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Journalism Studies
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THE STRATEGIC REPERTOIRE OF
PUBLISHERS IN THE MEDIA CRISIS
Michael Brüggemann, Frank Esser & Edda Humprecht
Version of record first published: 22 Mar 2012.
To cite this article: Michael Brüggemann, Frank Esser & Edda Humprecht (2012): THE STRATEGIC
REPERTOIRE OF PUBLISHERS IN THE MEDIA CRISIS, Journalism Studies, 13:5-6, 742-752
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2012.664336
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THE STRATEGIC REPERTOIRE OF
PUBLISHERS IN THE MEDIA CRISIS
The ‘‘Five C’’ scheme in Germany
Michael Bru
¨ggemann, Frank Esser, and Edda Humprecht
Germany could be considered a deviant case in the comparative study of the current
transformations in media markets as publishers continue to be profitable despite painting a
gloomy picture of the possibility of there being a ‘‘media crisis.’’ What is specific about the German
case is the strong economic position and political lobbying of the publisher associations.
Combining different sources of primary and secondary data, this article investigates five strategies
of crisis management (‘‘the five Cs’’): media companies may react to the current changes by
cutting down costs and creating new products. They may further try to influence the general
framework conditions by complaining about their plight in public (discursive strategy), taking
competitors to court (legal strategy) and wooing politicians through lobbying and campaigning
(political strategy). The article concludes that the sustainable provision of journalistic value
benefits the most from creative, productive strategies.
KEYWORDS crisis management; ‘‘Five C’’ scheme; Germany; ‘‘media crisis’’; media markets
Introduction
Public and academic discourse on the transformation of the media landscape
follows transnationally similar patterns although the underlying empirical realities differ
substantially. The German case is particular because a number of important contextual
factors have kept the market position of newspaper publishers comparatively stable (see
Esser and Bru
¨ggemann, 2010). Another specific factor concerning German publishers is
their highly professionalized approach to advocacy and lobbying at national and European
levels. Relying on expert interviews, original case studies and secondary data analysis, this
article investigates the crisis-management strategies of individual publishing groups and
their industry associations.
Conceptual Framework
The strategies of German publishers can be analytically divided into five types that
may be referred to as the ‘‘5 Cs’’: cutting,creating,complaining,campaigning and going to
court (see Figure 1). The first two strategies concern the internal reactions of media
organizations, the other three their external relations with the public, politicians and
competitors. Faced with dwindling revenue streams from their traditional business, a
publisher’s reaction may be to ‘‘cut’’ costs, resources and editorial operations. A second
strategy (employed instead or in tandem) may be to ‘‘create’’ new offers, for instance by
launching new editorial products, modernizing existing ones or by expanding into new
Journalism Studies, Vol. 13, Nos 56, 2012, 742752
ISSN 1461-670X print/1469-9699 online
#2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2012.664336
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business areas. Furthermore, media companies may employ discursive strategies*usually
by ‘‘complaining’’ about the plight of the industry in the wake of the ongoing crisis. This
strategy is designed to frame public discourse about the crisis in self-interested terms, on
occasion to legitimize simultaneous cutting measures, at others to support political
lobbying strategies. Lobbying is part of the fourth strategy which is called ‘‘campaigning.’’
It is designed to influence the drafting of regulation or formulation of policy through
relationship management, policy advice and expert opinion. Finally, the legal strategy
(taking matters to ‘‘court’’) usually manifests itself in the form of publishers pressing
charges against new competitors to prevent them from entering their market.
These strategies impact on journalistic production within media organizations. We
conceive of media organizations as self-interested actors that have historically been trusted
with the provision of journalistic value. We thus distinguish between media organizations as
the exterior structure, and the journalistic value created by trained professionals within them.
We understand journalistic value as the product of a set of practices that are cherished by
society for providing reliable information about relevant public matters, for providing a
pluralistic forum receptive of diverse viewpoints, and for holding the powerful accountable
(Schudson, 2008). Journalistic value is a public good that has never been able to find
customers willing to pay for the true costs necessary for providing this good persistently and
at a reliable quality (Baker, 2002; Hamilton, 2004). Historically, the provision of journalistic
value had to be always cross-financed by selling advertisements or by public subsidies or both
(Picard, 2010). In the past, media organizations had developed business models that paid for
the infrastructure needed to produce this journalistic value at relatively high profit margins.
