Prof. Dr. Heiko Staroßom

Table talk

Ladies and gentlemen,

I would like to welcome you to the Scotland Hall of the Atlantic Grand Hotel Bremen. Once again we are coming together for the Bremen University Talks. This year's topic is: The future of media, communication and information. An incredibly exciting topic! Above all, it is also a topic in which everyone can - and does - have their say. Have you ever noticed that wherever people who know each other at least rudimentarily come together, a conversation starts immediately? The human language has twenty-six letters and thus generates an unlimited number of new sentences. Well, at least that's how it was in the hoary past, before smartphones.

But we definitely agree that communication is something deeply human. So we're going to have a Bremen University Talk that affects us all. If everyone can have their say on this topic, then I also have a chance to make a small contribution. I would like to share with you the thoughts of someone who has spent decades consuming media, especially newspapers.

I would like to start with my own experience from this spring: Christian Siedenbiedel called me at the end of January this year. Siedenbiedel is a journalist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, whom I know from my time at my previous employer, when I was CEO of the cooperative organisation's second-largest accident - a large Volksbank in the Odenwald region. We were sufficiently exciting for the media back then, and I remember some good, constructive discussions with Mr Siedenbiedel and other journalists. I also remember generally fair media coverage: I didn't expect the newspapers to write a promotional brochure about us. So I was in a positive mood when Mr Siedenbiedel contacted me.

He began with a brief review of the old days and then told me that he was working on a story about how the European Central Bank (ECB) was spreading the word that the low interest rates enforced by the ECB were actually a gift to the banks. How would I feel about that? He had pressed the right button for me. I was immediately in fight mode! We then had a very constructive discussion about the fact that, of course, at least the northern European and German banks are suffering greatly from the low-interest phase, savers are being dispossessed and capital is being put to the wrong uses in the long term.

I found much of the content of the newspaper the following Sunday to be correct. The quote I agreed on: "If interest rates stay like this for ten years, you have to be very worried", was also correctly reproduced. Of course, we discussed the fact that this state intervention in the market affects all banks, large and small, institutions from all pillars of the German banking industry. In line with my conversation with the journalist, I was therefore expecting an article about the ECB's rhetoric distorting the facts. But what was the lead story of this article? "When will the first savings banks close - with an upside-down savings bank S? The low interest rates are destroying the business of savings banks and Volksbanks. They won't last much longer." By the way, Sparkasse Bremen turned 190 years old this year, and we achieved the second-best result in these 190 years last year. I am optimistic that we will last a long time and I am looking forward to the anniversary for 200 years and beyond.

So much for my current experience. You will understand that I will be cured for at least the next ten years and will avoid any dialogue with journalists. But very few of us are part of the news, most of us just consume the news. How do things look from this perspective?

The relevant historical research is fairly unanimous: it was not - as our technology- and media-loving present tends to assume - the invention of modern printing as such that triggered the first modern media and communication revolution. This invention was made around 1450 by Johannes Gensfleisch (1397 to 1468), a patrician's son and trained blacksmith from Mainz called Gutenberg. Rather, it was the fact that the needs of certain social groups to acquire and disseminate knowledge generated a mass demand for written material that led to a sometimes steadily progressing, sometimes rapidly increasing use and thus the establishment of this new, complex and capital-intensive cutting-edge technology. The history of book printing and the history of European knowledge are therefore closely intertwined. Our modern knowledge society was heralded here at an early stage.

The rise of newspapers as the privileged organ of the modern public sphere began in the early 17th century. With newspapers and the periodical press as a whole, a secular perception of the world emerged. Through their symbiosis with the pub, coffee house and reading cabinets, newspapers are as much the subject of collective as individual reading, and the addiction to news can also reach illiterate sections of the population through reading aloud. The circulation figures alone are therefore no indication of the dynamism with which newspapers inject the ever-growing raw material of news into the capillaries of society before they experience their steep rise to mass media in the 19th century.

Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the press as the fourth pillar of the state. In the context of the liberal theory of the press, which experienced its heyday in the 19th century, the term "fourth estate" became commonplace. In this understanding, the media stand alongside the three classical powers of legislation (legislative), administration and police (executive) and jurisdiction (judiciary). The institutions of public opinion are thus incorporated into the prospect of a horizontal division of power in conformity with the law. Of course, this is not where they belong, even if there has long been a dispute as to whether the media, due to their de facto influence on politics, do stand alongside the traditional powers. But this is a mistake, because the public sphere only arises at a distance from all other authorities in the community.

So if the press is a power at all, it is one that has to assert itself in fundamental difference against the other three powers. The idea of wanting to subsidise the future of the paper-based newspaper from public funds, with the argument that it is necessary for the continued existence of democracy, requires newspapers to become dependent on the authorities whose reflexive counterpart they must be. Removing this distance invites corruption, or at least suspicion of corruption. If the public is no longer interested in the medium, if society no longer wants to reflect on itself, then no public subsidy can prevent it from dissolving itself. Until then, we must try to understand that politicians drown in media campaigns and yet crave media presence to the point of undignifiedness, that the media also seek proximity to politics, beyond mere reporting obligations.

The term "media democracy" is used to express the fact that the political public sphere is orientated towards the presentation principles of the mass media. Only that which can be photographed and told is politically real. However, human interest is only ensured when all problems are personalised. Finally, attention and continuability must be generated by giving the story the form of a conflict. These are the formal conditions for politics to be sold as good entertainment.

In the media democracy, political problems are not thought through, but felt. The easiest way to achieve this is by moralising a problem. It also enables those who understand nothing about the issue to take part in the discussion. Moralisation is therefore a service for the incompetent. They then have to deal with people and stories instead of just ideas and values.

The more confusing and complex the world becomes, the more important simplification becomes. Under modern media conditions, politics must personalise all problems. The stars of the political stage then save us investment in expertise and judgement. But there are also factual reasons. Politics must be personalised precisely to the extent that we reduce complexity through trust. To put it more clearly: the personalisation of politics is the way out of incompetence; the judgement of people replaces the judgement of factual issues.

Politics, the media and opinion polls form an endless loop in the public entertainment programme. Talk shows and TV debates are entertainment programmes in which the media and politics stage each other, framed by pollsters and experts who ensure what was actually heard and seen in subsequent broadcasts about the programme. This not only teaches us that politics has become part of the entertainment industry, but also that the core of democracy is demoscopy. In this form, the people rule over their political leaders. Demoscopy helps people to make their choice, because to do so they need to know how others vote; and it helps politicians to distinguish themselves in the election campaign, because to do so they need to know what people want to hear. Voters ultimately become viewers of their own predicted behaviour.

So a news programme is good when viewers feel well informed. As everywhere in the 21st century economy, it's the same here: The customer is the product. And the product of a good news programme is the viewer who feels well informed. Public opinion is therefore not what people think, but what people think, what people think.

The newspaper always addresses the general public. But the general public of the newspaper is always a particular one, in every respect: in terms of circulation, price, distribution area or, last but not least, level of education. For example, if you add up the readership of serious national daily newspapers in Germany, you arrive at no more than 2.5 per cent of the total population. If you add in the readers of the serious weekly press, bearing in mind that many people read both a daily and a weekly newspaper, the figure is perhaps five per cent of the population. And finally, if we are generous and include sophisticated regional newspapers, we are still talking about less than ten per cent of all citizens. In other words: the newspaper is an elitist event, whether you like it or not. And: the newspaper is elitist, not despite, but because it makes a claim to generality. It is representative, and it must see itself as representative because its task is to create the fixed framework in which every important new piece of news is negotiated.

Influence is therefore often attributed to the media. Influence is often based on authority, and of all the qualities that a newspaper or - more generally - a media institution can possess, authority over all events is the most difficult to achieve.

