Springer Shapes Public Opinion

Axel Springer Verlag publishes a host of national and regional papers. In 2000, the company and its 13,600 employees generated total sales of € 2.9 billion ($ 2.56 billion). The publishing house produces everything from magazines for special target audiences to top-selling daily tabloids. With these products, Axel Springer reaches millions of people every day and shapes public opinion in Germany.

Springer's most successful publication is BILD - Europe's biggest daily newspaper. BILD caters to average people. It's a mixture of sex, scandal and politics-made-simple. If you want to know about public opinion in Germany, you have to know what BILD is saying.

BILD is written in a way that you can read the whole paper during your lunch break. And that's exactly what millions of Germans are doing every day. According to Axel Springer figures, more than 11.5 million people read BILD every day. That's almost 15 percent of the entire population.

And the Axel Springer publishing house doesn't only put out the daily tabloid BILD. There's the more upmarket national daily "Die Welt" and dozens of regional papers in Germany's biggest cities like "Hamburger Abendblatt", "Berliner Morgenpost" and "Berliner Zeitung".