The unremarkable giants of the German news media

If you were to randomly ask passers-by in a German pedestrian zone about the most important news media on the internet, you would mainly hear brands such as Spiegel, Tagesschau or Bild. However, their brand popularity is only reflected to a limited extent in their actual distribution, as there are two underestimated giants in the German media landscape: News networks and email providers.

Mergers and networks

Many editorial offices of regional or local news media have been gutted in recent years. The cost-cutting strategy is usually to outsource parts of the newsroom and produce content centrally for several media brands. Providers such as the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) or Ippen Media, which have a considerable reach, are benefiting from this. RND acts as a news agency and provides national content for more than 60 daily newspapers. The network, which belongs to the Madsack Group, also operates its own portal at rnd.de.

The Ippen Group operates in a similar way, running an almost impenetrable network of holdings in regional media throughout Germany and supplying them with national content from its own central editorial office. According to its own information, the group is responsible for around 80 portals - and yet is presumably largely unknown to readers.

Together, the two networks record over 400 million visits per month on their online portals. A figure that puts supposedly more popular news portals such as Spiegel.de (174 million visits/month) in the shade and is on a par with the largest public service news programme Tagesschau.de.

News agencies as gatekeepers

An even greater media power is the first news agency in Germany, the German Press Agency dpa. It has editorial offices at more than 50 locations in Germany and a network of over 170 correspondents abroad. The dpa supplies almost all regional and national daily newspapers and online services with print-ready texts, photos and videos. In addition, it has recently also started acting as a fact-checking service provider for international social media groups. The fact that dpa has 172 shareholders, including all of Germany's major publishing houses, ensures a certain neutrality. But it is also true that what dpa sends out appears in dozens of news outlets, and what dpa categorises as irrelevant has a hard time attracting attention. The agency acts as a gatekeeper - and a number of newspapers produce daily newspaper pages almost exclusively from dpa material for reasons of economy or efficiency.

Email providers with news offerings

And then there are the news giants that generated their reach in the 2000s with free or paid webmail services. Examples include T-Online, which was sold by Telekom to the advertising marketer Ströer in 2015, and Web.de and GMX, both of which now belong to the internet provider United Internet. Their home pages still prominently display the login to the webmail service, but above all news from all subject areas. With this offering, they together dominate more than nine per cent of the news market.

Both the advertising marketer Ströer and the telecommunications service provider United Internet take their journalistic mission very seriously. Web.de and GMX, two portals with identical content, employ 50 people in their editorial departments, while T-Online employs as many as 150 editors.

Behind this is a simple but successful principle: users of the e-mail service return to the portals again and again to retrieve their e-mails. They are presented with editorial and advertising content from the portals when they log in, but also in their inbox and in the emails themselves. Ultimately, it is therefore difficult to say exactly how many users actually read or view the journalistic content, as they often come to the site with a different intention. What is certain is that it is a commercially successful model, the editorial teams are now also winning media awards and the country's most important politicians are willing to give interviews on the portals.

Digitalisation is forcing many publishers to transform their processes. The pressure to save money on the one hand and new success mechanisms through Google and social networks on the other are reshuffling the cards. While traditional media companies are trying to reduce costs with networks such as RND or dpa material, completely new players such as GMX or T-Online are popping up elsewhere and securing large market shares. All of this is leading to many new media brands, but also increasingly to less diversity in the content itself, as a number of newspaper sites and online news are largely the same or are supplied by the same providers.