Column If the national daily press dies out, a piece of intellectual Europe will also perish. For decades, publishers of print media have comforted themselves with Riepl's Law. Wolfgang Riepl was editor-in-chief of the largest Nuremberg newspaper. In 1913, he published an ingenious dissertation on "Das Nachrichtenwesen des Altertums", which turned communication science on its head. In principle, he did so with a single, admittedly very long sentence: "In a sense, it is a basic law of the development of the news system that the simplest means, forms and methods, once they have been naturalized and found to be useful, can never be completely and permanently displaced and put out of use by the most perfect and highly developed ones, but can survive alongside them, only that they are forced to seek out other tasks and areas of utilization."The short version of Riepl's law is thus: no new, more advanced medium can replace an old one. This epochal insight was valid for many decades. Market shares may have shifted, but on the whole, radio did not replace newspapers, television did not replace films and video recorders did not replace cinemas. "By and large", this will probably also apply to the Internet. But what will become of the opinion-forming national press in view of the current newspaper crisis?
The FAZ Group made a loss of 60 million euros in 2002, Süddeutscher Verlag lost 76 million euros and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung Group 50 million francs. The Frankfurter Allgemeine had to practically halve its feature section. The journalists at Süddeutsche fear that the new owners in Stuttgart will downgrade the paper to a good regional newspaper; and the NZZ has probably not been left out for a long time. Nevertheless, the business model of the national daily newspaper is not yet up for discussion. The bottlenecks are also an opportunity to condense and essentialize, to take greater account of readers' wishes. If they only pick up their favorite paper for half an hour on average, it is arrogant and unworldly to serve them three hours of reading material. The daily newspapers will therefore have to concentrate more on their current, reflective core competence.
One can only hope that it will be possible to turn the tide and keep the flagships of the major publishing houses on course in terms of content. After all, a country's ability to engage in international discourse depends to a large extent on its media. The "global class", as Ralf Dahrendorf calls the intellectual and economic jet set, may well be satisfied with the Sunday edition of the Observer, the New Yorker or the International
Herold Tribune. However, dreams of Europe's intellectual self-assertion would quickly come to an end if we were to rely on such substitutes. A society that destroys the communication tools of its elites will sooner or later die.
It is bad enough that the European dialog between po
The communication between politics, economics, culture and science is laborious and viscous (cultural workers are often esoteric, while the classe politique is all too lacking in theory). Nevertheless, quality newspapers were and are central relay stations in the French debate on totalitarianism, the German historians' dispute and the Blocher debate here. The ultimate failure of their business model would not only destroy a few medium-sized companies. It would jeopardize the ability of our European society(ies) to understand itself and engage in serious controversy.
> Peter Glotz is Professor of Media Management at the University of St.Gallen, a recent lecturer at the Ringier School of Journalism and a SonntagsBlick columnist.
