The Future of Publishing – Interview with Lorenz Maroldt

We all know when it comes to news, the daily paper is no longer a model of success. Nevertheless, they still exist, and some of them may continue to do so – at least as a brand. Of the relevant Berlin newspapers, Der Tagesspiegel ranks among the more successful, which means they must be doing something right.

One factor might be Checkpoint, a recently introduced newsletter format. Every morning at 6 am subscribers get a round-up of what Maroldt thinks is worth knowing in Germany’s capital. As if being editor-in-chief of a daily didn’t keep him busy enough, most of Checkpoint is actually produced by Maroldt himself – more often than not with a tongue-in-cheek tone. Within only a couple of months, the newsletter already has 80,000 subcribers and has just been nominated for the prestigious Grimme Online Award. The price the editor pays? Lack of sleep.

When did you get up this morning?

7am, but I wrote until late. I decided that I’d rather work until 4, than get up at 4.

What is the idea of Checkpoint?

It started with the feeling that there are a lot of people who are interested in what I do as a journalist – print or online, but who tell me that they have less and less time to read the daily newspaper. They cancelled the subscription because they don’t have the time to read it in the morning. I felt that these people needed to be reached in a different way.

In addition, most reporting on the city feels rather dry and earnest which makes it almost tedious to read. I thought there must be a different way, that would be fun to consume – and to produce.

I’ve lived in this city for a long time now – since the 80s, and I always find myself in what I feel are typical situations. For example: I’m talking to somebody on the phone and we want to go out for dinner, but neither of us can come up with a suggestion because we think it wouldn’t be hip enough or we can’t remember a restaurant in the first place. So we give one recommendation per day. If they like it – good. If not – they can blame it on me.

Or another situation: Take the Bowie exhibition. As a Berliner you know about it; you pass by the museum on a Saturday, you see the enormous queue and you think to yourself, let the tourists wait, I’ll go next week. But of course you forget and you hear about it again on the radio when it’s over: “Closed yesterday, with all-time record visitor’s numbers ...” You typically miss stuff like that. So another important element of Checkpoint is – I remind people in time.

We want to offer a product with a tangible benefit – added value for our readers and with very individual recommendations. Not: Here’s the best 100. But: Today this might be the best option for you.

Despite all the information that we have available at our fingertips – do you think we will always need editors, who process and condense information for us?

Yes, I think so, whatever we may call that person. Why do we follow certain people on Twitter? It’s usually the ones that condense information that’s relevant to us and present it in an interesting, reliable and quick way. A newsletter like ours works in a similar fashion. I almost work like a curator.

I assume you don’t do this only for fun – it must be quite exhausting to do this every night and morning.

There are several reasons why I do this. One of them is that I am always looking for fun projects. I wanted to do it – combined with the feeling that there is a gap that needs to be filled.

What effect does this have on Der Tagesspiegel? Firstly, Checkpoint now has 80,000 subscribers. That’s an enormous number for a newsletter.

Secondly, I like to link to Tagesspiegel pages, so that they get enormous traffic. But I also link to Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, and other sites or blogs.

And thirdly, how does this affect the image of the paper? Of course I can only guess. But never in my life have I produced a journalistic product that has received such a positive resonance. I get a lot of emails, too many to process myself, and I’d say that more than 90 per cent are positive.

This fresh breeze seems to project on the image of the paper. Whether that shows in an increase of subscriptions, I can’t really say, but I don’t think that’s our main goal anyway – Checkpoint is not a means of promotion. However, there might be some image transfer, contradicting the prejudice that daily papers are old and boring.

Would it make sense to perceive daily papers as a brand, as an entity, instead of dividing them into print and online?

Der Tagesspiegel as a brand has never had more readers than today. We have an enormous online reach. We’re always in the top 15 in the AGOF rankings.

