Germany: the Bild tabloid will cut several hundred jobs and a third of its local editions

Germany’s most read tabloid Bild, owned by the Axel Springer press group, will cut several hundred jobs and a third of its regional editions in the country, in application of its digital shift.

The company will cut 200 positions in the areas of “editorial, editing and sales” throughout Germany, and reduce from “18 to 12” the number of its local editions, AFP learned from a internal source.

“Current structural changes are causing job cuts. We are parting with products, projects and ways of doing things that will never be profitable again,” management explained in an email sent to group employees Monday morning.

Since the beginning of the year, the company has embarked on a 100% digital strategy, with the long-term objective of ending the paper edition of this daily, which is one of the most widely read in Europe.

The owner of the tabloid, the powerful German media group Axel Springer, announced in February that it wanted to downsize and cut jobs, as part of this strategy, for its flagship titles Bild and the conservative daily Die Welt.

The group had also argued that certain positions, particularly in the layout and proofreading of articles, would soon be rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence and the automation of the most repetitive tasks.

Bild, however, claims to want to “do everything to avoid dry layoffs”.

Particularly focused on news items and headlines, Bild is the most widely read daily in Germany, a country of 83 million inhabitants. It claims a circulation of nearly 1.7 million copies per day, a figure which however exceeded 2 million in 2018.

To cope with the erosion of its revenues and its audience on paper, the group has therefore invested heavily in digital and multimedia in recent years. In 2022, 85% of sales and more than 95% of profits came from digital activities, according to the group.

© 2023 AFP

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