Analytically it is important to distinguish between this historically contingent
organizational framework (with specific ownership and funding structures) and the
institution of journalism that might survive in other forms too. Some form of stable
organization will, however, be indispensable for securing the permanent provision of
journalistic value. The activities of lay crowds and citizen reporters may produce
journalistic value in certain situations. But in the long run such amateur journalism
without a professional and organizational base is not in a position to meet society’s
legitimate expectations and will raise uncertainties about long-term news capacity,
editorial quality control and internal accountability structures.
Existing media organizations are affected by shifts in readership and advertising
revenues to different degrees. The perception of these shifts as ‘‘crisis-driven’’ depends a
good deal on the size of profit margins media managers have come to expect. Different
ownership structures and corporate cultures lead to different degrees of profit-orientation.
Crisis management strategies of media organizations
Intra-organizational reactions Extra-organizational reactions
Cutting Creating Complaining Campaigning
Going to Court
Reducing
costs and
services
Adding and
modernizing
products and
services
Instrumentalizing
public(ized) crisis
discourse
Interest-
representation
through
political
lobbying and
mobilization
Fighting
controversial
rival offerings
in court
Impact on the sustainable provision of journalistic value
FIGURE 1
Five crisis management strategies
‘‘FIVE C’’ SCHEME IN GERMANY 743
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Media organizations driven by the stock market are less likely to tolerate low profits and to
invest in long-term plans than media organizations with other forms of ownership (Picard
and van Weezel, 2008). Private ownership, it must be pointed out, comes in different
shapes depending on the corporate culture and business principles set by the respective
owners. Whether media organizations saved capital in good times to survive bad ones or
whether they react to falling advertising revenues by slashing journalistic resources is
determined by corporate culture. These differences at the organizational level are crucial
to understanding why newspapers respond differently to the current changes.
Research Questions and Data
Within our conceptual framework that distinguishes five types of strategy and
differentiates between journalistic value and organizational context, we will explore how
German publishers react to the current changes in the media sphere. We will address two
research questions: (1) How do publishers make use of the intra-organizational strategies
described in Figure 1 to remain profitable and relevant? (2) How do publishers make use of
the extra-organizational strategies to influence the public, politicians and competitors? In
the concluding section, we will evaluate these strategies with respect to the sustained
provision of journalistic value.
In addition to a secondary analysis of relevant documents, the primary data for this
article were gathered via eight semi-structured interviews with policy-makers from
government, industry, and trade associations so as to capture the policy debates, and
with corporate actors and media experts to gain insights in four news organizations
selected for case study analyses.
1
The Changing Business Model of the Press in Germany
In contrast to the United States (Downie and Schudson, 2009), newspapers in
Germany have not closed down as part of recent transformations. Nonetheless, the
Federation of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) never tires of pointing out that the
press faces an increasingly difficult situation. For a long time the print editions of
newspapers have been gradually losing readers (see Figure 2). Since the all-time high in
the year 2000, advertising revenues have been falling, albeit with ups and downs following
the economic cycle. In 2010 the German economy was picking up again but the
newspaper industry continued to lose advertising revenues until, for the first time,
television collected more advertising expenses than print (BDZV, 2011a).
However, it should also be noted that newspapers remain by far the most important
news source after television. In authoritative surveys (Allensbacher Markt- und Werbe-
tra¨geranalyse, AWA) half of all Germans report having read a newspaper the previous day
to be informed about current affairs. Only every fifth German used the Internet for this
purpose (Sommer, 2011). Furthermore, daily newspapers (together with public television)
enjoy far higher levels of trust than online media, commercial radio or commercial
television (van Eimeren and Ridder, 2011). Credibility is probably the most important asset
in the emerging multimedia environment. High levels of trust are combined with a
willingness among German media users to pay higher rates for newspaper subscriptions.
As Figure 3 shows, the overall revenues from sales are increasing while circulation is falling.
744 MICHAEL BRU
¨GGEMANN ET AL.
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Fewer newspapers are sold at a higher price. At the same time, the overall audience reach
including for online products is much higher than in the pre-Internet age. Despite all the
difficulties, German newspapers remain attractive to advertisers and still generate profits.
