THE GERMAN
MEDIA LANDSCAPE
The written press
As we know one of the biggest revolutions in communications was the invention of the press. When Johannes Gutenberg began building it in 1436, he was unlikely to have realized that he was giving birth to an art form which would take centre stage in the social and industrial revolutions which followed around the world.
In Germany, his home country, hundreds of years later, World War I began, and with it, the appearance of Carl Von Ossietzky became transcendental: he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for carrying out a campaign against the spread of Nazism and for exposing secret articles of the rearmament in Germany. Unfortunately when it was announced that he had received a Nobel Prize, Carl was a prisoner in a concentration camp. Hitler was outraged and forbid all German Citizens from accepting Nobel Prizes. Carl died in a concentration camp in 1938.
After almost 70 years, the German press has developed into a different medium. Now, we can appreciate the large number of titles and the freedom that they own in their articles, the strong local and regional market, the large number or magazines and the high dependency on advertising income.
Since the early 1990`s, the number and circulation of newspapers in Germany have shown signs of decline. Because of concentration processes and for financial reasons these papers work closely together with larger newspapers or other local and regional newspapers.
There are only a few national papers in Germany: BILD, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Welt, Frankfurter Rundschau, Tageszeitung. They claim to be independent and ‘above parties’, but most cover a liberal and conservative spectrum. The largest market for daily newspapers is controlled by the Axel Springer Group with around 23.7 per cent of the market.
The German magazine sector is extremely buoyant with some 780 general magazines and nearly 3,400 specialised periodicals currently on the market. “Der Spiegel” the weekly news magazine represents the most influential political publication in Germany with its “investigative” style of journalism
A recent development in Germany is the appearance of the free newspapers. All the countries around the world are experiencing this form of communication, nevertheless its excessive use as a “new medium” has saturated the market and it is not attractive for the target they want to reach anymore.
Another recent development more useful and less contaminant is the newspaper’s websites. In Germany, we can find a really interesting site called http://a1-all.com/press; there are many lists of German newspapers, magazines etc, all of which intend to provide 'an overview' and it’s cost-free.
The audiovisual media
One of the main characters if the German audiovisual media system is the federalism: the Lander have a strong role in public broadcaster; it’s possible affirm that the service broadcaster are a creation of the Lander, because the German Federal Constitution stipulates that the responsibility for broadcasting rests with the states of the Republic as part of their “cultural sovereignty”. The broadcaster is financed by license fees, around 30 DM per month paid by those who receive the service.
The first television channel (ARD, Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Rundfunkanstalten Deutschlands) is not a real channel that broadcast in all the state, but is a society formed by all the regional corporation; so, every region, usually a Land, has his television and radio public service, that organize regional programs.
The second television is the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) offers instead a national television service, but maintains offices in the different part of the country.
Also for the radio every Land provides to himself, with different stations that offers different programs.
There is also a third minor cable channel, 3Sat, that shows cultural programs or reruns from the main channels; another cable channel is ARTE, born in 1992 from a Germany-French project for the broadcast of cultural programs.
Both of the main public channels are active in digital television, and in the last times they are trying to growing up projects for the distribution via the Internet.
To arrange all these corporations there is an independent Broadcasting Council, that represent all the “socially relevant group” of society; so all the kind of citizens could be represented, even if is true that the political party representatives are those who really influence the Council.
In the middle of ‘80s the television system turned in a “dual system” with the born of 2 commercial networks: RTL e Sat1: soon many programs were available, and the situation grew up very fast. Today there are two big media groups that control the commercial television: on one side the one led by Leo Kirch (Sat1, Pro7, DSF), and on the other Bertelsmann and the Luxerbourg-based CLT, including RTL and RTL 2, Super RTL and Vox. In 1995 several program was added, including a news channel and two music channels in competition with MTV.
Also for the commercial television there is a supervision system similar to the public one: a national framework of regulations is laid down in agreement between all Lander.
The cable and the satellite are popular; 54% of households has the cable tv, and the contract for the satellite are growing very fast since 1999, when KirchGroup founded a society called Premiere World that control the satellite broadcast. The prices are quite good, for 55DM is possible to have a package with a decoder in rent, and that’s why over 2 millions of Germans subscribed for it.
The Deutsche Telekom, has really a strong position in the control of the cable and the satellite technology, so the European Commission’s ruling to separate telephone and cable television to avoid the formation of a monopoly in the German communications.