German leading news media provide a long list of formats, from headline news online to two-hour long features in radio, in areas such as politics, economics, culture, and so on. Germany’s public service broadcasting providers (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk) provide their audiences with a wide variety of news and information formats. Whereas ARD delivers nationwide television and radio formats, ZDF is a nationwide television provider, and Deutschlandfunk offers nationwide radio programmes. Das Erste (ARD) and ZDF show the highest information competence and provide the two most-viewed evening news shows on television (heute, 19:00, by ZDF, and Tagesschau, 20:00, by Das Erste – ARD). Table 6 shows the proportions of information for the top five stations and gives an impression of the diversity of formats.
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The two big public broadcasting services (ARD, ZDF) deliver news throughout the day, starting with a joint morning and midday magazine followed by news shows during the day and longer news programmes at 17:00, 19:00, and 20:00. Furthermore, both present a late-evening news magazine including reports, info magazines, and documentaries, as well as a news magazine at midnight. The news format with the broadest reach in Germany is the public service television news format Tagesschau (20:00), with average viewing figures of over 9 million viewers online and offline. In times of crisis, Tagesschau is the most consumed news source. During the peak of the Covid-19 crisis in March 2020, tagesschau 20:00 sometimes reached over 17.4 million viewers and a market share of over 46 per cent (15 March 2020), about double the average. Famous mobile news products are the tagesschau-app and the hourly updated news streams tagesschau24 and tagesschau 100 seconds. The second-biggest public service television station ZDF provides the less-known ZDFheute-app. These new formats are a response to changing viewing habits and increased mobile news consumption.
The news show heute (19:00) by the public service television provider ZDF is the second-biggest player in the television news sector. Both news formats are fifteen minutes long. The late-night formats tagesthemen and heute-journal (ZDF) have a broad reach as well. There is lesser variety in online and offline news formats in the commercial broadcasting stations RTL, and Pro7/Sat1, which are also consumed less due to the dual system of Germany’s broadcasting sector. Whereas public service media are obliged to offer a variety of news and information as one of their core functions, commercial broadcasters mostly offer entertainment and only basic information. Sat1 broadcasts a morning show (Frühstücksfernsehen).
Besides these, special audiovisual news channels provide 24/7 news, consisting of two commercial and one public news channels (ntv, n24; Phoenix).
The public service media’s information competency is also reflected in political and investigative magazines, reportages, and documentaries, which constitute an essential part of their programmes. Whereas ARD (Das Erste) broadcasts 34 per cent political news per day in a four-week random sample in 2018 (17:00–01:00), and ZDF 31 per cent, the main commercial newscasts present 29 per cent (RTL) and 18 per cent (Sat.1) per day on politics. However, commercial television’s news formats tend to present more lurid information (Krüger et al., 2019).
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Radio news is delivered every hour by all public broadcasting services and most commercial stations. Every regional radio station uses one or two frequencies for special information programmes, such as WDR3 and WDR5 in the largest German state, North Rhine-Westphalia. The national radio information programmes are broadcast by Deutschlandradio, which offers three special interest format channels: Deutschlandfunk (news and information), Deutschlandradio Kultur (news about cultural aspects of life), and DLF Nova (for young target groups). All three are clearly news-oriented with only small amounts of music.
The print sector continuously lost market share during the last decade, and the online sector grew dramatically, often by serving snackable news for free. Users tend to avoid subscriptions, and editors are still searching for sustainable profit models. However, printed newspapers still reach a comparably high number of readers in Germany. The tabloid newspaper Bild is the most read with over 1.6 million copies sold in 2018, a decrease of over 7 per cent compared with the previous year. This is followed by five national quality newspapers: Süddeutsche Zeitung (357,000 sold copies incl. e-paper), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (over 252,000 copies sold), Welt (over 169,000 copies sold), Tageszeitung (53,000 copies sold). Frankfurter Rundschau, a liberal newspaper, lost most of its readers and does not provide print copies anymore; however, it has over 10 million visits to its e-paper (Schröder, 2018, 2019b).[i]
There also exists two weekly news magazines (Der Spiegel, Focus) and one major weekly newspaper (Die Zeit) (Schröder, 2018). During the last decade, every nationwide daily or weekly and print magazine established an online format. Germany’s biggest tabloid newspaper, Bild, is uncontested and increased the number of visits to its Bild Online to 422 million per day in 2019. The quality magazine Spiegel Online (now Der Spiegel) has over 250 million daily visits, followed by the online version of the second-biggest print news magazine Focus Online (more than 180 million) (Schröder, 2019a).
Compared with MDM 2011 (Marcinkowski & Donk, 2011), the online news sector is highly networked, with Twitter becoming an important hub to access news. In Germany, Twitter is a forum highly frequented by journalists, politicians, and members of the public interested in news. Hence, renowned journalists like Dunya Hayali or Anja Reschke not only increase their personal reach on Twitter, but also help make political news more accessible, establish a broader online discourse about politics, and form counter-publics to hate speech and fake news.
[i] Since 2013, Frankfurter Rundschau is part of the RheinMainMedia GmbH, and single data about sold copies or e-papers are barely published.
