Holger Friedrich, the newspaper owner who says stay away from journalists

It is an unusual message from a newspaper owner, but Holger Friedrich wants everyone to know that he has a low opinion of reporters.

The German media, according to the publisher of Berliner Zeitung, has “very low” trust among the public and poor professional standards. He told the Financial Times: “I would advise any person with responsibility or [a public] exposure level to avoid contact with most journalists.”

The 56-year-old tech millionaire entered the newspaper business alongside his wife Silke in 2019 to rescue a struggling Berlin daily with a rich history. Under his ownership, Berliner Zeitung’s financial bleeding has stopped and online readership has swelled. But its proprietor has become entangled in a string of controversies. 

Within weeks of acquiring the broadsheet, Friedrich was outed as a former Stasi informant. He later faced accusations of using his newspaper to give a platform to Covid vaccine sceptics and Russia supporters following Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

Most recently, he has caused an outcry among journalists in Germany, earned a reprimand from the press council and triggered lawsuits after exposing a source. 

Friedrich, who grew up in communist East Germany, says that he is trying to shake up a media landscape he argues has been debased by double standards, West German cultural hegemony and narrow-minded group think.

Speaking in the newspaper’s historic office in Alexanderplatz, he says the German media is “discussing or analysing politicians or business leaders and not following our own same standards”.

First published weeks after the fall of the Third Reich, Berliner Zeitung was one of the most important papers in East Berlin during the years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Owned by the communist party, it had a daily circulation of up to 500,000. 

After German reunification in 1990, it went through four owners — including a brief stint with infamous British media baron Robert Maxwell — and became stuck in a spiral of declining readership, dwindling advertising revenues and mounting losses.

Friedrich, a former McKinsey partner, paid an undisclosed sum to acquire the title from Cologne-based publishing group Dumont in September 2019, describing the purchase as a “romantic opportunity”.

His turnaround has involved cutting costs, overhauling the website and growing digital advertising.

While acknowledging that reader numbers are dwarfed by the biggest German outlets, and that print circulation has fallen to 33,000, he claims to have transformed the business and says online growth has been “very very good”. He adds that he “does not care” about print. The number of visits to Berliner Zeitung’s website and app is up more than 40 per cent this year to 17.6mn in July, he says.

After combined operating losses of €8.4mn between 2019 and 2021, the publishing house disclosed in July that it made €1.2mn in operating profit last year, adding that the good performance was continuing in 2023.

Friedrich argues he is seeking to democratise journalism by publishing reader contributions on topics from the state of the Russian opposition to the history of a Berlin motorway bus stop.

He says Russia supporters and vaccine sceptics deserve to be heard as well as those holding opposing views, adding he trusts readers to form their own opinions.

But, since his takeover, the paper has made waves for its owner as much as for its journalism.

Friedrich and his wife used a joint article in November 2019 to thank the last communist leader of east Germany Egon Krenz for not ordering the shooting of protesters who toppled the regime in 1989 and questioned his later jail sentence. 

Days later, the conservative broadsheet Welt am Sonntag revealed that Friedrich served in his youth as an unofficial collaborator for the Stasi.

The media owner claims that this account was incomplete. An independent investigation commissioned by the then-editor of Berliner Zeitung found that Friedrich himself was a longtime target of Stasi spying, with the secret police noting his negative views about the GDR. As a 21-year-old, he was coerced into co-operating with the Stasi for three months after being arrested on suspicion of planning to flee the GDR, then a criminal offence.

The investigation also found that the co-operation was ended by Friedrich, who claims that he warned those he was supposed to spy on.

Friedrich casts himself as a freethinker. Earlier this year, he backed a “manifesto for peace” that urged Germany to stop supplying Ukraine with weapons and in May he attended a reception at the Russian embassy. But he describes Vladimir Putin as a “criminal” and says that “Russia has to pay” for its aggression in Ukraine. He insists he has “no sympathy” for the GDR.

While relishing the idea of sparring with German media titans, he also appears to crave their acceptance, saying rivals were never interested in views “as an outsider” or how his experience in finance and tech might be helpful.

Friedrich is now facing widespread media opprobrium after breaking journalism’s principle of source protection.

In April, he was approached by Julian Reichelt, who had been fired as editor of newspaper Bild in 2021 after facing allegations of lying to his employers over sexual relationships with junior female staff. Reichelt denies having deceived his bosses.

Friedrich says that Reichelt offered him explosive information about a compliance investigation conducted by Bild’s parent company Axel Springer, the owner of US-based outlets Politico and Insider. Declining the scoop, he wrote to Axel Springer executives to notify them over Reichelt’s leaking.

That enabled Axel Springer to launch a legal battle against Reichelt, taking the former editor to court to demand that he return his €2mn severance pay. Reichelt has said he did not share internal Axel Springer documents.

While Friedrich was cleared of legal wrongdoing by courts in two complaints brought against him by Reichelt, his actions caused horror among journalists. The German Press Council, the sector’s self-governing oversight body, issued a rebuke.

His own outlet felt it needed to publicly distance itself, with editor Tomasz Kurianowicz releasing a statement vowing to always protect sources. However, a few months later Kurianowicz testified in a civil case about material that had been shared with him by Reichelt. Kurianowicz told the FT he had been asked to give his account of the events after Reichelt sued Friedrich and the publishing house. Friedrich said the paper had to defend itself against Reichelt.

Friedrich says he was appalled by the sensitive nature of the documents he claims to have been offered — and, more generally, by what he sees as the eagerness of the German press to publish embarrassing material for little reason other than titillating readers.

He is on a mission to raise the bar he insists. “The open question is how we can improve our standards.”

This article has been updated regarding court testimony given by Kurianowicz about material shared with him by Reichelt