The result is clear: while in 1939 there were still 406 printed newspapers, today the number has fallen to less than 200. Because advertising revenues, subscriptions and individual sales in the print sector are falling at the expense of the online sector, publishers are resorting to restructuring and cutting staff. In this way, both the editorial departments and the print press as a whole are being bled dry.
At the national level
Despite a strike unprecedented in the Swiss media landscape, the philippines rcs data Swiss News Agency (SDA) is being rapidly converted into a multimedia agency. The merger announced in autumn 2017 with the Zurich photo agency Keystone, which in turn was half owned by the SDA and half by the Austria Press Agency (APA), came into effect in January 2018. Before the merger, the main shareholders of the SDA were Tamedia AG (29.4 percent), the NZZ Group (11.4 percent) and SRG/SSR (10 percent). After the merger, the APA holds around 30 percent of the capital of the new company.
The price for the restructuring is the elimination of 36 of the 150 positions in the editorial department. According to the announcement, a further nine positions outside the editorial department, particularly in marketing and sales, are to be eliminated in summer 2019. The example of the SDA shows how the downsizing of an editorial department is directly reflected in the thinning out of content: Today, the SDA no longer has a business section, and the Switzerland and International sections have been merged.