In Germany tabloids have always been associated with Britain — and headlines comparing football matches to WW II. However, now tabloids are the new fashion for the big German publishers.
In May, the conservative broadsheet Die Welt got a smaller sister called Welt Kompakt; publisher H2oltzbrinck (Handelsblatt, Die Zeit, Tagesspiegel) has started the tabloid-sized News in Frankfurt; and the Kölner Stadtanzeiger in Cologne is sold in a smaller version named Kölner Stadtanzeiger Direkt.
However, these tabloids have not got anything to do with the Sun‘s kind of journalism. Nor are they a copy of the broadsheets in a smaller size. ”We want to reach new readers with Welt Kompakt,” says Jan-Eric Peters, the editor of Welt, Welt Kompakt and Bild, who developed the tabloid for the powerful Axel Springer Verlag. ”More than half of the readers of Welt Kompakt have not read a newspaper before, and more than half are aged between 18 and 35. It is an additional product to Welt”.
The paper is half the size of Die Welt. It uses the content of its bigger sister, but focuses more on news than on comment and selects stories according to the interests of a younger readership.
Also, it can still be updated after midnight — Welt prints its first edition at 6pm.
The paper was first tested in Berlin in May; it is now sold in eight German cities, others will follow. ”It has been a great success so far,” says Peters.
He will not comment on the exact circulation, but insiders estimate it sells between 10 000 and 20 000 copies a day. However, to replace the broadsheet Welt with Welt Kompakt, like the Independent and the Times in the UK have done, is out of the question, he says. ”Except for the format, we have not much in common with the British model.”
Almost 90% of the broadsheet’s sales are from subscriptions. It has a completely different distribution to Welt Kompakt, which sells on the newsstands, which is the reason it can be updated much later.
Traditionally, the formats of German newspapers have always varied greatly. In earlier times, the format depended on the region. In the North, broadsheets were common, whereas in Berlin and the Rhineland the papers were smaller, but still bigger than a tabloid.
The ”Berliner” format, to which the UK Guardian newspaper will switch by 2006, is now only used by one paper in Berlin, the left-wing tageszeitung. Introduced in the late 19th century, most newspapers in Berlin were traditionally printed in that specific, slightly smaller format up until the second world war.
The big nationals such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Süddeutsche Zeitung and even the Bild, a tabloid from its content, have adapted the British broadsheet format.
In Germany, the market for newspapers has a few crucial differences to Britain. Most daily papers are sold mainly by subscription, so the daily competition for readers is less important. There are no big, sensational headlines shouting at the reader, except in Bild.
The German market has been in crisis for several years, and the new tabloids are one response to diminishing sales and advertising revenues, says Horst Roeper, director of the media think tank Formatt-Institut in Dortmund.
Since the end of the war, only two new papers have been created, the left wing tageszeitung and the German version of the Financial Times, Financial Times Deutschland, says Roeper. The current shake-up is a good signal, he thinks.
According to the National Association of Newspapers, advertising revenues have fallen by more than 30% since 2000. Circulation has decreased by 2% every year. The decline of the German economy from 2001 onwards has taken its toll on advertising budgets of the big companies.
By targeting young readers with more focused titles, publishers hope they are adapting to changing reading attitudes. They are trying to catch the young readers with more graphics to pander to their allegedly shorter attention spans.
”The publishers finally adapt to the multimedia age,” says Jo Groebel, head of the European Institute for the Media in Düsseldorf.
As these young readers grow older, the publishers hope, they will then switch from the tabloids to the broadsheet titles. The publishers also hope that with the new tabloids and the advertising–attractive group of the young and urban, will come a new kind of advertising revenue, one that is less expensive for the companies than in the broadsheets.
The Holtzbrinck group has already brought three new tabloids on to the market this year. With News, a daily tabloid first published in September that is sold only in Frankfurt, it created a new product that is not just the content of a broadsheet title in a smaller format. News is very much focused on young readers, and it gets its content from several Holtzbrinck publications, the financial daily Handelsblatt as well as the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. But News also cooperates with the Lifestyle monthly Fit for Fun and other titles from the publisher Milchstrasse, which specialises on magazines for young people.
In the whole region of Frankfurt, Holtzbrinck sees a potential circulation of 100  000 copies. It currently distributes 25 000 a day, although Holtzbrinck is unwilling to say how many copies are actually being sold.
The new tabloids altogether still sell ”well under 100 000 copies”, Roeper says.
Holtzbrinck applies the tabloid format to different goals. In the east German region of Lausitz, for example, 20 Cent, the tabloid version of the daily, Lausitzer Rundschau, is aimed at those readers who can’t or won’t spend more than â,¬0,20 on a newspaper. Financial problems are especially common in the east, where unemployment can reach up to 25%.
Free papers such as the British Metro have failed in Germany because of fierce resistance by the established titles. They lost a battle widely known as the ”Cologne newspaper war” of 2000/2001.
The Norwegian publisher Schibsted was using Cologne as a test market for its free daily paper 20 Minutes. But the established publishers took action by throwing their own free papers on the market. Axel Springer Verlag saw its Bild sales threatened, and DuMont Schauberg was concerned for its local title Kölner Stadtanzeiger as well as its tabloid Express. Schibsted decided to leave the German market.
A third tabloid concept of Holtzbrinck is Boulevard Würzburg, which comes out every other week and combines news with the cultural agenda of the city.
Media expert Roeper thinks that there are more tabloids to come in Germany. ”All the big publishers have concepts in their drawers,” he says. A development like the British market, where several of the big nationals switch completely to a smaller format, is however unlikely, he thinks. ”A fundamental transformation like that would be too expensive for the German publishers right now”. — Â