"Crisis" is just a word
For years now, the media industry has been making headlines it doesn’t really deserve. After all, it is the major opinion leaders who are facing problems and setting the pessimistic tone for an entire industry. This is then amplified by many thoughtless parrots who constantly talk about the «print crisis.».
When the Neue Zürcher Zeitung closes its printing plant, the public concludes that the entire printing industry is in crisis. If there were media journalism in Switzerland that was truly independent of the company that makes it possible, the story of why things got this far in the first place would be researched, for example. At the turn of the century, intelligent technocrats from the NZZ set up a project called "Zürich Print". Both print shops were faced with major additional investments. Despite the high print runs and volumes at the time, the technocrats knew that they had to make a big investment: 'Isn't it actually nonsense that both companies - one in Bubenberg, the other in Schlieren - are doing almost the same thing at the same time and inevitably creating overcapacity? Let's merge the two newspaper printing plants into a joint company and save tens of millions in investments!
In addition, the savings on paper purchases alone would have generated millions every year. But Tamedia rejected the idea. They wanted to remain independent. The irony of the story is that it now benefits anyway because it will print the NZZ.
Since the NZZ, the European champion in uncovering backgrounds from Hawaii to Azerbaijan, has so far been unable to communicate such and other basics of its radical decision on Schlieren to its employees, readers and shareholders, the polemicists can in principle spout any nonsense that suits their agenda.
And once again it is confirmed: in the publishing industry, the competition always gets you PR, and does so with select malice. Just a quick question: will we live to see the day when the Tages-Anzeiger and SonntagsZeitung report with the same openness on events and corporate decisions at their own company as they do on the printing and editorial problems of their local competitors? The decision to close Ziegler Druck would also have provided plenty of material!
Sometimes it helps to look at things from more than just Zurich. The contrast to Schlieren is currently being staged in Visp. The innovative SME publishing house Mengis is having the world's first digital newspaper printing press installed there. The Walliser Bote (circulation 22,000) will be printed on this new machine from July. The CEO of the family business wrote his thesis on digital printing and sees it as a worthwhile business opportunity. And unlike the managers, he is investing his own money in this vision.
The major newspapers, currently all in crisis and only surviving in the property accounts thanks to reserves and cross-subsidization, are acting like air conditioning units and playing up a print crisis to the public that does not exist in this generalized form. The business results of many small and medium-sized newspapers, which fluctuate between "satisfactory" and "excellent", speak against this undifferentiated crisis narrative - the only problem is that this is not communicated. They don't want to attract attention. And the "Swiss Media Association", formerly known as the newspaper publishers' association, is apparently so busy with internal squabbles that it no longer has time for clever and constructive industry PR. We haven't even mentioned the clever start-up ideas and encouraging start-ups in the print sector.
- Take grandparents, for example: the young publisher Dominik Achermann from Baden launched his project with a small six-figure sum as venture capital. After six months, he has 2,500 paying subscribers. He's not out of the woods yet, but he's ahead of schedule. Moral: there is still plenty of room for clever newcomers in the niches.
- Take Falstaff, for example: the bi-monthly magazine for "enjoyment, wine, food and travel" reports over 2000 subscription orders for its newly launched Swiss edition within just a few weeks. It is a magazine to kneel down to: 180 pages, well thought out, elegantly written, beautifully designed. Even the apparently unavoidable PR articles are at least decently done.
- There are also success stories at the upper altitude, where many traditional consumer magazines only have a short breath. Ringier's LandLiebe sold a certified 148,000 copies two years after its launch. Or the Swiss family: it is one of the domestic cash cows that provide Tamedia with the milk for its expeditions into the digital world.
Could it ultimately be that "crisis" is just another word for unimaginativeness?
Karl Lüönd is freer
Publicist and author
