are newspapers still relevant

8/7/2019 Are Newspapers Still Relevant

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Heribert Prantl

Are newspapers still relevant?Journalism at the dawn of a new age

"Good journalism is good whether in print or online" writes the political editor of theSddeutsche Zeitung . It is not the Internet that is responsible for the "crisis of thepress", but subordination of journalism to the market. The increasing pressure tomake a profit means that, for the first time since 1945, German journalism risksbecoming trivialized.

Yes, newspapers are relevant and I can prove it. They are more relevantthan Hypo Real Estate, more relevant than Deutsche Bank or Dresdner Bank.They are far more relevant than Opel or Arcandor. The Sddeutsche Zeitung isrelevant, the Frankfurter Allgemeine is relevant; Der Spiegel , Die Zeit , DieWelt , the Frankfurter Rundschau and the tageszeitung are all relevant. So aremany others. The system in which they are relevant is not called the marketeconomy, not the financial system or capitalism, but democracy. Democracy isabout a community shaping its future together. And the media, in all its forms print, broadcast and digital is one of its most important creative forces.The proof of the relevance of the press is 177 years old, begins in 1832 andcontinues right up to the present day. It arises out of the entire history of German democracy.

This history of German democracy begins in 1832 at the castle of Hambach, atthe first ever mass demonstration in Germany. Its chief organizer was ourjournalistic forebear Philipp Jakob Siebenpfeiffer, born in 1789, the year of revolution. When the government sealed up its printing presses, he took it tocourt on the grounds that the sealing of printing presses was as unconstitutionalas the sealing of baking ovens. This is a marvellous phrase, because it containswithin it the recognition that the freedom of the press is democracy's dailybread. Press freedom is the daily bread of democracy: that is the message of Hambach Castle in 1832.

Hambach was then, in the very first days of German democracy, the very earthin which the trees of liberty were planted. Today these trees of liberty aredeeply rooted, they are fully grown and they are tended by the FederalConstitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Karlsruhe is something like the Hambach of our age; and Karlsruhe has confirmed the constitutional relevance of the pressin major judgements, for instance in the Spiegel judgement of 1965, 1 or theCicero judgement of 2007. 2 "A free press that is not influenced by the publicuse of force and is not subject to censorship is a fundamental component of afree state." Furthermore, "the press is a body whose permanent function it is tomediate between the people and its elected representatives in parliament andgovernment and to monitor them". That may not be as vividly expressed as atHambach Castle, but it means the same thing: freedom of the press is

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democracy's daily bread.

Public radio andtelevision, which are"the press" in the legalsense, also of courseprovide this "daily

bread" and are wellrewarded for doing so.The acknowledgementof the constitutionalrelevance of publicradio and television isin the broadcastinglicence fees.Compared to what

ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk and co. put together have received in licencefees, the stimulus package for the economy for the year 20089 is a merepittance, and the sums provided by the state for the Hypo Real Estate bank arepractically a personal loan. But in return for this money, public broadcastersprovide not only our daily bread, but all kinds of cakes and pastries too.

Statefinanced newspapers?

You probably think that my comments on the relevance of the print mediahave been leading up to a plea for its financing or support by the state. Farfrom it, in fact. I don't want to see any demonstration of goodwill for the pressor any state security, relief package or emergency money. The last thingnewspapers need is a situation similar to ZDF when political parties think that they can not only choose the chief editor of the public news channel, butalso the editor of the tageszeitung .3 Above all, the reason why I don't want anystate loan, rescue package or emergency money for newspapers is that I justdon't see the desperate state of newspapers such as it is being universallybemoaned. Rather I see a remarkable kind of journalistic decadence;melancholy mixed with an easycome, easygo attitude, worldweariness andsupposed helplessness in the face of dwindling sponsorship and the Internet, inthe face of the current state of affairs and their apparently inexorable trend.This alleged state of existential crisis, the very moribundity of newspapers oreven of professional journalism in general all this is a manifestation of thekind of hysteria that thrives in journalism more than it does elsewhere. Thiscockadoodledoo journalism, this excitable squawking which has shapedour political journalism for some time, is now squawking its own end intobeing. We are writing our very own fin de sicle . We are running down ourown product, denigrating it until everyone believes it even intelligent

people like Jrgen Habermas and Dieter Grimm.

