Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Germany

Revolution: Welt Kompakt launches Google Wave to reach readers

Laura Oliver — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:22:12 +0000

Welt Kompakt, sister title of German national newspaper Die Welt, has created a ‘wave’ on Google’s new service in a move to attract younger readers.

I don’t have an invite so if you can access the wave at this link, tell us what Welt is doing and if it works for you.

Full post at this link…

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#Outlook2010: Germany’s WAZ media – learning from bigger players and going open source

Laura Oliver — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:16:08 +0000

Last week Journalism.co.uk attended the INMA and Online Publishers Association (OPA) Europe’s annual conference Outlook 2010 – the event focused on innovation, transformation and making money for media businesses. Follow our coverage at this link.

Regional newspaper WAZ Media has learned to punch above its weight online by looking at what bigger publishers are doing digitally and seeking out free and open source software and platforms to use, explains the outgoing CEO of its new media Katharina Borchert.

Starting with video the group supplied reporters with Flip cameras to capture original video news and began using a bank of freelancers to edit the footage.

The group has also joined forces with another regional publisher to create The Media Lab – a small company that invests at a really early stage in local online start-ups that add something interesting to the market, explains Borchert.

This has already spawned an online-to-print publishing solution for printed user-generated papers in areas not covered by WAZ’s titles – after a year-and-a-half the group expects this project to be in profit by next year.

Listen to Borchert’s talk on video, Twitter and regional media innovation online below:

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Buzzmachine: Kai Diekmann, Bild editor and brand

Laura Oliver — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:55:43 +0000

Jeff Jarvis reviews the new blog and online shop of Kai Diekmann, head of German newspaper Bild.

Diekmann is a brand in himself and in this respect unmatched in the Anglophone world, suggests Jarvis – and he’s getting attention for his paper.

“There’s a 360-degree tour of his office, starring him. Click on his possessions and learn more – about, for example, a piece of the Berlin Wall signed by Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George Bush (41). He has a bio and lots of photos. Diekmann interviews himself (Why are you writing a blog, he asks. ‘I’m just incurably vain,’ he answers). He posts video he shoots himself – ‘ich bin Videoblogger-in-Chief für Bild.de’ – including one in Baghdad and another of him getting a shot. He brags about the commercials for Bild made by Bild’s readers, who understand its brand well. He links gleefully to an interview with a competitive publisher and scion of a German publishing family (founders of Der Spiegel) who says the esteemed Süddeutsche Zeitung won’t be around on paper in 20 years – but Bild will,” writes Jarvis.

Full post at this link…

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Media Release: Attributor partners DPA for online copyright protection

Laura Oliver — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:45:16 +0000

Attributor has teamed up with German agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur to monitor online copyright infringements against its content distributed in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The agency has been trialling the service for eight months, but will now make it available to its clients.

Full release at this link…

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MorningStar.com: Readers will pay for online within five years, says Axel Springer exec

Laura Oliver — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:22:15 +0000

In an interview with Dow Jones, reproduced by the Morning Star, Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Doepfner says customers will be willing to pay for ‘online quality content’ within the next five years.

Significantly, Doepfner adds: “However, our business cases aren’t based on a breakthrough of paid content but will work anyhow.”

The chief exec plans to generate 50 per cent of Axel Springer’s sales from online operations within the next 10 years, according to the report.

Full interview at this link…

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Bild reaches out to blogosphere with Twingly

Laura Oliver — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:32:58 +0000

We’ve seen it picked up by newspapers elsewhere in Europe, but this week Germany’s Bild announced it will improve its connections with bloggers by introducing Twingly to its sport, entertainment, German premier league football and English-language site, Bild.com.

The Blogstream widget links back to bloggers who are linking to Bild content in an attempt to share some link love and let the paper see where its content is being picked up and talked about.

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Successful German blog Basicthinking.de sold on eBay

Alexander de Vivie — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:35:36 +0000

Basicthinking.de, one of the most-visited German blogs discussing IT and hardware topics, was sold on eBay last week for nearly €47,000, Medienlese has reported.

Robert Basic, IT expert, owner and only author of the popular forum, said in a post that he had put the blog on eBay, because it was ‘time for a change and to build up something new’. At time of writing, Basic’s last entry had received 444 comments.

Some critics accused Basic of linkbaiting, suggesting that he would not go through with the sale of the blog.

He will continue to write for multi-language blog buzzriders, but not basicthinking. The blog is now in the hands of serverloft, a German server company.

