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  Venerated German Paper Gets a Makeover: Can FAZ's New Look Halt Shrinking Circulation?

Venerated German Paper Gets a Makeover Can FAZ's New Look Halt Shrinking Circulation?

By Markus Brauck

Part 2: A Lack of Joie de Vivre

What is odd, however, is that the paper has managed to pull off the stunt of changing its layout while otherwise remaining exactly the same: The FAZ's transformation does not include a single new idea in terms of content.

D'Inka speaks of the paper's "high barrier to entry" and the need to "make it accessible." It sounds like he wants to say what politicians do when their message fails to get across: It's all just a communication problem. There is nothing wrong with the content.

But in fact it is precisely in that area that the FAZ is on the retreat. The political commentators seldom bother to move beyond idiosyncratic conservatism. The vigorous debating culture that once made the paper great has now disappeared.

What's missing is reporting and a bit of light-heartedness, a little humor and a certain joie de vivre -- all things that the Süddeutsche manages quite effortlessly. "When you read the Süddeutsche, you have to laugh three or four times every day," one FAZ editor says. And what about the FAZ? The editor does not reply, but only smiles silently.

Others are more explicit: "The FAZ is reader-unfriendly," says newspaper researcher Horst Röper from the Dortmund-based media thinktank Formatt Institute. It makes no effort to represent complex issues in a way that non-experts can understand them, he says, adding, most damningly of all: "The paper is boring."

The only person who ever manages to generate any excitement is co-editor Frank Schirrmacher. He once devoted the entire feature pages to printing a section of the human genome, a long series of different combinations of the four letters C, G, A and T. He also helped to push forward the recent debate on German author and Nobel laureate Günter Grass, after Grass admitted to having been a member of the SS, by publishing an interview with the writer. Schirrmacher's colleagues, especially those from the political desk, tend to find his knack for self-promotion somewhat off-putting. They prefer to remain in the background.

Georg Paul Hefty is one of the paper's best-known commentators. He stands for everything the FAZ's left-wing enemies despise: its conservatism, its closeness to the CDU, and its defense of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "When he writes, the FAZ turns into Pravda," the left-wing Die Tageszeitung once wrote about Hefty.

For Hefty, constancy is a positive thing. "I have never changed," he says. "All that has changed is the world around me." He expects something of the same from his paper.

Hefty recently wrote about a strategy paper on neo-conservatism by Markus Söder, the general secretary of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and his associates. One sentence in his piece could almost be a description of the FAZ itself: "They have nourished the assumption that conservatism is not an independent force, even within the CSU, but rather a sequence of more or less accepted clichés."

The FAZ often seems similarly formulaic. But it's usually no better when it occasionally attempts to cover up its own insecurity by heavy-handedly declaring war on everything it considers modern.

This is currently clearest in the "family policy arms race" the paper believes it has discovered and with which it hopes to gain the attention of its regular readers. Children's day care is presented as if it were the root of all evil: "Nurseries create what the government is allegedly fighting against." A sentence like that isn't made any nicer by a new layout.

Left and right, conservative or liberal -- those are the worn-out categories that the FAZ trots out every day.

Hefty believes the majority of people in Germany are left-wing or at least left-leaning liberals. "That's what is behind the Süddeutsche's success," he believes. "The political balance in Germany works in its favor."

But perhaps the reason for the Süddeutsche's success is simply the fact that what the FAZ most likes to do -- writing about other institutions as an institution itself -- has gone out of fashion. That's not something a photo on the front page can fix.

But what is more interesting than the question of what the FAZ will look like, is the question of how the paper would like to look. What image of itself does it want to convey? The advertising campaign that the paper has launched to coincide with its makeover is quite revealing in that respect.

The campaign no longer uses images of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl standing on a gargantuan container ship. That was conservative, statesmanlike and somehow clunky. Now the FAZ is trying to woo new readers with images of people like Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen, a glamorous working mother of seven, of all people.

She too is conservative -- but also nicer, somehow. The effect is reinforced by the fact that she is shown standing in front of a field full of white rabbits.

The FAZ seems to mean business.