The philosopher Jrgen Habermas and the former federal constitutional judgeresponsible for press freedom, Dieter Grimm, have argued for newspapers tobe funded by the state. They believed and believe in the existential crisis of newspapers and their response is an almost desperate declaration of love.We journalists for the most part dismissed this rather arrogantly, often becauseit is easier to dismiss such an argument than to complain about the lack of imagination on the part of one's own publishers and management, and todenounce the unrealistic profit expectations of one's owners. Excessive profitdemands on the part of newspaper owners are an expression not of financialneed, but of shortsightedness and stupidity.



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missing. In blogs you found the critical analysis and commentary opposingBush and the war in Iraq that you could not find in the newspapers. Goodjournalists should not start wailing and gnashing their teeth at the thought of the blogosphere. They should be grateful to bloggers for filling in, whereneeded, the commentary that they fail to provide and exposing their ownmistakes.

There is much to be learned from the newspaper depression in America.Especially, what needs to be done to avoid such a depression. Some things areworth stating explicitly here: maybe, above all, that mawkishness needs to bereplaced by passion. Impassioned journalism would not accept themanipulation of the press by the Deutsche Bahn so readily as has recentlyhappened. 4 Instead, there would be an outcry. Perhaps the truth is that we areembarrassed, firstly to have allowed ourselves to have been manipulated likethis, and secondly because these things were exposed not by the press, but bythe private organization "Lobby Control".

Blogs = more democracy

As far as blogs and the Internet are concerned, I do not understand why, asprint journalists, we should be afraid of the Huffington Post . It does the samething as a quality German newspaper does: "proper" journalism. We shouldstop constructing artificial antitheses between newspapers and classicaljournalism on the one hand, and blogs with their supposedly "unclassical"journalism on the other. We should stop regarding blogs with financial envy.There is much less money made in blogging, and with blogs, than withnewspapers. We should stop the vapid talk of how classical journalism isdisappearing into a "Bermuda Triangle". Good classical journalism is nodifferent from good online journalism. The baselines run right across all theseframeworks and clusters: there is good journalism and bad in all media. It's assimple as that.

Good journalism has good, no, great times ahead. Journalists have never had abigger audience than in the aftermath of the digital revolution. Journalism wasnever accessible across the world before as it is now. And there was probablynever so much demand for journalism that enlightens and classifies, which onecan rely upon and look to for orientation. But the fact remains that thebroadening of knowable knowledge via the web (the philosopher Martin Bauercalls it the "horizontal" broadening of knowledge) is achieved at the cost of thedeepening of that knowledge (thus, in Bauer's terminology, its verticalization).In brief: the quantity of data increases, but without being processed. Thispresents journalists with a new task: the only remedy against data trash isthoughtful reflection and background knowledge. Print journalism thereforeneeds to react to the media revolution by inventing new "formats", with

journalists taking on the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff. The newformats are where the web's mass of data is sorted and evaluated.

The amateur journalism thriving in the blogosphere is no reason forprofessional grumbling. This amateur journalism affords opportunities forfruitful collaboration. It represents a democratic profit. These bloggers remindme of the revolutionary citizens of 18489, and the communications revolutionof today reminds me of the one of 150 years ago.

For the revolution of 18489 was also a communications revolution. Thenumber of daily newspapers in German practically doubled, from 940 in 1847to 1700 two years later. In Paris the total circulation of all papers soared from



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50 000 before the revolution to 400 000 in May 1848, when 171 newspaperscould be counted in the French capital. One of the chief activities of theincredible number of political organizations that were founded at the time wasto read aloud from newspapers and discuss the material together. Theexplosive spread of the press, together with the new means of transportationoffered by the railways, gave rise to a new and greater sphere of experience. InGermany, the intellectual idea of a shared German fatherland thus became a

tangible reality. In short: 1848, the year of revolutions, stands for a politicallearning process that included hundreds of thousands of people and gave themthe opportunity to participate in the political process. 150 years later, thedigital revolution offers the same possibility once again, on an unheardof scale.