The national quality press is doing fairly well with relatively stable numbers of
subscribers. Weekly and Sunday newspapers are doing even better and are expanding
their circulation. At the same time the tabloid press is losing street sales and the regional
press is losing subscriptions. For some regional papers, it has been a rude awakening from
a long over-comfortable monopoly situation in which they had grown complacent. The
national news market has always been more competitive with a large number of daily and
weekly broadsheet papers and generously-financed public broadcasters all offering high-
quality journalism. Nevertheless, projections show that if the current trends in the
advertising market, reader market and newspapers’cost structure continue unchanged,
the German newspaper industry will accumulate a deficit of more than two billion euros
FIGURE 2
Newspaper circulation in Germany (number of copies). Source: IVW (2011, II quarter/year)
FIGURE 3
Sales and advertising revenues (euro in millions). Sources: BDZV (2011a) and Media
Perspektiven (2010)
‘‘FIVE C’’ SCHEME IN GERMANY 745
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by the year 2018 (Kolo, 2011). Doing nothing and enjoying the relative profits while they
last is therefore not a sustainable strategy for publishers.
There are only two basic options for staying profitable: cut costs or open up new
revenue streams. For many publishers, it seems fair to say that the default option has been
to lower costs. Already the first press ‘‘crisis’’ of 2001 served as an incentive to rationalize
production and distribution so that administrative and printing costs are considerably
lower today than 10 years ago (BDZV, 2011a). Unfortunately, for the sake of providing
journalistic value, many publishers also reduced the journalistic workforce. The number of
full-time journalists fell between 1993 and 2005 from 54,000 to 48,000 (Weischenberg
et al., 2006). More up-to-date figures are available for the subgroup of daily newspaper
journalists, showing a decrease from 15,000 in 2000 to 13,000 in 2010 (BDZV, 2011a). This
fall of 13 per cent is modest compared to the 30 per cent in the United States (Pew, 2011)
but is nevertheless worrying in the face of a growing public relations workforce. A measure
by German publishers that was abandoned after months of protests and strikes was the
attempt to cut the starting salary by about one-quarter, which would have made the
profession even less attractive.
Case Studies: Intra-organizational Responses to Market Transformations
The aggregate figures and general statements about ‘‘the publishers’’ in this article
should not blur the differences in the approaches of different publishing houses. We
examined four large German media companies*Axel Springer, Westdeutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung Group (WAZ), Spiegel Group and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)*that
represent different types of strategy in dealing with the current challenges. Figure 4
illustrates the variation in size of the four companies. It shows that some of them are
growing despite all the gloomy talk while others are indeed shrinking.
Axel Springer is Germany’s largest publishing house and owns more than 240
newspapers and journals in 36 countries. It spent the last six years investing in news
FIGURE 4
Revenue of selected German media companies (euro in millions). Sources: Elektronischer
Bundesanzeiger (2011) and Institut fu
¨r Medien- und Kommunikationspolitik (2011)
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¨GGEMANN ET AL.
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content online and offline as well as in online portals for classified ads and online
marketing (e.g., by acquiring Zanox). It now generates 30 per cent of its turnover with
digital businesses. Springer remained profitable even in the crisis year of 2009 and is back
to a profit margin of about 10 per cent in 2010 (Elektronischer Bundesanzeiger, 2011;
Institut fu
¨r Medien- und Kommunikationspolitik, 2011).
Whereas Springer’s proactive strategy has won it a reputation as a successful
Internet-savvy powerhouse, the image of the WAZ has become more tainted. It is one of
Europe’s largest regional newspaper chains with 27 dailies, 175 magazines and 99 free
sheets. When profits of the German-based papers fell, 260 journalists were laid off and
regional offices closed down to save 30 million euros*at the cost of diversity and in-
depth coverage. While the circulation continues to shrink, new weblogs are thriving in its
market eager to fill the gap left by the thinner local coverage of the WAZ papers. The
strategy seems much more reactive, primarily targeted at securing profits (the profit
margin in 2009 was still at 3 per cent in 2009; see Elektronischer Bundesanzeiger, 2011) at
the expense of providing journalistic value.
