Print media – from survival in the dying newspaper industry

At 29, I was suddenly a made man. It went like this: I was sitting at the desk at home. Then the phone rang. It was the secretary of a newspaper editor, whose name I had heard of it somewhere. He wanted to talk to me. I let myself be done. Yes hello, said the newspaper editor that he just read a text from me – whether I would rather work for him and his newspaper?

That was in 1998, those were still the good times, the newspaper did not fit under the door at the weekend because the job market was so thick, the big editorial offices bought each other from the employees. The fact that there was an internet was rumored to be aware of the edge.

The editor offered me 3000 D-Mark a month from the start, as a freelancer.

“What do I have to do for it?”

“Mr. Ungerer, you decide that yourself!”

I wrote to myself for them, from time to time they asked whether I would not like to be an editor in their ugly city. In the course of a life crisis I agreed. I entered the editorial team of the Große Zeitung and they didn’t even have a place for me. The newspaper has been too swollen lately, in scope and staff, I would have to be patient until there was a room for me. The newspaper had bought the house next door and wanted to make breakthroughs there.

That was the old days. Then her end came. So around 2000, 2001. Jobs were no longer occupied. Large -scale moving plans had to be collected. Soon you hear the gurgling and spilling of the first wave of discharge in the house. Then the second. Then the phone rang for me. This time it wasn’t the editor. It wasn’t his deputy either. It was a representative of the deputy. Not even he told me what it was about. I had to guess.

I would be released. You had the controllers in the house. There was a relapse order. Gave a social plan. In that I had too few points, I wasn’t there for very long, I had no family, the child was still a medium cell pile in my girlfriend’s belly. My girlfriend had just lost her job at the other big newspaper. We went to another city without jobs. That was in 2003. Since then I have watched dying.

First the newspaper, which was only available on the Internet, died a hip project, so I was briefly part of the editorial team. When I arrived, everything was already hopelessly disputed, one spoke of intrigues from the executive floor, there was no money either, sometimes you came in in the morning and was not greeted back by anyone.

At some point the handling came in. The handling had Porsches and Rolexe, they had bought up the project, they announced great plans that nobody believed to do, then invited the management level to a workshop weekend. Shortly afterwards the shop was closed, the Porsches rolled out of the house again, and it was interesting to have taken it through.

Next our text agency died. We had worked on a gap in the market: glosses. Funny good texts for news, available free house for all regional daily newspapers. A text, seventy prints! Seventy fees. That was the plan. In fact, we only had a handful of customers, and if each of them printed once a week, we could be happy.

After a few years we looked at my partner and I – the fastest and funniest author I was allowed to work with – then we stopped the company. Today she works as a teacher. We are no longer a couple. The eternal cooperation in a confined space, the constant money worries. Killer!

We also made a satirical side online. For a well -known news magazine from the print world. Every day there were three, four or five jokes on the current situation, the thing had cult status – and almost didn’t cost anything. For a touch of budget, we generated millions of clicks. But the news magazine had new bosses at some point. Somehow they didn’t know what that was supposed to be, satire. Then they turned the rooster. We were allowed to go, we were only a freelancer anyway.

Then I was still a text chief. In free cooperation. At a weekly newspaper. Weekly newspapers are the future. This special. She belonged to an left million inheritance, and the left million inheritance liked to make guest appearances as a publisher in the talk shows. So there had to be the sheet, no matter how thin, no matter what was in it. The publisher sent an email once a week and said how he found the cover picture, otherwise you had rest in front of him. He changed editors every few months.

The job was fun for three years. I had a lot of very nice colleges. The Kollegis enjoyed my whining and moan when I had to read one of the texts in the sheet again. Whenever the opportunity offered themselves, I said: You have to invest here. The thing has 28 pages and costs four or five euros, the texts have to be good! You have to put more money, then you have better authors, the editors have to rum less and can write more themselves!

None of that happened. Instead, the editor -in -chief was replaced. And Corona came. Rumors told me about an emergency plan. The management devised it. There is no longer any text manager in the emergency plan. Shortly afterwards it was actually time: two colleagues came to my office one after the other, with whom I had worked confidently as a freelancer for three years. As if it were a little extra vacation, they said: Oh Klaus, you don’t need to come from next week.

That was a real highlight in my processing history. I’ve been handled so many times, I could become a resolving consultant. The problem is: it hardly needs any expertise. Because the newspapers are largely contested by free authors, and what rights does a freelance author have?

He can climb the cat hump, bow and silently close the door. And every “Tschüs, see you soon” could have been the last one. My ghosting stories are legion. You write for years for such a high gloss leaf in which journalism and PR enter into an exciting new alliance, then you write a lively text about an advertising customer-Zack. Away. Never order again. From time to time you write for a magazine supplement for a rather conservative sheet, the editor is totally nice and open, then you write him because you want, a piece about the connection between violence and gender – Zack, away. Written down, mail, Facebook, no matter. Never an answer again. You write for a humanistic news portal for years, then you will no longer get answers. Mail, Facebook, Insta – silence. Never again a demand, never a text order, no explanation. Should you call afterwards?

So life as a freelance author, Juchhei! And the people in the media business may not even be much feelings and merciless than anywhere else. But the system makes it easy for you: a free author is nothing, it can be snapped away at any time, there are enough others, and the fear in a dying trade ensures that everyone stays nice and somehow try to cling to the falling flow.

In the interviews sometimes: what tip would you give your 18-year-old I?

Learn something neat, Klaus. Find a job, any where you can trust your collegis. Write on weekends. Especially look for this one super woman, a Huguenottin from Hamburg, you will only meet at 50! And if you don’t know what to do, and if everything looks touched, cycling to the “nd”: You can drive a paternoster, what fun it is! Down, down, down, go down into the basement – but then, like a miracle, you stay alive down there and the journey goes up again.