Wolff Telegraph Bureau

Orbis, 2019

Link to article: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/4/559.abstract?keytype=ref&ijkey=KCr0p2sRaf0z0Cm From August 2013, a new, controversial ancillary copyright law (Leistungsschutzrecht) permitted German publishers to charge online news aggregator, such as Google for displaying article snippets. Implementation remains contested, but this is not the first time that new technology has prompted Germans to seek intellectual property rights in news. In August 1927, a German delegation successfully pushed through its compromise resolution on the legal protection of news during a Conference of Press Experts at the League of Nations. The resolution foresaw protection for news before publication, but allowed national governments to regulate news after publication. This left space for Germany to promulgate a national law on news that Germans hoped would become a model for others. This article uses the Conference of Press Experts to argue that German approaches to media, technology and law developed from the intersection between national and international concerns. In contrast to other scholars’ focus on the press as a national phenomenon, the article shows that the international spotlight enabled a temporary cooperation between two groups often at odds during the Weimar Republic: the press and government officials. Officials saw law as a form of soft power to raise Germany’s international profile, while the semi-official news agency, Wolff, aimed to counter domestic competition and stop radio listeners eavesdropping on its news. Yet, bureaucrats and the media only cooperated effectively on the international stage. In domestic discussions after the conference, consensus swiftly disintegrated. This interplay between national and international imperatives remains key for media policy today as well as in interwar German history.

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2021

The central pitch of this study is: different portfolio of knowledge related to propaganda and public relations are competitive in these two decades of re-initiating democracy and public debate in postwar Germany. The research is aiming at priming the definitions and practices of public relations, press relations, political communication and propaganda. How did these stocks of knowledge change in this period, how did the procedures of communicating official information adjust to the shifting perception of 'the public'?

Year book, 2007

Wolff, acclaimed political and cultural commentator, 2 was amongst them. Wolff was born in 1868 into a family of Jewish textile merchants. At an early stage he showed a talent for writing and, at the age of 38, became the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt, 3 one of the most influential liberal newspapers in Germany. He held this position until the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933, when as a Jew, a liberal democrat and a fierce Nazi opponent he escaped the Nazi terror. Wolff and his family were offered asylum in France, where they settled and lived for almost ten years.

Cihannümâ tarih ve coğrafya araştırmaları dergisi, 2019

Before the World War I, Havas, Wolff's, and Reuters agencies signed confidential agreements with several governments, promising to serve them in various ways. These agencies concluded contracts with any government that was willing to subsidize them, treated news as an ordinary commodity. To convince statesmen to sign agreements with them, the agencies took advantage of world politics and tensions between empires. By this way, Wolff's overcame its vulnerability to Havas and Reuters while Havas defied competition in its home market and secured a large subsidy from the Russian Empire for more than a decade. Likewise, Reuters signed confidential agreements with the Japanese and the British empires and was subsidized by the Egyptian government for more than five decades. From the second half of the nineteenth century, until the World War I, the policy of the first and major news agencies of Europe, Havas, Wolff's, and Reuters was to maximize their profits by signing contracts with governments.

2013

This article explores the changes in news agency mechanisms that accompanied the restructuring of Europe after World War I. During the interwar period, a new form of negotiation replaced the pre-World War I conception of English, French and German spheres of influence with a more cooperative vision of the collection and dissemination of news. I argue that the private and business-oriented nature of news agency cooperation enabled it to outlast better-known political attempts at multilateralism. Indeed, it often produced more concrete results by offering different incentives for cooperation to all involved from large global agencies, such as Reuters, down to the small agencies of new Central and Eastern European nation-states. Overall, the agencies' cooperation until the outbreak of World War II suggests alternative periodizations of the interwar period than the division into a fairly internationalist 1920s followed by the increasing bilateralism of the 1930s.

2018

The paper at hand provides a brief overview of the development of broadcasting as a means of signal transmission in Germany during its emergence (1920-1945), nationwide extension (1946-1980), expansion of satellite and cable broadcasting (1981-1995) and the still ongoing process of digitalisation (up from 1996). With regard to the general subject of the project the paper is embedded in, it also briefly discusses the most obvious and relevant consequences of the altering forms of signal transmission for broadcasting as a logistic and technological system to transmit information, and the consequences for broadcasting as an institution that provides information to the public-and thus has societal, political, cultural and economic implications.

Literary Journalism Studies, 2019

Rolf Brandt (1886-1953) was a German journalist, author, and political commentator. His first work was as a war reporter on the Eastern Front during the opening months of the Great War (World War I). His reports appeared in several important German newspapers (Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and Frankfurter Zeitung) and were compiled and published in 1915 as Fünf Monate an der Ostfront: Kriegsberichte (Five months on the Eastern Front: War reports). Brandt's reports were more than just army-approved press releases. He wrote in a way that constructed a bridge between the home front and the front lines. In the process he employed techniques now associated with literary journalism. With a clear point of view, he told his story through a sequence of scenes, instead of a simple historical narrative, and included genuine dialogue and status details. While scholars of German literary journalism point to Egon Erwin Kisch as the originator of German literary journalism, this study suggests Brandt should be considered an early practitioner of literary journalism in the German language. More interestingly, Brandt's particular brand of literary journalism had an unmistakably conservative nationalist perspective, thus suggesting that it is possible to have a conservative form of literary journalism.

Journal of European Studies, 2009