German Blogosphere Stuck in Beta

Der Spiegel has come out with a piece comparing the current blog scene in Germany with the bogosphere in America.  German bloggers are strictly small-time operators, Spiegel complains, and no blog has achieved anywhere near the readership - and corresponding advertising revenue - as the American mega-blogs, such as Huffington Post:

Während die Szene in den USA mittlerweile gutbezahlte Stars hervorgebracht hat, die im Wahlkampf mitmischen und als echte Davids die Goliaths der etablierten Medien ins Grübeln bringen, bleibt Deutschland Blog-Entwicklungsland. Hier regieren allenfalls Beta-Blogger statt massenmediale Alphatiere. ( While the blog scene in the US has produced some well-paid stars, who get involved in the election campaign and as genuine Davids have demoralized the Goliaths of the established media, Germany remains a backward blog-nation. The beta-bloggers are in charge here instead of the mass-media alpha-operators.)

The blogs featured in the article include Bildblog, NachDenkSeiten and  Spiegelfechter.

It is unfair to compare the political blog scene in the US with that in Germany.  For one thing, blogs in English attract readers from all over the world, while German-language blogs have a fraction of the global audience.  Political blogs in America grew in response to the success of right-wing talk radio; progressive voices needed a platform and were pretty much shut out of the traditional media. Then the US press failed miserably during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: they became mouthpieces for the Bush administration and the Pentagon. Blogs offered the only forum for dissenting views, and they soon became a vehicle for political organizing, giving rise to the NetRoots phenomenon. Today there are mega-blogs in the US that have their own ecosystem of secondary blogs.  Some of the more successful blogs such as TalkingPointsMemo now have the resources for getting hard-hitting news stories out to the public faster than even the newspaper Web sites and also provide original reporting.

Germany is not nearly as politically polarized as the US - there is not the same "debate culture" as we have here - so blogs don't need to play the same role.  The blogosphere is more fragmented, with individual contributors rather than large group blogs. Some bloggers view the German blogosphere as "more authentic" than the scene in America, since there is not the same temptation to rake in the big bucks. "Gut, dass es keine deutsche Huffington Post gibt" (It's a good thing there isn't a German Huffington Post) writes German blogger Don Alphonso. They wear their "Beta status" as a badge of honor.

Comments

[Omar]

i think the nicest detail about this is that such media outlets as Der Spiegel which on their side have been degraded to nothing more than a better boulevard press after being a well researched paper are complaining about the quality of the blogosphere..

I think there are many things that we could profit by looking overseas. Die Süddeutsche has for example portrayed "The Daily Show" and finds that

"Mag ja sein, dass Deutschland mit Angela Merkel, Kurt Beck oder Erwin Huber nicht gerade die Charisma-Stars zu bieten hat. Dennoch hätte es die politische Klasse verdient, intelligent und stilvoll verulkt zu werden. Dafür könnte man glatt mal auf die "Tagesschau" verzichten."

I agree fully!

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/212/304189/text/

[David]

Who is the German Stephen Colbert?

[Björn]

That would be Oliver Pocher:
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=156625

[Björn]

Damn, blew it. Of course Stephen Colbert himself is the German Stephen Colbert.

[antonymous]

The last truly horrible attempt at a satiral news show was back in the 80s by a very sad Dutch host.

Of course there was for a long time the hilarious "GNN" Gute-Nacht-News, but it became too hot for the RTL station changing ownership to the Bertelsmann conglomerate. They were also more into generally satirizing the my-am-i-important stance of "news".

Colbert is still somewhat stiff. We do have much better "cabaret", ever heard of that in America?