While daily newspaper circulation in the US fell 27 percent from 1998 through 2008, it slipped 19 percent in Germany, according to a report this month from the German Newspaper Publishers’ Association. While fewer than half of Americans read newspapers, more than 70 percent of Germans do. While newspapers’ revenues have plunged in the United States, they have held steady in Germany since 2004. “Germany is and will remain a print nation,” said Andreas Wiele, a board member of Axel Springer, publisher of the biggest newspaper in Germany, Bild, in a speech last autumn. Instead of focusing on journalism, the report says, U.S. newspapers also made unwise investments in new media, and compounded the damage by giving away their contents free on the Internet.
Read more at the New York Times.