Put a different way: blogs are "more democracy", even with all theimponderables they entail. Inherent in blogs is the opportunity for a new civilrevolution. Should professional journalism really turn up its nose at this, just asthe established princely rulers and monarchical potentates did 150 years ago?

Talk less, act more

Maybe in Germany we should stop talking about freedom of the press so muchand actually practise it instead. Too much incense, it is said, spoils the saint.And what is true of saints could also be applied to fundamental rights: amidtheir ritual exaltation they become scarcely recognizable and lose their identity.Be that as it may, the law views freedom of the press as a basic right worthmaking a fuss about. It is almost like one of those pieces of glittering tinsel thatwe put up on special days such as the anniversary of the federal constitution just as a German family does with the Christmas decorations on 24 December.After the festive season, we put all the stuff away.

In the daytoday legislative routine, the freedom of the press plays no role atall: take the BKA law, 5 the mass storing of private data, the laws ontelecommunications surveillance. Journalists' telephones are bugged, phonenumbers are stored, journalists' computers can be searched as if there wereno such thing as the protection of confidentiality and no such thing as presssecrecy. What is the use of the right of a witness to refuse evidence, asguaranteed in the code of criminal procedure, or journalists' right to theconfidentiality of sources, if the state can find all that out by searching throughcomputers or recording phone conversations without court authorization?

As has sadly been the case for some time, press freedom is compelled to standaside when the state comes along with its blue light flashing, in other words byclaiming that security interests are at stake. Lawmakers have becomeaccustomed to having little regard for press freedom. I wonder myself whether

journalism has not itself got used to having a low opinion of itself. Does thepress pose a greater danger to press freedom than the legislature? I believe so.The truly great danger for journalism in this country comes from within, fromthe media themselves from a journalism that despises journalism, fromowners and publishers who bring journalism to its knees through economizingmeasures, real or pretended, and from media entrepreneurs who lay journalismupon the altar of the commercial and advertising market.

Perhaps it is my origins in Regensburg that at this point bring to my mindsomething that the late Prince of Thurn und Taxis once said. Speaking of theprincely fortune, he described it as something so vast that it could never bedrunk, eaten or whored away all one could do was stultify it. Sometimes I



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get the feeling that this is also true for the intellectual and economic assets of the big German newspapers.

The journalism of the future

What will journalism look like in the future? Anyone who wants to talk aboutthe future has to know about the past. I began by mentioning our ancestor

Philipp Jakob Siebenpfeiffer, because he stands at the beginning of a line of great journalists. The Siebenpfeiffers of the Weimar Republic were called KurtTucholsky and Carl von Ossietzsky, in the Federal Republic they were calledHenri Nannen and Rudolf Augstein, and even Axel Springer. Even with alltheir differences and contrasts, they were aware that journalism has a task thatgoes beyond making money.

I often speak of these great names of journalism, because they stand not onlyfor journalism's past, but also its future. It is important that our youngcolleagues in schools of journalism not only learn how "crossover journalism"works, that they not only learn how to write, and produce, quickly andeffectively, but also that they learn to appreciate that there are journalisticexemplars to emulate, great ones at that why they are great, and how theybecame so. Why? Not only because they were wonderful journalistic craftsmenand intelligent and astute publishers, but because they had a certain attitude.

Attitude: the word has gone out of fashion. It means standing up for what youbelieve in, not bending in the face of shortlived trends, of unrealistic profitexpectations, or balance sheets. I am convinced that if the journalistic side of anewspaper or a media enterprise is healthy, then in the long term the economicside will be healthy too. Today, an appropriate journalistic attitude includesconsidering, in cooperation with others, how "creative" savings can be made.In other words, we have to be clear about what the press needs in order todefend its freedom from the cuts being made in the news and media markets.