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Bloomberg: Google loses copyright cases in Germany

Laura Oliver — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:28:59 +0000

The search giant has lost two cases involving thumbnail images included in the previews of search results. The rulings can be appealed.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Behind the spin of Mecom’s half-year results

Kristine Lowe — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:43:07 +0000

Even former Mirror boss David Montgomery, who has a reputation as a ferocious cost-cutter, admits his new pan-European newspaper group Mecom cannot cost-cut its way out of a recession.

Shares in the company tumbled on the London Stock Exchange last week after the newspaper group failed to impress the market with its interim half-year results.

Perhaps jittery from all the recent talk of recession, investors did not appreciate the highly geared company’s reports of ‘worsening economic conditions’.

Despite Montgomery’s assurances that his business model is very different from that of UK newspapers – with subscription rates as high as 96 per cent in some of the countries Mecom operates in – alert observers noted that advertising still makes up 52 per cent of revenue.

No more title-specific news desks?
As widely reported, this does of course mean employees at the company, already disgruntled about redundancies on the table, will have to prepare for an even tighter ship in times ahead.

But there is more to this story: in a phone conference with employee representatives last week, Montgomery is reported to have admitted the company cannot cost-cut its way out of a recession; and emphasised that new ways of working and new streams of revenue were necessary for newspapers to have a profitable future.

He specifically highlighted two areas as key to the company’s future strategy: digital expansion, where its Norwegian division, Edda Media, is leading the pack with 9 per cent of its revenues from digital operations; and the media house strategy pioneered by Lisbeth Knudsen, the CEO of its Danish operation.

As Journalism.co.uk previously reported, Knudsen has reorganised her company’s titles into ‘verticals’ that deliver copy not only across platforms, but also titles – be they broadsheet, tabloid or regional newspapers. This, apparently, is to become the standard for all future media house strategy in Mecom.

Innovation exchange
“Mecom’s German division for instance – comprised of Berliner Zeitung, a national; Netzeitung, an online-only newspaper, and various magazine titles – should pay heed to these words. This model might be seen as a good fit for Germany,” an employee representative told me.

Mecom has also established an agreement that allows all Mecom countries to exchange software solutions developed in one country to another Mecom country without charge. The Reader’s Newspaper, a citizen journalism portal previously described by Journalism.co.uk, for instance, is to be exported from Norway to Denmark and Poland.

Another Norwegian export is a new range of hyper-local websites and freesheets Mecom is launching in Poland: Moje Miastro – a concept that has been operating for some time in Norway. The newspaper group, often portrayed as cash-starved and too much in debt, has also entered into an agreement to buy Edtytor Sp. z o.o., a regional newspaper business in Olsztyn. It has told employee representatives that the Polish expansion in new products was to blame for the dip in profits from its Polish arm.

Beware the ghost of recession
In other words, keeping an eye on innovations in the various parts of Mecom’s far-flung empire, can give useful pointers to what we can expect on group level.

Unfortunately for Mecom, a less fortunate trend spreading through the many European countries the company operates in is the ghost of recession.

In this age of globalisation, operating in more than one European country is no safe hedge against a market downturn, despite Montgomery indicating otherwise.

As Peter Kirwan recently wrote in his Press Gazette blog: “[W]hen it comes to the ad recession, we’re at the end of beginning, not the beginning of the end.”

In the summer months we have seen the footprints of recession appear in new territories such as Norway and Holland, causing the job and property classifieds markets to shrink – a sure sign that worse is yet to come.

For Mecom, the question is which is strongest, which will have the final say: the ability to come up with new innovative ways of doing business with less resources, or the clammy hand of a jittery market in the throes of recession?

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Baldy blogger’s campaign goes to government

Laura Oliver — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:08:56 +0000

Regional newspaper journalist and blogger Adrian Sudbury’s campaign to encourage more bone marrow donors will be heard by government ministers only 24 hours after its official launch.

Sudbury, digital journalist with the Huddersfield Examiner, has spoken openly about his battle with leukaemia on Baldy’s Blog, recently telling readers he only has weeks to live following a relapse of the disease.

In his latest post he explained that his dying wish was to ‘educate more people about what it is like to be a bone marrow donor’.

The Examiner has taken on Sudbury’s challenge by launching an official campaign, which will now see the journalist address health minister Alan Johnson and Ed Balls, secretary of state for children, schools and families, at Westminster, the paper reports.

At the meeting, he will explain the system in Germany, where school children are educated about bone marrow donation as part of their curriculum.

All the best Adrian – we will be thinking of you.

UPDATE – The Examiner has now posted a video of Adrian’s meeting with Gordon Brown.

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