The structure of the West German newspaper industry is thus characterised oy the lack of centralised ‘national’ press in the British sense, presenting instead a pattern of numerous small-circulation papers with geographically restricted readerships, Blld, as always, being the one exception.
Superficially the picture is similar to the situation in the USA, but the causes behind this pattern differ considerably in the two countries, being predominantly geographical in the case of the USA, where the sheer size of the country and the isolation of its communities have prevented the development of a centralized national press, and historico-political in the Federal Republic.
A closer analogy might be with Italy, which, like Germany, was late in coming to be a unified country, and where such cities as Milan, Turin, Florence, Bologna and Rome vie with one another for metropolitan status and all produce newspapers of more than local significance.
Most of the main newspapers in West Germany are morning papers and appear daily except for Sundays. There are no independent Sunday newspapers of the British type; instead, two of the dailies publish special Sunday editions as is commonly the practice in the USA. These are : Bild am Sonntag and Welt am Sonntag.
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In appearance and layout the newspapers of West Germany retain a number of common features that strike the foreign observer as peculiarly German, though some like Boulevardblatter have adopted the more or less international style of the mass press. Bild however, wit its screaming headlines, often underlines in red its large variety of eye-assaulting type fac£s, its habit of breaking up with miniscule stories in pink boxes and its liberal use of exclamation marks, presents a degree of typographical savagery unparalleled in the British or American daily press. Normally the pages of West German papers are folded in separate sections of which there may be as many as 5 or 6 at week-ends.
One of these cover local news while the others are devoted to such topics as economics, finance, arts, advertisements, science and a mixture of these and other material. Many newspapers have special
sections on certain days of the week; for instance, the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung carries a travel supplement while in Die Welt, Thursday is the day for the weekly literary section with the holiday and travel sections appearing on Fridays. In the quality press the front page is typically devoted to the major international and national news of the day.
The headlines tend to be sober and factual, the stories often preceded by a summary in heavier type and the photographs, if any, are unusually unsensational. The front page of many West German papers also contains one side down single column, typographically distinct from the rest of the page, to present a brief commentary, often in a witty or epigramatic style on a topic of interest, which may or may not be one of the day’s major stories.
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This column is known as the glosse, the German equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon ‘leader’. The glosse is followed by a further commentary on the inside pages, but the editorial page with which Indian, British and American papers are familiar, has no real counterpart in the German press.
The Weeklies
The absence in West Germany of a truly national daily press is compensated to certain extent by the existence of a number of nationally distributed Weeklies. The most prestigious and widely read is the liberal Die Zeit, which is simultaneously published in Hamburg, Toronto and Buenos Aires. Most of the weeklies have the appearance of the daily Der Spiegel which is often classified as a member of their group.
Magazines
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A notable feature of West German press is the large number of periodicals and magazines in circulation; about a thousand titles exist and total copies produced cross 100 million. The largest published group in this field is the Heinrich Bauer Verlag of Hamburg which controls about 1 /5th of the total circulation of magazines including two of the illustrated ones-Their names are : Illustrierte Neue Revue and Quick.
The three main weekly entertainment magazines are : Neue Post, Das Neue Blatt and Wochenend. Among the women’s magazines Neue Mode and Pralin are important. One special feature of the German press is the number of weeklies devoted to radio and television. The more important are : T.V Horen + Sehen un.l Fernsehwochcn.
The most successful German weekly is Illustrierte which represents a model in photographic journalism, as a weekly general interest magazine characterised by its photo news stories.
Another type of mass circulation weekly is represented by magazines of the so-called Regenbog t npresse or Rainbow Press, so named after their habit of emphasising their headlines with coloured underlinings. Gradually, however, these so-called Rainbow press newspapers are changing to magazine format.