 3.5m today), part of that is down to what is known as ‘self-cannibalisation’ - competition from its own powerful online edition.

Founded in 1952, Bild prefigures Rupert Murdoch’s Sun: politically right-wing, with a staple diet of sex, crime, wars, celebrities, football and the lunacy of paper-shufflers: Brussels is a favourite hunting ground.

Gossip like Commissioner Günter Verheugen’s nudist holiday triste are swiftly turned into major scandals, disappearing just as suddenly to make way for the next one. Most days "Brussels" is "burning our good German money", though the coverage just now seems rather tame. Is Bild going easy, at the moment, on the conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel?

A potentially promising new development in Brussels coverage is the decision by the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Group (WAZ) publishing group to set up a Brussels office with around a dozen journalists from different countries, using English as their lingua franca. Writing for their respective papers - around Central Europe and the Balkans as well as German provincial papers - they draw their information from a pool.

In a few weeks correspondents from titles such as Hungary’s HVG and Croatia’s Jutarnji List are being joined by correspondents from Politika in Serbia, 24 hours in Bulgaria, and Utrinski Vesnik in Macedonia.

Does this mean there is suddenly popular interest in the EU? Maybe. Maybe not. Or perhaps the coverage will itself generate interest. There is at least power behind it: with an annual turnover of around €2 billion, WAZ employs 16,000 people and controls 37 dailies with an overall circulation of more than 2.5m. Plus there are 112 special interest magazines, 133 advertising journals, and 250 customer magazines.

Head of the new office, Knut Pries, was formerly at the Frankfurter Rundschau office in Berlin. He says he wants to put an end to "the journalistic lone fighter". The new idea is "integrated inquiry, differentiated presentation". In overall charge is Bodo Hombach, WAZ’s manager since 2002, a friend of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a man who got to know eastern Europe while special co-ordinator of the Stability Pact for the Balkans.

WAZ says its vision is to end the much-complained-about distance between the EU and the people it represents and to put the Union - and NATO - where they belong, at the centre of European politics. Will it succeed? Possibly. It is in any event courageous and - not only for German journalism - heartening.

Elsewhere, the German press is faced with the same challenge as everyone else, of readers and advertising, being sucked inexorably away by the internet. One response which alarmed the media world recently was the overnight sacking of the staff of the regional Münstersche Zeitung and their replacement by interns and freelancers.

Change is in the air, but there is hope for a smoother transition than such scorched-earth tactics. There has, for instance, been ambitious expansion of its online presence by the heavyweight Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the Munich-based supra-regional Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), which has nearly 450,000 daily sales. Another pointer to the future is Spiegel Online, the most-clicked news source in Germany. Well-established and with no less than 60 editors, it is also translated (very well) into English. Spiegel’s veteran editor-in-chief Stefan Aust wants to launch a print version in English too.

"It’s time to go beyond the borders of the German-language area," he argues. The paper could be successful internationally "without automatically expressing Anglo-American views of the world".

• Dirk Mueller-Thederan is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.

Despite all the recent upheavals in the media, Springer Press’s flagship Bild Zeitung still sets the agenda in Germany, even if it often is wrong, half-wrong, or downright mendacious.