Hillary, help!

 
René Worni on the beauty ideals of media managers An accomplished journalist offered Die Zeit in Hamburg an elaborate background story and was told: "We'd be happy to print your text, but we can't pay you a fee." Five years must have passed since then, and the media landscape has changed considerably. But you hear jokes like the one described more often now. This has to do with so-called quality journalism. Because in an age of free content on paper and on the Internet, shareholder-conscious media managers are once again back in favor of quality. Less is more. But where once the world paper Le Monde was one of the journalistic references (a conspicuously thin postille for its importance), today economic constraints alone dictate this less. Le Matin boss Peter Rothenbühler, for example, pitted the Tribune de Genève (12 regional journalists) against Le Temps (2 regional journalists) at the start of the year and concluded that Le Temps clearly has the better quality regional stories. So slim down and make savings. Less is more. Tamedia CEO Martin Kall agrees. He bought the Bern-based Espace in order to synergize with it. He and his new subordinate Albert P. Stäheli are faced with the paradoxical question: is it possible to produce even better journalism with even fewer resources? Last year, there were 770,000 more readers in Switzerland than the year before. That makes sense.
In 2000, newspapers earned 663 million francs more from advertising than in 2006. In the case of regional newspapers, advertising and readership are in continuous decline. The pressure is mainly on the expensive editorial offices, because they are the easiest to save on. The constant upholding of journalistic quality is therefore no coincidence and is intended to conceal the actual misery. The lean editorial team has become the undernourished beauty ideal of managers and is slowly threatening to starve to death.
By the way, have you heard of him? An experienced journalist recently offered a major Zurich regional newspaper relevant research. The editor reflexively asked: "Do you write for free?" And when he contacted the magazine of the same paper with another story: "Come back when you have an interview with Hillary Clinton!" That can't be right.
René Worni, Editor