Friday, 22 August, 2008,
Fasanenstr. 73, Berlin
04:30 – 07:00 p.m.

Dr. Stephan Weichert,
Stefan Niggemeier,
Leif Kramp

By Angela Unkrüer

The final event of this fruitful and highly interesting day takes us to the Institute for Media and Communication Politics in Berlin. Here, the focus is on the rising problematic relationship between the Internet and printed media. After a short film-presentation, which provides a brief synopsis of journalism in the past, present and future, the participants embark on a lively debate with the researchers of the institute under the general heading of “more readers, less journalism”. The three panellists, Mr Stefan Niggemeier – creator of the “Bild-Blog” – and the publishers and members of the institute, Dr Stephan Weichert and Mr Leif Kramp, discuss together with the young journalists of the workshop a range of themes, such as the future of the daily newspapers as well as the complex problems of the Internet. Concerning this last point of debate, the three hosts agree that a lot of the already existing Internet media do not yet have a working business model. Hence, even well-established Internet brands are always in the danger of being taken over by international media companies.

In the end, the panellists and the young journalists reach a not-so-bleak conclusion: it would be too early to arrive at too fatalistic a view and it would, of course, be overly simplistic to identify an eventual decline of newspapers. Instead, they stress, there will be a coexistence of printed and Internet media in the near future. Nonetheless, all participants agree that the gap between tabloid and quality press will widen even further. It might even be true that sophisticated newspapers will become something of a status symbol in the future.