Germany is considered to be a country of books, of deep thought, and of highbrow media. However, Germany has also become a country of DJs and daily soaps. In popular German culture music and TV series, blockbusters in the cinema and the tabloid press are just as important as in other countries – and as the highbrow culture of the poets, the theater and the opera.
Naturally enough there are also some characteristics that are peculiar to the media scene in Germany. These include the emphasis on federal sovereignty in cultural affairs and broadcasting and the dual existence of public and private media, something that cannot be taken for granted in other countries. As regards freedom of the press and speech, in international terms Germany comes off very well. There is pluralism with regard to opinion and information. The press is not in the hands of the government or political parties, but rather in that of societal players. For more than fifty years now the freedom of the press and speech has been the common property of everyone and protected by the Constitution. Article 5 of the Basic Law expresses how the Constitution interprets the freedom of the press: “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. (...) There shall be no censorship.” In general the structure of the German media can be explained by the specific conditions of recent German history. On the one hand the country has experienced extraordinarily troubled times over the past centuries. Many of the theories behind changes in society emerged in Germany or actually took place there. The Enlightenment, Communism, Modernism: All these upheavals, at intervals of less than 30 years – Democratization, the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and Second World War, the East-West conflict and the Cold War, the student revolts and reunification always had a media side to them, indeed would have been unimaginable without the mass media that had emerged in the 19th century. The idea of freedom of opinion and equal rights was disseminated through books and the daily press.
The press
In addition to books, for some 500 years now newspapers and magazines have been a medium that as regards content, form and dissemination may well have been constantly modernized, but whose basic structure has remained more or less the same, despite the continued emergence of new media. Now, as ever, the press stands for in-depth analysis and background reporting, addressing specific topics, and comment. The partial dissolving of fixed ideological convictions in German society along the traditional spectrum of left and right was accompanied in part by the disappearance of a clear cut political allegiance on the part of the press. The German newspaper market is characterized by a large number of publications and regional differences. Alongside 333 regional daily newspapers there are ten national dailies, alongside ten quality publications and nine so-called popular newspapers that concentrate on general interest matters. In this category the influential “Bild”-Zeitung, which is published by Axel Springer Verlag and has a circulation of 3.6 million, is the only national newspaper to play an outstanding role. Overall the total circulation figures for some 350 German daily newspapers come to 24 million.
However, the financial footing of the classic daily press is under pressure: The younger generation is reading fewer newspapers, advertising revenue is declining, and all manner of content is nowadays procured from the Internet, which among almost all age groups has now advanced to become a leading medium. Almost two thirds of all Germans are meanwhile “online” – or 48.7 million people over ten years. Nevertheless there is one sold newspaper for more than every third German, and the number of readers is even higher. In terms of politics and culture several publications are considered to be highly influential, for example national quality newspapers such as “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung“, “Süddeutsche Zeitung“ and the traditional weekly “Die Zeit“.
An increasing number of special interest publications have been appearing alongside the popular magazines. The entire range of popular magazines includes some 2,300 publications and boasts a total circulation of more than 120 million. “Stern“, “Focus“ and “Spiegel“, news magazines that play an active role in discussion in society or have themselves been the subject of important discourse, are among the most widely-read publications. Of these, “Spiegel“, a political journal with perhaps the greatest long-term influence of any weekly publication, is outstanding. The biggest publishers of popular magazines are Heinrich Bauer Verlag, Axel Springer Verlag, Burda and Gruner+Jahr, which is part of the Bertelsmann Group. Springer and Bertelsmann are also the two media corporations that by virtue of owning successful radio and TV stations, as well as Internet activities, generate sales in the billions, triggering a discussion about media concentration and the trans-media concentration of opinion.
Internet and user-generated content
As in most other countries, the German media world faces fundamental challenges by the Internet and mobile communications. First, technically speaking so-called convergence is now a reality, meaning one device or platform unifies telephony, Internet access, video, music and TV. Second, the lines between customized communication for the individual and mass communications thus get obscured. The customary professional press and radio products still tend to constitute the lion’s share of media content. Yet above all the younger generation is increasingly using community communication, such as blogs, as an alternative information source alongside the traditional media. As at the end of 2007, according to the German “Blogcharts”, the most frequently linked blogs in Germany include Basicthinking.de, bildblog.de (which focuses critically on the newspaper “Bild”) and spreeblick.com. Today, the majority of active blog-users states that these sources are more credible they believe than the usual journalism. The result: In many German media houses forms of products are arising that combine in a new unit the customary work of editors, with its strong craftsmanship and sense of trust, with so-called user-generated content. Thus, in the best case, German media’s professional standards are upheld and married to the “democratic” and spontaneous elements of media products created by the public itself. Under the heading of “Digital Germany”, not only the communications scene is changing, but political participation, culture and the country’s digitalization-driven economy are being linked ever more closely to current international trends.
Broadcasting
Radio and television also play their part in the overall reach of the German media. Having begun in the 1920s (radio) and the 1950s (television) as public network institutions, since the 1980s the colorful spectrum of a dual system made up of public network channels and private stations has emerged. Nowadays some 460 radio stations, for the most part local and regional in character, compete with each other. Some 75 public network radio stations vie with around 385 commercial stations. Overall, in its history radio has undergone a change of function. After the introduction of television it tended to develop more as a parallel medium, and in terms of listening hours achieves about the same figures as TV.
There are differences in the television structure on two levels, national and regional, and between general and special interest channels. Germany has some of the largest public (ARD and ZDF) and private (RTL, Sat1, ProSieben) broadcasting houses in Europe and the world. Depending on the technical platform (terrestrial, satellite, cable, broadband, mobile), and on whether reception is analogue or digital, more than 20 different public TV channels can be viewed, including the two national channels ARD and ZDF, as well as regionally produced offerings broadcast nationwide, such as WDR, MDR, BR and special interest channels like docu-channel Phoenix and kid’s TV KIKA. Then there are three international broadcasters: Deutsche Welle, Franco-German arte, and Austro-German-Swiss cultural channel 3sat. The digital strategy pursued by ARD and ZDF also endeavors to provide a TV media library available round-the-clock and new online and mobile products. Here, there is a constant threat of conflict with the private channels, who fear competition will be distorted by the strong influence in the market of the “subsidized” stations.