Germany’s leading weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, gained importance through
investigative reporting, and lately by becoming the nation’s online news leader. Spiegel is
owned 50 per cent by its employees, 25 per cent by the founder’s family foundation and
25 per cent by the publisher Gruner & Jahr. When most newspapers in the 1990s remained
hesitant about investing in a strong Web presence for fear of self-cannibalization, Spiegel
set up a fully-fledged, independently organized online newsroom in 1995 and quickly
became market leader by winning new audiences beyond the readership of the printed
magazine. The success of Spiegel Online was a combination of early market entry, sharp
and fast reporting, and a clear business model based on advertising and weak competition
(Meyer-Lucht, 2005).
The FAZ, Germany’s leading elite daily paper, has been much slower to invest online.
The paper is well respected for its serious political, international, economic and cultural
coverage but only just breaks even. It is owned by the FAZIT foundation which is also
active in other business areas (like higher education programmes) and secures the paper’s
independence from immediate profit expectations. Thanks to the financially healthy FAZIT
foundation, the introduction of a very profitable Sunday paper and an extremely strong
brand reputation, the paper is getting through cyclical downturns by focusing on its core
business (printed papers) and limiting itself to an elegant but restrained website.
With respect to intra-organizational strategies (see RQ1), we find in all four
publishing houses a mix of cutting and creating. The WAZ has focused most clearly on
cost cutting. Spiegel and FAZ have been creative, with Spiegel more so online and FAZ
offline. Springer has expanded strongly into non-journalistic fields from where profits can
partly be used to cross-finance news operations.
Extra-organizational Strategies to Represent the Publishers’Interests
The above case studies illustrate different intra-organizational strategies, and we
now turn to the extra-organizational strategies targeted at influencing public opinion,
politics and the competition.
The discursive strategies serve the publishers in ‘‘going public’’ with their motives
and concerns. They wish to emphasize to politicians that the press is a democratic
‘‘FIVE C’’ SCHEME IN GERMANY 747
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institution worth preserving and to advertisers that the press is still an ideal medium for
publicity and promotional purposes. The news coverage of the media crisis in their papers
calls attention to the troubles of the newspaper industry and accentuates, and at times
dramatizes, the need for policy changes. In other instances this crisis reporting may help
explain increases in cover prices or subscription rates, or help legitimize cuts in editorial
staff or content. Publisher associations are in a privileged position for framing the public
discourse about the media crisis as its members have ample editorial space at their
disposal. We therefore refer to the strategic framing of the crisis discourse as calculated
‘‘complaining’’*knowing full well that only a portion of the published crisis discourse falls
clearly into this category.
One of the duties of the BDZV and the Association of German Magazine Publishers
(VDZ) is to arrange opportunities for their members to discuss their situation in public and
socialize with influential policy-makers, such as German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Interest representation in the field of media policy also includes legal action (going to
court). Currently, eight leading publishing houses are suing the first public broadcasting
channel ARD for providing too much press-style text on its ‘‘Tagesschau App’’, a smart
phone application named after ARD’s flagship television news bulletin. The publishers argue
that it is effectively a digital newspaper with only loose relation to the broadcasts whereas
ARD claims that the app does not offer any genuine content besides what is already
published elsewhere on its websites. During the first hearing the judge suggested that both
parties should seek an agreement out of court rather than pulling the proceedings through
the courts. In another recent dispute several newspapers took the small Web portal
Perlentaucher to court for offering summaries of book reviews published by newspapers.
These court cases show that publishers are fighting two types of perceived
competitors online. First, public broadcasting has become a direct competitor as a
growing number of regional and national public TV and radio stations offer news free-of-
charge on a myriad of websites. Second, Internet enterprises like Google, Apple and a
number of much smaller players have become competitors because they entice
advertising (Google) and sales revenue (iTunes/Apple) from traditional outlets.
In the case of Apple, the publishers entertain a ‘‘lovehate relationship’’ (as Mathias
Do¨pfner, CEO of Axel Springer Group, put it; Boldt, 2011). On the one hand, they are
excited about the opportunity to sell digital newspaper subscriptions to iPad and iPhone
users but, on the other, they are angry with Apple for cutting out a commission of 30 per
cent and having control over the customer data and the content distributed.
