Berliner Zeitung

Berliner Zeitung

Sample front page
Type Daily (except Sunday)
Owner(s) M. DuMont Schauberg
Publisher Berliner Verlag
Editor-in-chief Brigitte Fehrle
Founded 21 May 1945 (1945-05-21)
Language German
Headquarters Berlin, Germany
Circulation 148,000 (2010)
ISSN 0947-174X
Website www.berliner-zeitung.de
Berliner Zeitung Headquarters

The Berliner Zeitung is a German daily newspaper based in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in East Germany in 1945 and continued publication after the reunification.

History and profile

Berliner Zeitung was first published on 21 May 1945 in East Berlin.[1] The paper, a center-left daily, is published by Berliner Verlag. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the paper was bought by Gruner + Jahr and the British publisher Robert Maxwell. Gruner + Jahr later became sole owners and relaunched it in 1997 with a completely new design. A stated goal was to turn the Berliner Zeitung into "Germany's Washington Post". The daily says its journalists come "from east and west", and it styles itself as a "young, modern and dynamic" paper for the whole of Germany. It is the only East German paper to achieve national prominence since reunification.[2] In 2003, the Berliner was Berlin's largest subscription newspaper—the weekend edition sells approximately 207,800 copies, with a readership of 468,000. The current editor-in-chief is Brigitte Fehrle.

Gruner + Jahr decided to leave the newspaper business and sold the Berliner Zeitung in 2002 to the publishing group Georg von Holtzbrinck.[3] This sale was forbidden by the German authorities since Holtzbrinck already owned another major Berlin newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel. The Berliner Zeitung was then sold in the fall of 2005 for an estimated 150–180 million euros to the British company Mecom Group[4] and the American company Veronis Suhler Stevenson. The employees criticized this sale vehemently, fearing that journalistic quality could suffer as a result of excessive profit expectations by Mecom boss David Montgomery.

The Berliner Zeitung is the first German newspaper to fall under the control of foreign investors.[5] Andrew Marr, former editor of The Independent, which like the Berliner Zeitung was taken over by David Montgomery, said of the Berliner Zeitung that "[a]nyone who was working at The Independent in the mid to late Nineties will find all this wearisomely familiar. David's obsession at that time was removing as much traditional reporting as possible from the paper and turning it into a tabloid-style scandal sheet for yuppies."[6]

On 23 March 2009, it was announced that the Berliner Verlag would be sold by Mecom to the publisher M. DuMont Schauberg (MDS) in Cologne. The price is about 152 million Euro. Mecom was forced to sell its publishing interests in Germany as well as Norway because of heavy debts.[7]

List of editors-in-chief

Portrait of Rudolf Herrnstadt (1952).

(incomplete)

Notes

  1. ↑ R. C. Raack (1995). Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945: The Origins of the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. p. 122. Retrieved 14 October 2013. – via Questia (subscription required)
  2. ↑ Wilder, Charly (27 June 2013). "Digitizing the GDR: East German Papers Offer Glimpse of History". Der Spiegel. Retrieved 4 October 2013.
  3. ↑ "Annual report 2002" (PDF). Bertelsmann. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 May 2015. Retrieved 3 May 2015.
  4. ↑ Helen Pidd (24 June 2008). "Montgomery axes 30 journalists at German paper Berliner Zeitung". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 3 May 2015. Retrieved 3 May 2015.
  5. ↑ Brooks (2005)
  6. ↑ As quoted in a 2006 article The Independent (Elkins and Burrell 2006).
  7. ↑ "Die Kölner können kommen". Berliner Zeitung (in German). 23 March 2009. Retrieved 11 May 2009.

References

External links

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