Perhaps we should talk less about press freedom and practise it more. Thatgoes for publishers and editors. I mention both explicitly. Both publishers andeditors must show in their work and not in cheap petitions made tolegislators what freedom of the press is and what it means to them. What isworse than raids on Cicero offices, worse than the stockpiling of data andpolice searches of online material, are mental straitjackets selfimposed byjournalists, and the selfemasculating measures being carried out by publishersin editorial offices. Press freedom is not the freedom to squeeze editorialoffices dry. Nor is it the freedom to replace oneself by parttime offices, as if it were a case of keeping a call centre operational for a while. Press freedom isnot the freedom of corporate raiders, but rather the freedom of responsiblejournalists and publishers. These assetstrippers devour everything, even

freedom of the press. Sometimes they even disguise themselves as benevolentphilanthropists. The work of journalists cannot simply be farmed out to PRoffices, lobbyfinanced advertising agencies and freelance writing services.Yet that is exactly what is happening. We are facing the acute danger, for thefirst time since 1945, of German journalism becoming trivialized and reducedto the lowest common denominator because of the increasing pressure to makea profit; and because informed, capable journalists not in the pocket of privateinterests are increasingly being replaced by multimedia production assistants,razorsharp jacksofalltrade and masters of none. The profession knowntoday as journalist will then become a multifunctional filler of newspapersand websites. Such filling skill is not exactly the democratic cultural institutionwhich the fundamental right of the freedom of the press was established to



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protect.

Freedom is something guaranteed the press that is to say, journalists,publishers, media enterprises. Press freedom could cease to apply if thisprivilege is misunderstood as freedom without responsibility and if mediaenterprises see themselves merely as profitmaking concerns like any other.Managers are mistaken if they believe that the manufacture of print

publications is no different from the manufacture of clingfilm. There is nofundamental right set down in law for manufacturers of clingfilm. There is areason, however, for the press's fundamental right to freedom: it is theprecondition for a functioning democracy. If this basic principle is notrespected any more, this fundamental right loses its raison d'tre . And in thatevent, newspapers really will be robbed of a future. More and more people arealready busy writing the newspaper's obituary: "Born 1603 in Strasbourg,Alsace, died 2020. We shall honour the newspaper with a fitting memorial."These funeral orators are not talking about the merging of editorial offices, norabout editors who have lost their jobs, nor of outsourcing rather it is theInternet they are thinking of. Ever since the American journalist Philip Meyerpublished a book in 2004 called The Vanishing Newspaper , panel discussionsabout the Internet at media conferences have sounded like preparations for thefuneral of the newspaper.

For a start, such thoughts are a little premature, given that Professor Meyeronly forecast the year 2043 for the death of the daily newspaper. Secondly,Meyer's prophecies could end up like those of his colleague Francis Fukuyama,who proclaimed the "End of History" in 1992, after the collapse of the EasternBloc and the communist states. History then refused to obey.

But this desire to accelerate the death of the newspaper, the mortalitydiagnosed by Meyer, does indeed exist. Recently in Germany it was DavidMontgomery who sought to drive journalism out of the Berliner Zeitung andmake the paper into a kind of user interface featuring less and less of anythingthat costs money (i.e. good articles) and more and more of what brings moneyin (i.e. advertising and product placement). As I have discussed, this is apattern we are already familiar with from the USA, where journalists are maderedundant, correspondent numbers are reduced, editorial offices broken up andarticles written inhouse replaced by agencywritten pieces or bought in onthe cheap. The editorinchief becomes a head of management; intellect isreplaced by inanity; and savings are made until readers leave. It is like atwisted version of the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale; gold, out of greed and folly, isspun into straw. In the case of the Berliner Zeitung , we may hope that thepaper has now taken a turn for the better. But I worry that though Montgomerymay now be gone, his example has become the accepted thing. 6

Only reflection and background education can help us to combat"data trash"

This is not what a successful future for the newspaper would look like. Thedaily paper must change itself, and it will far more than competition fromradio and television have changed it. The contents of newspapers will bedifferent from what we have grown accustomed to, but it will remainnewspaper journalism, very much so. The texts will have to be news in theoriginal sense texts around which we can orient ourselves. There will alsohave to be texts and formats which sort, order and evaluate the mass of information in the Internet. This will come at a cost. But I believe that manynewspaper readers will be willing to make a contribution, and that there will be



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users who will be drawn to newspapers for this very reason.