The bigger battle, though, is with Google. German publishers are demanding that it
shares the revenues derived from using editorial content produced by the traditional
media companies (‘‘fair share’’). They are also asking for ‘‘fair search’’ as Google
presumably favours its own websites in search results at the expense of sites from other
sources. The publishers have complained about this to the European Commission and to
the German Antitrust Office (BDZV, 2011b).
German publishers’move to reinforce their rights goes beyond the national level. An
example of the transnationalisation of their political lobbying tactics is the ‘‘Hamburg
declaration’’, which strongly advocates ‘‘urgent improvements in the protection of
intellectual property on the Internet’’ (Axel Springer, 2009). Initiated by the Germans, it
meanwhile carries 166 signatures from publishers from all across Europe.
The background to this move is the publishers’demand to introduce a neighbour-
ing right as an extension of existing copyright that would require Web aggregators like
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¨GGEMANN ET AL.
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Google News to compensate content providers for any commercial use of published
material online. This could be done against payment of a licence fee to a special collecting
agency. Private, non-commercial use of news articles would remain unrestricted. The idea
has been criticised by free-Internet advocates and many questions about how it could
work in practice are still unresolved but the German government has promised that it will
include a neighbouring right into the current overhaul of the German copyright law.
The second strand of lobbying is aimed at containing the expansion of public
broadcasting activities online. In conjunction with the German Association of Private
Broadcasters (VPRT), the print publishers filed a complaint with the European Commission
which asked the German policy-makers to clarify the role of broadcasting online.
This resulted in the introduction of a three-step public value test for digital media
incorporated into the 2008 revision of the German Interstate Broadcasting Treaty
(Rundfunkstaatsvertrag). Policy-makers drew up a list of activities no longer to be pursued
online by public service broadcasters (for instance, carrying event guides). Most
importantly, the treaty requires all online content to be related to actually-broadcasted
programmes and not to be ‘‘press-like’’ in nature. All websites were evaluated with respect
to the public value generated and to the potentially negative effects on competitors
taking into account external expertise. The result was a time- and cost-consuming process
that was completed in 2010*and left every party unsatisfied: the BDZV complained about
a biased ‘‘test’’ procedure that waved through absolutely every offering, and the public
broadcasters were disappointed about eliminating 80 per cent of their content online,
mostly archived material and thematic dossiers, once they had passed a new one-week
default time after the related programme had been aired (BDZV, 2011a; Staatskanzlei
Rheinland-Pfalz, 2011). The external opinions commissioned in the process had
predominately argued that the online services of the public broadcasters did not have
the effect of disturbing the respective market (Woldt, 2011, p. 74).
Public broadcaster ARD prefers a more co-operative approach in the current climate.
In 2008 it offered ‘‘partnerships for journalistic value’’ (Qualita¨tspartnerschaften) which
would allow publishers to use public broadcasting materials on their websites. In 2011
ARD set up, together with commercial broadcasters, a so-called ‘‘Content Alliance’’,
which*much like the Hamburg Declaration initiated by the publishers*urged policy-
makers to improve legal protection for those producing cultural content in the digital
market. It appears that the decisive battle line now runs between content-producers, on
the one hand, and mere distributors and platform providers, on the other. The newspaper
publishers have so far refused to join this Content Alliance and decided to maintain their
combative line against the public broadcasters.
The Way Ahead: The Sustainable Preservation of Journalistic Value
So far, the overall majority of publishing houses still enjoy a comparatively
comfortable situation but have nonetheless established well-organized lobby initiatives
that have found a political environment receptive to many of their demands.
Our analysis of the publishers’reactions to the changing media landscape identified
different approaches to defend their market position. While Spiegel Group has invested in
journalistic quality and won new audiences and revenues online, the WAZ as a regional
newspaper chain has focused on centralizing production and reducing costs. Springer
‘‘FIVE C’’ SCHEME IN GERMANY 749
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expands into all possible directions in the digital market so that revenues from other
sources compensate losses in the news field. And the FAZ focuses on its core business of
providing high-quality journalism that is mainly distributed and sold offline. We thus
encounter publishers who focus reactively on cost-cutting (WAZ), whereas others invest
proactively in innovations online (Springer, Spiegel) or offline (FAZ). This shows that there
are different ways to survive in the new media environment, but some are more short-
sighted like that of the WAZ which reduces regional diversity despite localism being the
main asset of the brand. Spiegel displays the only strategy that is focused on creating new
journalistic value online with the website offering fast, sharp and rich news reporting while
the printed weekly magazine continues to focus on investigation and critical analysis. Both
Spiegel and Springer have demonstrated how a bold, diversified approach with early
investments in the online world can pay off eventually. The FAZ has meanwhile
demonstrated how its successfully launched Sunday paper has filled a widely overlooked
gap in the traditional market and that real money is still be earned outside the Internet.