There is only one way to acquire authority: through knowledge, wisdom, reliability, through free, reasoned judgements that are subject to discussion. This also means that original ideas can only support the authority of a medium, but cannot guarantee it. Such authority can only be built up over years and decades. And it must be defended on a daily basis! Trust dwindles when the public is convinced that a coalition of interests is defending against the emergence of alternative views or arguments in public dialogue.

Once media, especially newspapers, have authority, the format (paper or tablet or smartphone) loses importance. Surveys among readers of daily newspapers repeatedly show that it is primarily an older audience that turns to newspapers. I am now one of them. I can claim that I have been a subscriber to a major German weekly newspaper from Hamburg since the age of 17 and later to several daily newspapers. In contrast, the readership of today's people under the age of forty and even more under the age of thirty is low and is also declining. At the same time, the same studies show that the authority of the newspaper does not diminish as a result: in this respect, it is superior to all other media, even among the younger audience. Some people then read the newspaper in the edition on electronic reading devices, like my children.

One of the many jokes attributed to Count Bobby, a fictional character from Vienna in the 1950s, is his mock astonishment at the fact that just as much happens in the world every day as fits into tomorrow's newspaper. Hidden in this joke is an insight into the fundamentals of the newspaper: you can write about anything, the objects and ways of writing are virtually infinite. But you have to do it in a limited space and for a specific point in time. For a long time, this limitation was so self-evident that people didn't think about it. Today, however, it stands in contrast to the seemingly infinite possibilities of digital media, both in terms of the spatial limitation and in terms of the newspaper's link to time: the daily newspaper has to be printed and distributed in one day. After that, it turns into an archive and waste paper. These two elements - temporal and material closure - are among the basic characteristics of every copy of a daily newspaper printed on paper.

One of the motives that has driven the development of the media since the emergence of the printed newspaper in the early 17th century has been to reduce the time lag between the event and its entry into circulation as news. The fact that the printed daily newspaper has to compete with faster media is therefore nothing new. It has been slower than radio for almost a hundred years and slower than television for around sixty years. So far, this competition has not done lasting damage to the large, serious daily newspaper. On the contrary, in Germany the 1990s - the years following the generalisation of private television and the PC - were one of the most successful periods in the recent history of newspapers.

The fundamental difference between then and now is that digitisation has now reached the newspaper itself: it has become part of the newspaper. First in its production process, then in its distribution. So while the paper-based newspaper has remained as slow as it has been for decades (it has even become slower following the discontinuation of the special editions), it has also become part of the fastest, digital media. On the one hand, it is tied to paper and print, while at the same time representing the highest level of topicality. This is possible because, unlike radio and television, the Internet is not another medium, but a new infrastructure for media. The acceleration of the media, which began two hundred years ago, has now reached its historical and systematic end. The news has reached the event, in the form of social media. However, this not only means that news agencies are losing their monopoly, but also that the acceleration of the flow of news is no longer the final and decisive criterion in the competition between the media.

However, it would be a mistake to believe that the Internet edition is consistently more up-to-date than the printed daily newspaper. Every online edition (and this applies to all newspapers) contains articles that are considerably older than yesterday's newspaper. Online therefore by no means only means a higher degree of topicality, but also a higher degree of archive.

Among those who are currently talking in public about the future of the newspaper, the majority seem to be a special kind of Adventist. They are convinced that the final triumph of digital over paper-based media is imminent. However, this Adventism is based on a tautological idea, namely that the near future cannot help but be a continuation of the recent past. It is true that newspapers have changed a great deal over the past twenty years and have evolved from exclusively paper-based organisations into hybrid entities between paper and digital. But it is by no means certain that these hybrids are only transitional phenomena. It is at least as likely that the dual structure of print and digital media will remain. And it is by no means impossible that the hybrid creatures will once again contain larger proportions of paper in the future. In fact, the greatest opportunity for the future of the printed newspaper lies in the consistency with which it contrasts the abundance of options on the web with the scarcity of options in print, both editorially and technologically.

So I will remain an avid newspaper reader in the future!