Berliner Zeitung staff publish Montgomery protest

Opposition to David Montgomery’s takeover of the German Berliner Zeitung has taken a new twist after the newspaper only appeared in a 12-page protest edition on Tuesday. The editorial staff decided to publish the edition following the appointment of Josef Depenbrock as editor-in-chief. Employees said Depenbrock, 44, formerly the editor-in-chief of the tabloid Hamburger Morgenpost, was hired as part of the new owners’ plans to relaunch the broadsheet Berliner Zeitung as a tabloid newspaper. The reduced edition was the latest and most extreme move yet by the editorial team, which has staged a series of protests since a group of international investors, headed Montgomery took over the publishing house that owns the Berliner Zeitung last autumn. A front-page story in the reduced edition said the protest was necessary to ensure ‘the maintenance of the quality and the editorial independence of the newspaper’. Earlier this month the German Journalists Association granted the paper’s editorial team its prestigious Press Freedom Award for resisting and protesting the Montgomery takeover. (Media Guardian,May 31, 2006)

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>