Newspaper Crisis Hits Germany

It came to Germany almost a decade later than America, but the newspaper crisis is sweeping the country, with plummeting circulations and revenues. The German news media must reinvent itself in order to retain readers.Three decades ago, the editors of the Munich daily Abendzeitung produced a newspaper each day for 300,000 buyers. Fast forward 30 years and its circulation has declined to 107,634. One of of three desks in the large newsroom next to his office is now unoccupied, so when Editor in Chief Arno Makowsky uses a ballpoint pen to add a sharp upward curve into the next year on the chart in front of him, all he can do is laugh.Makowsky knows that he can’t get the curve to move upward anymore, and so do the top editors of other German newspapers, like the Berliner Morgenpost, Tagesspiegel, Berliner Zeitung, Hamburger Abendblatt and Hamburger Morgenpost. They only thing they can still do is slow the decline. In Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, local newspapers have lost about 30 percent of their readers in the last decade, with readership declining at an ever faster clip.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/circulation-declines-hit-german-papers-a-decade-after-america-a-915574.html

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