Germany sustains an unusually dense Fachzeitschrift sector — periodicals for individual industries, trades and professional specialisms, many published for decades. The reader is assumed to want depth in one field rather than breadth across several.
journalism
Consumer Reports
The American product testing organisation, founded in 1936, takes no advertising and publishes ratings alongside price. Its signature judgment is the Best Buy — not the best product, but the best product at its price.
Consumer advice
American consumer journalism publishes guidance on how to haggle — what to say at a dealership, when to buy, what the dealer paid, what margin to aim for. The information asymmetry is treated as a problem to be solved rather than as the way things are.
Cause-research
Cause-research. German has a single ordinary word for the activity of investigating why something happened, and it appears in news reports as a matter of course. Die Ursachenforschung läuft — the investigation into causes is running.
There is no English equivalent that is not a phrase. Root cause analysis is consultant’s language. Ursachenforschung is what a newsreader says.
The advice column
The American newspaper advice column is a national institution — Dear Abby and Ann Landers were written by twin sisters and ran in thousands of papers for decades, and the genre continues across newspapers, podcasts and websites.
Every one of them works the same way. A person writes in describing their situation and asks. The advice is published only in answer to a request, and the request is printed first.
Too obtrusive?
In 2011 “Spiegel Online” published an article on how to write a job application for the American labor market. The beginning of the article points out differences between Germany and the US.
“Asking additional questions is not considered bothersome and the marital status should not be in your resume- if you apply at an American company it is easy to trip over cultural differences. Here is an overview over the most important concepts.”
After turning in your application, the article suggests: ”You should not expect that he or she will get back to you on his/her own.”
Conversely, asking additional questions is interpreted as annoying in Germany. The potential employer should get back to you on their own if they are interested. Asking further questions is considered as obtrusive in Germany.
BER
The Berlin-Brandenburg Airport is a topic surrounded by discord. There is no end in sight for this odyssey. The costs just continue to rise into incalculable sums. This caused the association of taxpayers to heavily criticize the politicians responsible for it in 2012.
The airport was a “manifest of poor planning, mismanagement, incomplete construction plans, and expenses beyond the budget“. The association of taxpayers blacklisted the overseeing committee of high-ranking representatives from Berlin and Brandenburg and the federal government, accusing them of “political failure” and “blind trust” in the underqualified management” of the airport.
Should one have checked the project’s progress more rigorously? Perhaps through frequent feedbback?
TIME magazine
TIME magazine was created in America in 1923 by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden. It was the first weekly news magazine in the US and its founders originally intended to call it Facts. However, because Luce and Briton wanted to keep their magazine brief (something that busy people could read in about an hour), they decided to change its name to Time and use the slogan “Take Time – It’s Brief.”
Largely thanks to its brief format, Time almost immediately surpassed its closest competitor, The Literary Digest. In fact, the magazine was so popular that in “History of Time Magazine” David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace wrote “if Time liked them, they marched or strode; if not, they shuffled, straggled, shambled, plodded, lumbered, barged, swaggered, wobbled, or slouched.”
These days, Time magazine is still the most popular weekly news magazine in the US, and has been since its creation, with the only exception of Newsweek, which briefly overtook Time during the Vietnam War.
Fault-finders
Gabor Steingart, the Editor-in-Chief of the Handelsblatt, was quoted in June 2015 as stating that Bayer AG is Germany’s most valuable blue chip company. Its shareholders are singing Bayer chief executive Marijn Dekkers’ praises.
However, anyone who wants to play devil’s advocate can find enough ammunition in their financial statements. Bayer may be profitable, but German software giant SAP and chemical company Merck are more so. And Bayer’s net financial debt tripled within a year.
Steingart said that German journalists can’t help but look for flaws. He quoted Stefan Aust, his ex-boss at news magazine Der Spiegel, as saying time and again: What we are more than anything is fault-finders.
“Academics don’t like journalists“
It’s certainly a cliché in Germany to say that academics don’t like journalists. German universities are no longer just ivory towers of knowledge, for degree programs in Wissenschaftsjournalismus – literally academic-journalism – are helping the broader public to understand complex academic and scientific material.
More and more academics, including those from the natural sciences, are teaming up with journalists not only to communicate their findings, but also to gain public relations value for their themselves and their work.
Nonetheless, there are many academics who cringe at thought of being interviewed by journalists. They find it painful to hear from journalists that their work needs to be communicated publikumsgerecht – understandable for the public, for the “man on the street.”
For the academic, for the scientist, this can only mean dumbing down. They fear that the complexity will be so oversimplified that the public will not understand the overall message, its interconnections and mutual interdependencies.
Which is why German academics will always preface their statements with: “If put in a simplified way, the ….” or “In reality it is far more complex than this, but ….”