Our analysis also provides evidence for our theoretical assumption that the type of
corporate culture and media ownership strongly influences media crisis perceptions and
reactions. Two of the companies that focus their investments on creating journalistic value
(Spiegel and FAZ) have alternative forms of media ownership (employee ownership and a
foundation). The strategy of Springer to cross-finance journalism through profits in other
areas is typical for a company that has a legacy of not only being interested in maximizing
profits but also of pursuing a journalistic ‘‘mission’’. Investors who are exclusively
interested in maximizing profits will likely withdraw from journalistic media organizations
in times of shrinking revenues (Picard, 2008). Ironically, for journalism this may actually be
good news if (if) there are enough new owners interested in financing journalistic value.
Should this not be the case media policy may need to step in though thus far there is no
indication that the German media market needs immediate policy interventions.
The main goals of the lobbying strategies of the publishers are to enforce stricter
limits to the online activities of public broadcasters and to extend the copyright law vis-a
`-
vis the news aggregation services of Internet firms. Of the three extra-organizational
strategies employed by publishers, the discursive approach is used to frame public
discourse on the media ‘‘crisis’’ in ways that are more reflective of their particular interests
than of the still relatively comfortable facts. Legal measures are used to squeeze out new
competitors, and political lobbying to influence potential changes to the regulatory
framework conditions at the national and international level.
It is interesting to note that German publishers’extra-organizational strategies
of crisis management seem to be more orchestrated and unified than their intra-
organizational strategies. The latter is illustrated not only by our case studies but also by
the fact that a common approach toward introducing a universal micro-payment system for
paying online or purchasing newspapers at a shared digital news stand are still lacking.
To evaluate these strategies we return to the distinction of media organizations and
journalistic value. All intra- and extra-organizational strategies discussed so far are
legitimate attempts to prevail in the market and make one’s interests heard but must
not necessarily contribute to providing journalistic value. Cutting journalists’jobs or
reducing journalists’entry salaries seems rather detrimental to it. Other strategies like the
lobbying-induced change of the interstate broadcast treaty have had questionable side-
effects. Erasing millions of public affairs documents doubtlessly curtails the ideal of a rich
environment for political information. It is hard to see how blocking free access to the
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¨GGEMANN ET AL.
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news archives of public broadcasters should help the newspaper publishers economically.
The US example shows that in media systems without strong public broadcasting the
press may still not be better off. In our view, a more co-operative way of meeting the
challenges of the new digital media age would be desirable but this would require a
change in the publishers’legal strategies. Perhaps, if the publishers were able to agree on
more unified strategies in matters such as the introduction of micro-payment models or a
digital news stand they could afford to pursue their political and legal strategies less
doggedly.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank all those we interviewed for of fering their time and expertise. We
are also grateful for the valuable input from our colleagues in Zurich: Otfried Jarren,
Manuel Puppis, Matthias Ku
¨nzler, Pascal Zwicky and Florian Saurwein.
NOTE
1. Experts interviewed were Jan Marc Eumann (State Secretary in the Ministry of Federal
Affairs, European Affairs and Media), Kajo Do¨hring (General Secretary of the German
Association of Journalists, DJV), Anja Pasquay (Spokesperson of the Federation of
German Newspaper Publishers, BDZV), Sabine Nehls (Media Policy Advisor of the German
Trade Union Confederation, DGB), Katharina Borchert (CEO of Spiegel Online), Christoph
Keese (Managing Director Public Affairs of Axel Springer), Stefan Laurin (journalist and
blogger at the news website Ruhrbarone), Andreas Tazl (Head of Communications at
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, FAZ).
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Frank Esser, IPMZ*Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research, University of
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