Fighting To Give New Media A Fighting Chance

Michael Hedges September 8, 2011 Follow on Twitter

Slowly but surely new media platforms have the undivided attention of media houses. That isn’t to suggest all are focused on using these tools to give people better products and services. Combine instinctive competitiveness with learning curve exhaustion and, well, some lose sight of the core purpose.

German publishers war with public broadcasters over smartphone apps, headed for the courts, drags on. At the opening of the Berlin consumer electronics show IFA both sides took the opportunity to moan and groan about each other. Publishers see smartphone apps tromping their asparagus patch. Public broadcasters see earthly delights in a garden of plenty.

“We are sure there is a solution with the publishers,” offered ZDF director-designate Thomas Billut. “We should leave aside the din of battle.” Berlin-Brandenburg public broadcaster RBB director Dagmar Reim called the argument “bizarre.”

That battle over smartphone apps is but one in the long war between publishers and the public broadcasting institutions. Court decisions and even European Commission intervention have done little to enforce calm. Charges turned particularly ugly when WAZ Group CEO Christian Nienhaus suggested in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) interview (August 26) that public broadcaster WDR threatened members of the Nordrhein-Westfalen parliament with negative news coverage “if they voted against the license fee.”

While German publishers have not seen profits fall to the same extent as publishers in other countries, they are congenitally worried and frustrated. “As long as we had scarce (broadcast) frequencies, the system was in order,” Herr Nienhaus explained. “The internet has shattered that. State broadcasting on the internet broke the market. I appreciate the quality of public broadcasting but to produce this costs money and the internet business model is broken.”

WDR wasn’t pleased at the allegations and threatened to sue (September 1). Mr. Nienhaus later (September 5) said his comments had been misinterpreted.

Virtually every German publisher joined a lawsuit in June seeking to clarify the rather vague terms of the 2008 Broadcasting Treaty regarding new media ventures by public broadcasters. At its most simple dimension, publishers don’t like the amount of text content available through the Tagesschau smartphone app.

“I regret this step by the publishers, “said regional public broadcaster NDR director Lutz Marmor, “because with the news app we move into our core competency of information." Publishers should try working with rather than against public broadcasters, he added, to strengthen journalism and information literacy in the service of democracy.”

“We should not depend too much on the (legal) action against the Tagesshau app,” admitted Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner to the IFA Media Week presentation. Less conciliatory, Herr Döpfner, a self-confessed fan of the Apple iPad, groaned about the Tagesschau website coverage of Greece that included several pages of text.

“It takes away our business base,” he concluded. “This creates a completely new competitive order.”

Not all smartphone apps from public broadcasters are equal in the eyes of German publishers. Public television network ZDF released its archive smartphone app at the IFA, receiving somewhat reluctant praise from publishers. The new ZDF app is all archive video and very little text.

“The conflict between publishers and broadcasters is resolved if all public (broadcasting) offers on tablets and smartphones are designed according to this model in the future,” remarked Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) chief executive Dietmar Wolff. 

Publishers, broadcasters and, well, everybody who’s anybody continue to rush out mobile apps in a torrent. Denmark’s Berlingske Media launched free Android apps (September 2) for five titles, available through the Android Market. The publisher will, however, continue to focus on iPhone apps, said mobile manager Anders Oliver Andersen to mediawatch.dk (September 2) because iPhone owners in Denmark are twice as likely to download apps than Android smartphone users.

Unlike website creation two decades ago mobile apps are platform specific, different for Apple products (iOS), Google products (Android), Windows Mobile, Blackberry and more, more, more. Like website developers of those earlier times these folks speak a variety of languages, for which they get paid the big bucks. If nothing else has been learned from the digital age it’s that the geeks are in charge.

Once developed that smartphone or tablet app needs a home. Apple and RIM, the Blackberry people, have online stores, mini-kiosks if you will, for apps developed for their proprietary platforms. Not all publishers have been overjoyed at the arrangement that puts a middle-man between them and customers, often with a charge attached.

Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times (FT), was an early adopter of smartphone and tablet apps, its well-healed audience in sync with the latest and greatest trendy gadgets. The FT was one of the first in the Apple Store and, it appears, one of the biggest to leave. Pearson and Apple were unable to come to an agreement on data gleaned by the Apple Store about subscribers, a source of contention between Apple and publishers. In June Pearson said it would develop mobile apps for the FT with the open source HTML5 platform.

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