My Space for the region

René Worni on questions of the existence of print mediaSomehow publishers in Germany always seem to be a step ahead of their Swiss colleagues with their innovations. Regional print media there are bending in all directions and sometimes pushing cross-media links to peaks that are still a long way off here in Switzerland (with some exceptions). Virtual circles with common interests, so-called communities, are increasingly becoming a question of existence, and the fact that newspapers have to re-legitimize themselves, as was recently stated at the 15th Local Journalism Forum in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, is certainly nothing new and has arrived everywhere in the industry. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Westfälische Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ), for example, has appointed the 34-year-old blogger and newcomer of the year, Katharina Borchert, as head of the online editorial department (and, according to Welt am Sonntag, not the usual "Zampano from the print editorial department"). However, the appointment of the lone fighter, who has set standards in the blogosphere with her Lyssa blog, is a prominent example of how the industry is changing. Borchert is working on a sophisticated online portal for the WAZ Group's four regional newspapers on behalf of Managing Director Bodo Hombach. Meanwhile, those less prominent in the media are already much further ahead. For example, the Hessisch-Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA), which is part of the empire of Munich newspaper king Dirk Ippen. Germany's fifth-largest publisher - although he sees the press as the first victim of digitization - advocates a kind of reverse credo: he sees the local newspaper at the center, as an interface and portal to the digital world. HNA is an impressive example of this: There are dialect podcasts in the idioms of the circulation areas, regional online videos, feedback forums and a sensational local Wikipedia, a web archive on which 400 amateur authors are already working. The region is to grow into a community, a kind of regional My Space. - From a Swiss perspective, one might wonder whether it is simply due to a lack of pressure from the local industry why there is hardly any evidence of such efforts here in Switzerland. After all, massive online expansion (especially at Blick) is on the list of priorities at Dufourstrasse.
René Worni, Editor