Paid circulation of weekly newspapers in Germany 1975-2023
According to the Information Community for the Assessment of the Circulation of Media (IVW), the average paid circulation of weekly papers was around 1.63 million copies in 2023. This was a slight decrease compared with the previous year and back to the level of 2021. Since 1995, however, the general trend has shown a decrease in the number of weekly papers circulated.
Are newspapers dying out?
It is not just in Germany that newspaper sales are decreasing, the same is true in the U.S. which has seen a consistent decrease since 2010. Life for most people is relatively fast-paced, and so perhaps sitting down with a broadsheet and coffee is no longer conducive to the lifestyles that people lead. A good share, however, still trust the media to provide them with reliable information, so media companies must find new formats to do so. A popular option is to read the newspaper online, most newspaper companies now offer a subscription system in which the subscribers pay a fixed fee and can access exclusive newspaper content on the internet. In the second quarter of 2024, the New York Times Media Group made around 439.32 million U.S. dollars from subscriptions alone, showing that there is room for lucrative profits in the sector. When people in Germany were asked about their online newspaper subscription habits, around 20 percent of respondents stated that they actually took out additional news subscriptions. This perhaps indicates there is still a bright future for newspapers and journalism, but it will just have to take on a new form.
Social media news
For some, social media is a convenient alternative method to access the news. There is still a large discrepancy, however, between countries that favor social media as a news source and those that do not. In countries such as Kenya, Nigeria and Thailand, 75 percent or more of adults used social media platforms to keep themselves apprised of current events; in Germany, this figure was only 34 percent in 2024. Despite this, around 78 percent of 16- to 29-year-olds in Germany said that social networks gave them the quickest access to updates about what is going on in the world. 32 percent of them believed that it gave them the ability to influence politics. Therefore, although it may appear that Germans are not reliant on social media for the news, perhaps the younger generations will continue to turn towards online sources for their news consumption. Although modern methods of obtaining the news may be more convenient, there are constant questions about the trustworthiness of these sources because it is often unclear where the information comes from. As AI becomes more developed and intelligent, it is more difficult to separate reliable from unreliable information on social media.
