The year of the hypochondriacs

Samuel Helbling on the real and imagined media sick in SwitzerlandJournalists, as the sociologist Niklas Luhmann once remarked, like to constitute the public sphere by describing the "phantom pain after amputations": the desolation of cities due to industrialization, the assassination of a king, the voting out of a federal councillor. As the last link in the chain, from the typesetter to the printer, journalists feel the loss that the transformation of their own working world brings. As the year drew to a close, nothing came as easily to the lips of journalists as the word "press crisis". For a professional group that lives by the cynical slogan "only bad news is good news", it would be superhuman not to paint their own suffering in the brightest colors. There is no doubt about it: circulation and advertising trends are not making publishers happy. And so they too are joining in the lament and openly calling for the sweet poison of state subsidies. Just a year ago, the then president of the Swiss Press Association rejected a media article in the constitution because he rightly feared that the opinion-forming press in particular would lose its independence as a result. Today, the same lobby group is demanding 150 million francs. The fact is, however, that the existence of no established Swiss media company is seriously threatened. According to Media Focus, the newspaper industry is doing about as well in terms of turnover as it was in 1997 - except that it was living well back then. Six years later, it still has potential. Even titles that were declared dead are flourishing again. Under Roger Köppel's leadership, the struggling Weltwoche has regained its sex appeal and is now the talk of the town. Everyone wants to read the original version of what is being hotly debated across the country and repeatedly quoted in other media. And anyone who knows us journalists knows that no colleague refers to the work of a competitor without need. In other words, Weltwoche offers a USP that no one in the trade can ignore. Such self-centeredness of the media is not only an invention of Niklas Luhmann, but also the formula of every successful brand owner in our media society. This is especially true for media brands, which constitute them in the first place.> Samuel Helbling, Editor-in-Chief