Netzeitung

» see netzeitung.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In November 2009 the Netzeitung had 1,703,000 visitors and about 6,556,000 page views, which is a number most German newspaper sites of the period would have been pleased with. Three weeks later its owner announced it was closing the newsroom. Those two facts sit next to each other without contradiction, which is the whole story of the thing.

It went live on 8 November 2000, built in Berlin and Frankfurt through that spring and summer by staff from Nettavisen, the Norwegian online paper that had been running since 1996. The founders were Olav Anders Øvrebø and Knut Skeid, and to make Germans take it seriously they hired Michael Maier, who had edited the Berliner Zeitung and Stern, as editor-in-chief. The pitch was simple enough that it sounds unremarkable now: a proper daily newspaper with a national desk, full-time reporters and an actual editor, published only on the web. Its own claim was to be the first German site that was all of those at once, and nobody seriously disputed it.

For a while it worked as journalism even when it did not work as a business. The Netzeitung was the most-quoted online medium in Germany in 2005. Its daily media column Altpapier was nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2002 and again in 2003. It wrote radio bulletins for other people's stations and supplied the teletext news on Sat.1 and Pro7 from December 2004. From early 2006 it co-ran a Berlin FM frequency with Motor FM. A newspaper with no press turned out to have a lot of spare product to sell.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Launching a pure-play news site in November 2000 meant launching into the exact month the money left. The dot-com collapse took the advertising market with it, and the Netzeitung spent its entire life covering a newsroom payroll out of banner inventory that was worth less every year. Subscriptions were tried, in the modest form of a personalized front page and an SMS alert service, and they were never the answer.

It also kept experimenting. On 1 June 2006 it launched Readers Edition, a citizen-journalism site modeled openly on South Korea's OhmyNews, opened to the public five days later. When Maier left at the end of that year to chase Web 2.0 full time, his new company bought Readers Edition off them and took it with him.

~ the owners ~

The Netzeitung changed hands six times in nine years, which is a lot even by the standards of European media in that decade. Spray Network owned it at birth and was swallowed by Lycos Europe within weeks. It went to BertelsmannSpringer on 1 July 2002, escaped through a management buyout on 1 March 2003, was bought outright by Norway's Orkla Media in mid-2005, passed to Mecom's German holding company in June 2007, and landed at the Cologne publisher M. DuMont Schauberg in January 2009. Eleven months later DuMont did the arithmetic that all six of them had been doing.

None of this reached me at the time. I was on Turkish and English-language sites in those years and had no reason to read a German national news desk, so the Netzeitung is a grave I am writing from the records rather than from memory. What makes it worth a grave anyway is that the experiment it was running is the one every newspaper on earth eventually had to run, and it ran it first and lost.

~ what got buried with it ~

The end came in two cuts. At the close of 2008 all fifteen freelance contracts were terminated, which quietly killed Altpapier and most of the other columns. A year later the remaining twelve staff journalists were made redundant on economic grounds, and on 4 January 2010 netzeitung.de came back as an automated aggregator taking its feed from nachrichten.de. The traffic fell off immediately.

That zombie ran until July 2014, when it stopped being updated at all, and the domain was eventually pointed at the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. So the name outlived the journalism by four and a half years, publishing the whole time. Anyone checking whether the Netzeitung was alive in 2012 would have found a site full of fresh headlines and concluded that it was.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »