Weekly Digest: Axel Springer’s focus on America, Voice of America scandal

Axel Springer, Europe’s largest publishing house that owns multiple news brands in Germany and the United States, announced restructuring plans that would shift its focus on the American market. 

The company will phase out publication of print editions within the next few years and reduce staff to cut costs across its German news outlets. As The Wall Street Journal reports based on an interview with Axel Springer’s CEO Mathias Döpfner, “[t]he cuts will mainly affect the company’s German dailies Bild—Europe’s biggest-selling tabloid—and Welt”.

Axel Springer will focus on developing US brands Politico, Insider and Morning Brew, including Politico’s expansion across the United States and in Europe in an attempt to compete with leading American publishers like The New York Times. The company is also setting up a new American headquarters in New York.

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Substack announced that it reached 2 million paid subscriptions across the newsletters hosted by the platform, up from previously reported 1 million over a year ago. The company says it has over 20 million monthly active subscribers, a figure which includes readers with free subscriptions.

While the 2 million figure is still almost significantly smaller than The New York Times’ close to 10 million paying subscribers, it puts Substack well ahead of most leading individual news publishers. The company has benefitted from cost-cutting measures across big tech companies, which led them to shut down rival newsletter platforms – namely, Twitter’s Revue and Facebook’s Bulletin.

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US government-funded broadcaster Voice of America (VOA) has faced a scandal over its hiring of journalists who formerly worked for Russian propagandist channels.

Harry Knyagnitsky and Daria Davydova were hired by VOA’s Russian-language service late last year “after working for several years at media outlets controlled by the Russian government or closely allied with it”, The Washington Post notes. At the time 15 VOA journalists raised concerns over Knyagnitsky’s and Davydova’s previous involvement in promoting Russian propaganda narratives, signing a letter to the management calling for the two hires’ dismissal. The management decided against dismissing Knyagnitsky and Davydova then.

Three months later, the letter was leaked to Ukrainian outlet Kyiv Post, prompting a backlash from the Ukrainian media community. As a result, Knyagnitsky and Davydova have been placed on paid leave as VOA promised to conduct an internal review into the issue. (Knyagnitsky denied being a propagandist and expressed his support to Ukraine in a comment to The Washington Post; Davydova did not comment).

Bonus — Two more stories you might want to check out:

• https://deadline.com/2023/02/vice-france-closure-editor-in-chief-tweet-1235274029/  
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64726729  

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