German tabloid Bild cuts 200 staff and embraces AI as it accelerates ‘digital only’ strategy

Germany’s leading tabloid Bild is cutting nearly a third of its staff and closing six regional offices, as it embraces the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution to ease cost pressures.

The plan for 200 job cuts is part of an accelerating “digital only” strategy at Springer, Bild’s owner, to boost revenue by €100 million in the coming three years.

From July Bild has said it will begin parting with “products, projects and processes” with no economic future and “colleagues who have tasks, which in the digital world can be replaced by AI or other processes”.

“This sounds brutal and it is,” said Bild editor-in-chief Marion Horn at a staff meeting.

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Part of her “radical cultural shift” will see the tabloid close six regional offices from Düsseldorf and Cologne in western Germany to Dresden in the east. Surviving regional offices will no longer have senior managers, six regional editions will be cut and production of the 12 surviving editions will be managed through the head office in Berlin.

A spokesman for Springer said that, even for those who survive the cull, “the functions of editors, layout staff, proofreaders, secretaries and picture editors will no longer exist in their current form”.

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It is the second radical reform of Bild this year. In February Springer chief executive Matthias Döpfner fired Bild’s editor amid a legal battle with the previous editor over claims he abused his position for sexual favours with young women staff members.

Flagging the cost-cutting measures four months ago, Mr Döpfner said that, without radical change, the ongoing existence of Bild – and its broadsheet sister paper Welt – were in question.

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“Turnover and profit are not everything but, without them, everything is nothing,” he added. “The freedom to pursue independent and critical journalism depends on economic success.”

The 60-year-old executive has said that the near future at Springer will see “not just a farewell to print but a fundamentally new understanding of quality journalism in the digital age”.

Key to this is a growing Springer’s focus on the US, and its takeover of news portal Politico. The cost-cutting drive is also influenced by US investor KKR, which holds a 35.6 share in Europe’s largest news publishing house.

In recent years Bild has made a greater digital-first push and now has more than 600,000 paying app users, while print sales have slumped to just 1.1 million, down 76 per cent in the past two decades.