As I have stated, only reflection and background knowledge can help us tocombat "data trash". This is what newspapers must provide. But this cannot beachieved with the kind of journalism that is gradually dumbing itself down.Journalism done on the cheap is destined for the trash, not to be read. If anewspaper bases itself around advertisements, it becomes no longer a

newspaper at all, but a freesheet, which does not even have enough adverts tofinance itself any more.

If journalism is not to become a cheapened caricature of itself, what cannot beallowed to continue much longer is newspapers giving away their mostimportant articles on the Internet for free. That is, quite literally, a form of selfbetrayal. A very rapid change of course will have to take place, towards avery simple, straightforward and workable system of micropaymentperarticle. Then you would get the appetizer for free, whilethe main course would cost a few pence. Click and buy: it doesn't kill anyone,but it does make newspapers stronger.

Having said that, I would have no objection to endowment foundations, whichare currently experiencing a welcome upturn, offering newspapers a helpinghand: they could certainly do with a little patronage. Sponsorship of anewspaper endowment is truly sponsorship of public welfare. The FAZ endowment model (for decades, the financial and editorial independence of theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has been supported by the FAZIT Foundation)ought to be able to entice people to emulate it. There is after all no shortage of intelligent and responsible multimillionaires in Germany.

The Internet, the Internet! Many newspaper people talk about it as though itwere a new invasion of the Huns. The Huns came from nowhere 1500 yearsago and reduced everything to rubble (and then vanished again 100 yearslater). The Internet is not reducing anything to rubble. And this is precisely thelesson of every revolution in communication throughout history: no newmedium has ever driven out the old ones. They learn to coexist. The Internetdoes not replace good editors, nor does it make good journalists irrelevant. Onthe contrary: it makes them even more important than before.

Furthermore, it will continue to be the case, more so than ever, that it is authorswho lend authority, and that no pain, no gain in quality. This motto may bedisplayed in the Hamburg School of Journalism, but it does not apply only tostudents of journalism. It does not mean that readers and users should betormented with stupid, superficial journalism. No pain, no gain in quality: thisphrase demands of journalists in all media, even the Internet, that they give themaximum effort to achieve their best work. Then journalism will have a

splendid future in store.

Let us return to this image of journalism at the dawn of a new age the greysky that represents the beginning of the transition from night to day. If we canlocate journalism at this moment of transition, then we can be very happy.When the night is over, we have the chance to do something exciting w ith theday.

Based on a speech made at the annual meeting of netzwerk recherche e.V. in2009

http://www.netzwerkrecherche.de/http://www.netzwerkrecherche.de/


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1 In 1965, the Federal German Constitutional Court overrode the charges of treason broughtagainst Der Spiegel in 1 962 during the socalled "SpiegelAffre" ed.

2 In 2007, the Constitutional Court ruled that the police searches of the offices of themagazine Cicero , on gr ounds that the magazine had colluded in revealing official secrets,were a violation of press freedom.

3 A reference to an ongoing quarrel over excessive political influence in the appointment of the managing director o f ZDF; the tageszeitung is an independent, leftwing daily ed.

4 In 2009 it emerged that the German national railway company, which at the time was facing

drivers strikes over its privatization plans, had used a PR company to influence presscoverage ed.

5 Law regulating permit of the Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Police Office), in 2008extended to allow a series of antiterror measures ed.

6 In 2005, David Montgomery's media investment company Mecom controversially boughtBerliner Verlag, to which the Berliner Zeitung belongs, and sold it in 2008 after financialfailure ed.

Published 20091211Original in GermanTranslation by Saul LipetzContribution by Bltter fr deutsche und internationale PolitikFirst published in Bltter fr deutsche und internationale Politik 8/2009

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