On September 1, 1949, the German Press Agency from Hamburg sent its first report on the ticker. The dpa soon becomes the market leader - and has to contend with a number of challenges.
+++ dpa 1 (domestic) german press agency starts work [...] +++
This is the first headline that the newly founded dpa sends across the ticker on September 1, 1949. Almost two weeks earlier, on August 18, 1949, several newspaper publishers in Goslar had decided to found the German Press Agency. It emerged from the merger of three Allied agencies:the German News Agency (DENA), the South German News Agency (Südena) and the German Press Service (dpd).
Cooperative structures for diversity of opinion
A few years after the end of the Second World War, three months after the promulgation of the Basic Law and a few weeks after the first elections to the German Bundestag, it is important to avoid structures that could again promote the synchronization of news. The dpa is founded as a cooperative, among other things as a lesson from the work of the national conservative Hugenberg Group, which opened the channels for Adolf Hitler's propaganda in the 1930s. Strict rules on the maximum shareholding are intended to prevent individual shareholders from exerting too much influence.
In post-war Germany, the young agency initially struggled with shortcomings. At the company headquarters in Hamburg, there is a lack of paper, chairs and communication technology. But the dpa can take advantage of the infrastructure of the start-up agencies. Above all, it adopts a completely new kind of journalism from the American allies.
De-Nazified journalism is coming
This includes, among other things, the strict separation of news and opinion, but also the "denazification of language":Racist, ideological or pathetic terms are to give way to sober objectivity, because the Allies assign the press and radio an important role in expanding democracy in Germany. Up to 600 editors and reporters, including American intellectuals, German journalists who had emigrated and young people who are not politically charged, write according to the American model.
The dpa is becoming a news wholesaler
Journalists are already familiar with hot summers in 1959. An editor in the Frankfurt dpa office knows what to do.In the years after it was founded, the dpa quickly rose to become Germany's largest news agency - and it still is 70 years later. Today it is present in almost 100 countries and more than 50 offices in Germany. The news reaches print media, broadcasters and online services via satellite and the Internet. In addition to the press and radio, dpa customers also include parliaments, associations, companies and PR agencies.
The offer is diverse:The dpa collects, processes and distributes breaking news, summaries, background information, analyses, comments, reports, portraits, interviews, quotes or colorful reports - in German, English, Spanish and Arabic. Today, around 1,000 journalists around the world produce around 600 reports in the basic service - the agency's most important product - and around 1,200 up-to-date images, plus infographics, videos and audios. Around 21 million images - and thus documents of contemporary history - are stored in the agency's archive.
"Khrushchev duck":Error quickly corrected
But even a news agency makes mistakes. For example on April 13, 1964, when the agency sent out the news about the death of the then Soviet head of state and party, Nikita Khrushchev - based on incorrect information. The report was corrected a few minutes later, but the glitch is likely to have burned itself into the collective memory of news writers worldwide as a "primal shock". And also showed how important it is to deal with errors transparently.
The crisis in the publishing houses becomes a challenge for the dpa
The news market is becoming a highly competitive industry. Various agencies compete with each other, also in Germany. In addition, there are major architectural changes in the news industry around the turn of the millennium:Print sales are declining sharply, a perfect and profitable business model for the online area of private publishers has not yet been found. The dpa felt this too, from two sides. Because it not only supplies almost all German media, it also belongs to many of them. 179 broadcasters, print and online media are both shareholders and customers (as of 2019). A new pricing model, which among other things grants circulation discounts, is intended to keep customers loyal from 2004 onwards. In addition, dpa is expanding its business areas, for example with products for PR agencies.
Centralization of the dpa and move to Berlin
All German dpa editorial offices have been bundled in a central editorial office in Berlin's Markgrafenstrasse since 2010. In Hamburg, where the dpa has resided in the villa of the former Royal Bavarian Embassy on Mittelweg since it was founded, is where the sales department, the management and the regional service north are located.
Sales dip recovered
The dpa has been working closely with the American news agency Associated Press (AP) since the end of 2012, which has caused sales to rise again after a few slumps since 2013. The fact that the WAZ media group, which now operates as Funke Mediengruppe and which the news agency had terminated in 2009, has also had a positive effect since the end of 2012.
According to the annual report, the core company dpa GmbH had a turnover of around 93 million euros in 2018 - after several years of stable sales growth, this was only a slight minus (2017:93.6 million euros). The dpa group with its 11 subsidiaries and various holdings was able to record an increase in turnover of 2.3 percent in 2018 (2018:139.8 million euros, 2017:136.7).
growth? View of target groups and playout channels
When developing new business areas, the service also relies on target group-specific offers, such as the "dpa news for children", which has been delivering texts, images and animated graphics and puzzles on current topics since 2007 - tailored to the needs of six to twelve year olds .
Increasing digitization, including among end users of content, and the steadily growing use of smartphones and apps are also pushing the German Press Agency to expand its products. In addition to text, images and graphics, videos and audios increase the bandwidth. Since 2016, the dpa has been offering its customers entire so-called multimedia dossiers:different modules, for example from the fields of politics and sports, which can be embedded and published directly in websites or apps.
Confront fake news and loss of trust
Technological modernity also entails challenges in terms of content. True to the motto "the Internet makes it possible", free media offers are more important to many users than good research. At the same time, anyone can publish. Rumours, propaganda and fake news spread at breakneck speed, the source - and thus the substance of the information - often cannot be identified at first glance. All of this goes hand in hand with a loss of trust in the established media, which was very pronounced in at least some sections of the population in the first half of the 2010s.
dpa:Fact checker since the founding year
How to deal with all this? In recent years, many media have introduced formats that attempt to clear up misinformation and rumors, mostly under the title "fact check". So does the dpa, for which the fact check is nothing new:"Dpa journalists have been fact checkers since it was founded in 1949. Because checking facts has been part of the agency's DNA from the very beginning," says NDR. But the dpa has also reacted clearly to the signs of the times and has been delivering fact checks to its customers as a journalistic product since 2013. Since the technical possibilities on the Internet and the skills of the users are constantly changing, the dpa is also further developing the area of fact checking and research:with special software and, according to its own statements, a high degree of social media skills.
The social media market itself should also benefit from the offer:Since 2019, Facebook has also been one of the buyers of the dpa fact checks in order to stop the spread of false information on its own platform.
Responsibility for the objective message to date
The dpa honored its 70th anniversary on July 1, 2019 with a ceremony in Berlin. Among the guests was Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who in his speech repeated, among other things, what has been the dpa maxim for 70 years - and could already be read in the first ticker message on September 1, 1949:
"The new agency will be characterized by the cultivation of objective news and the independence from any state, party-political and economic interest group."Excerpt from the first report by the German Press Agency, September 1, 1949