The question is: How do we make money? An online reader is less profitable than a print reader – that’s for sure. However, in contrary to many colleagues that have resigned themselves to the situation, considering themselves a relic from the past, I think we are in the midst of a great revolution and that we have a unique opportunity to be part of it – on the front line.

At Der Tagesspiegel we are lucky enough to have a publisher, Dieter von Holtzbrinck, who is actually happy to be part of this revolution. He leaves us plenty of wiggle room for experiments. They don’t always work, but they need to be tried and that’s exactly what we do.

The print edition is still important, and probably for many years to come – at least for a certain circle of readers who appreciate the format. For everybody else we will develop and produce different products.

Who is this print reader?

A broad variety of people. Not just the traditional ones that don’t know anything different. There are quite a number of people who say “I like, once a day – preferably in the morning – to have a one-stop read and not be exposed to this constant stream of information.” They might be a physician or a lawyer or the guy who sells vegetables who are not online all the time.

But newspapers do change radically. Today we do things that maybe happened in a weekly publication before. The traditional relaying of news is only to prove that we know the agenda.

So how is it going to work: Making money with journalism in the future?

Online readers don’t currently pay, at least not at Der Tagesspiegel. Other publishing houses try it. In the US it works quite well, in Germany we’re having a harder time with it. Certain local papers lock their content completely and you get no access whatsoever without paying. That’d be disastrous for us, as we do make good money with online advertising. Let’s see if reach marketing remains the big thing. I don’t believe so. The pure greed for reach will be replaced by more targeted group-specific offers.

What we do here of course is offset costs. We host conferences and readings with our writers, and we do Checkpoint. There are low costs for the latter, but our online revenues are good.

Condé Nast is opening colleges and offering to write biographies for private individuals with their editorial team and photographers.

We’ll try to do it the journalistic way. Take our new product, Agenda – a special interest publication for the capital’s political scene. We took a closer look at who the decision makers in town were and what they read. We found that more than 50 per cent of the people that have a direct or indirect impact on political decisions (that’s about 35,000 people here in Berlin), read Der Tagesspiegel. All the other papers combined don’t even get 40 percent.

We thought, there must be something in this for us. We’ve got these readers, so let’s give them something special – and so we had a closer look at what topics are of interest for this group of people. And it’s not only them; our average readers also appreciate this effort.

You could say it’s a local newspaper for the capital. It works really well. Especially regarding its commercialisation and marketing, because the target group can be defined so very precisely. Business associations or corporations that need to be in touch with political decision makers get the opportunity to send their message directly to the target group. Not with image campaigns but with informational ads. So you can either dine with everybody every night of the year or you simply place an ad in Agenda.

What does the future hold in terms of formats?

We are very successful with a Saturday supplement that we named Mehr Berlin. It closes the gap between community journalism – that often has a dodgy reputation – and the allegedly more sophisticated culture section.

We’re trying to pin down what the essence of this city is all about. It does contain a lot of art and culture, but we also shed an intensive light on the phenomena of Berlin. Since Mehr Berlin, the sales of the Saturday issue have gone up significantly. Even people that never intended to buy another printed news product buy it.

I think it is key to think in target groups, in a way that is more relevant than many others do. This is why we recently launched our weekly supplement Causa for readers who are involved in communication business.

On the whole, wouldn’t it make more sense to use indicators like revenue across the entire brand as an indicator for success, rather than the number of subscriptions or clicks?

I think that many publishing houses made the mistake of being too short term with revenue. We are lucky that our publisher follows long term strategies. We do not depend on the next quarterly report and lurch from one panic to the next if the numbers aren’t right. Many other houses made journalistic cuts as they saw their revenue decreasing, so they wanted to cut expenses.

Of course revenue is a key indicator for success. However, there are other criteria – the innovation rate for example. How often does a house come up with innovations? We look at how many editors work on new projects. I think that at least half of our editors do – one way or another, so I think we’re doing a pretty good job.

Image: Andreas Labes

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