In Berlin, Tech Money Takes Another Newspaper

A former BuzzFeed and Wall Street Journal media reporter shares a dispatch from Berlin.

By Steven Perlberg

A tech entrepreneur with no journalism experience buys a news outlet.

It’s a familiar story by now. Salesforce billionaire Marc Benioff bought Time magazine. The Atlantic was acquired by Emerson Collective, the organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar expanded the Glenn Greenwald Daily Experience into the Intercept and First Look Media. Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times. Then, of course, there’s Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post.

Tech money has become a journalism lifeline. The Post was struggling when Bezos rescued it in 2013, but the wider media industry was entering into glory days of dumb-money high valuations off the back of Facebook traffic and venture capital. People were optimistic! Now, with layoffs cascading, the remaining digital players buddying up in desperate all-stock combinations, and the Washington Post doing quite well for itself both editorially and commercially, everyone is looking to the heavens to ask WHERE IS MY BEZOS?

In January, I moved from New York to Berlin. As a media reporter, I’ve been interested in the German press, but as a New York media person, my brain can only understand new things by comparing them to America. So it was with some degree of amusement and déjà vu that last month I read about how an entrepreneur couple, Silke and Holger Friedrich, had purchased a local Berlin daily, the Berliner Zeitung, as well as its sister tabloid the Berliner Kurier.

With a circulation of some 100,000+, the Berliner Zeitung is no behemoth (Bild, the national tabloid powerhouse, moves more than 2 million copies). But the paper has deep historic importance — it’s the only newspaper established in the former authoritarian East Germany to “regain credibility and circulation” after reunification in 1990, according to Der Spiegel.

Weeks after the acquisition became a point of fascination and skepticism within the German media scene, I met Silke Friedrich in the office of the Berliner Verlag, the newspaper’s parent company, on the border of the city’s Mitte and Kreuzberg neighborhoods. Polite and direct, she ushered me to an empty conference room on the building’s third floor, which she explained was being used for special projects. The walls were full of brainstorming session notes. “We don’t really have a culture of private engagement as you have in the U.S.,” Silke told me, referring to the concept of individual tech wealth scoring a newspaper. “You just can’t step into this market easily. Now we did it quite easily, and people are quite shocked.”

Silke runs an international school in Berlin, while Holger, who formerly worked at McKinsey & Co., founded and sold a tech company to SAP and now operates a technology consultancy. It’s a kind of instant Monocle photo shoot: new money, modern taste, old credibility. Part of German Media Twitter’s fascination with the deal stemmed, perhaps undeservedly, from the previously unknown couple’s personal style. One German writer described the Friedrichs as looking like they design “fair-trade yoga fashion for babies.”

In interviews, the Friedrichs have displayed a degree of media savvy, emphasizing the gravity of stewarding a historic, if somewhat stale, news outlet. “We are East German, and this is an iconic brand,” Silke told me. “It’s also kind of a patriotic motivation to say, before this brand disappears, we see a need for — maybe not a different type of journalism — but areas of improvement.” Their plan is boilerplate for new media owners: deepen the paper’s digital presence while remaining committed to print. They frame their new enterprise as an independent, reporting-driven alternative in the German media landscape. “We want to increase the quality of journalism — investigation, fact-based. Less opinion-driven and less hysterical.”

But the vision is thus far short on details. In a relatively insular German media arena not unlike the U.S., the Friedrichs have been dinged as unqualified amateurs. “Engagement without experience,” said Tagesspiegel, another Berlin daily. “Better than ‘experience without engagement,’” Silke responded in a radio interview. Coverage of the acquisition seized on a part of the Friedrichs’ interview with German magazine Der Spiegel in which the couple acknowledged that they had not regularly read the paper for 15 years.

The national media here has deemed the Berliner Zeitung acquisition Germany’s Bezos moment, a designation the couple has rebuffed. “We don’t engage in this discussion,” Silke told me. “We want to do a good job, and we hope that our staff is seeing the good in this move, and also that we can stabilize and develop the newspapers so that our customers are happy and we can gain new customers.” Silke declined to disclose the acquisition price (she said the newly-acquired company has about 180 employees).

Do the first-time newspaper-owning Friedrichs have the ability to figure out how to run a news business in 2019? Does anybody? It will not be easy. Similar market pressures are at work in Germany as in the U.S.: German media giant Axel Springer, the largest publisher in Europe, just announced sweeping cuts at its two biggest newspapers, Bild and Welt, shortly after U.S. private equity giant KKR became the company’s largest shareholder.

While it’s impossible to know how the Berliner Zeitung will fare, some outside observers have been “cautiously positive,” crediting the pair with bringing fresh eyes and a promise of civic engagement. One report said the new owners “appeared modest” in front of the paper’s editorial staff, which was well received. “Our society is facing a lot of challenges, and [we thought the acquisition] could be a wonderful opportunity to support,” Silke told me.

Perhaps that’s the best the Berliner Zeitung, or anyone in the US media with a new, rich boss, can hope for right now. Either you pick an “establishment” place and pray for the best; work at a digital media roll-up conglomerate “worth” a few hundred million dollars betting that it’s the one Comcast or Disney or AT&T eventually gets tricked into buying; or pray that your new benevolent millionaire or billionaire owner is actually One Of The Good Ones. Viel Glück!

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