578 FRANK BÖSCH AND CHRISTOPH CLASSEN
East German media through the Treuhand (trust agency) and establishing
new publications; the WAZ Group was also quite successful on the daily
newspaper market. The fi fteen SED district newspapers with the highest
circulation were particularly sought-after by West German publishers.
The Kartellamt determined, however, that each publishing house could
take over only one SED district paper, but these newspapers nonetheless
usually achieved a much stronger dominance over the regional markets
compared to the West. The bloc parties’ press outlets were also quickly
bought out: the FAZ Group purchased many of the bloc-CDU papers,
while Springer snapped up the NDPD outlets. The news agency ADN was
sold to the Deutscher Depeschendienst (ddp), which was renamed ddp/
ADN in the 1990s, and the ADN image service Zentralbild went to the
Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa). The media landscape in reunifi ed Ger-
many thus fell almost entirely into the hands of West German publishers.
That said, however, the media landscapes in East and West since the
1990s have still diff ered from one another over the long term. With the
continued dominance of the ex-SED regional press, fundamental struc-
tures of the GDR media system have remained in place. This has often
been criticized as “privatization by oligopolies,” which has preserved the
GDR districts as spaces of communication, leaving hardly any room for
national or local papers.^103 Indeed, as of the mid-1990s, the former dis-
trict newspapers still accounted for over 90 percent of the newspapers
sold in the former GDR.^104 Their subscriber bases and regional anchor-
ing, as well as their publishing and printing facilities, gave them a de-
cided advantage over the few newly established papers and the smaller
publications put out by the bloc parties. Furthermore, their content was
also a better fi t for their readership than that of many of the new papers
or those imported from the West.
The number of separate editorial offi ces with a full staff therefore sank
rapidly in East Germany as early as 1992, even dropping below the GDR
level. But, it was not only East German papers that failed after 1990;
many newly established West German papers never really got their feet
on the ground in the East. Even in Berlin, where many Western publish-
ers optimistically started new papers with lofty goals of taking advantage
of the high population density within the city, several of these foundling
papers soon died off. The Burda/Murdoch venture with a new tabloid
paper Super! failed after just a year, despite the fact that they had hired
journalists from BILD and fed into East German resentments against the
West. On its second day, in a much-cited lead story, the paper proclaimed,
“Poser Wessi beat to death with a beer bottle.... All of Bernau is happy
that he is dead.”^105 In contrast, the ex-SED paper that the conglomerate
bought, Berliner Zeitung, was able to hold its own. But they were never