A sort ofGerd Schulte-Hillen passed away on Wednesday. He is eighty years old. Schulte-Hillen is one of the most important publishing managers in the Republic. His name is related to historical embarrassment, which proves his unparalleled arrogance and great economic success. 1981 Schulte-Hillen joined the publisher Gruner + Jar As CEO, he stayed until 2000. In the past 20 years, he has made the publishing house a leader in the European market, with major magazine brands such as “Stern”, “Capital”, “Bridget” and “Geography”. When the “Stern” performed particularly well, it is believed that Hitler’s diary was discovered there in 1983. These quickly proved to be false. The editor-in-chief had to hunt down the weird work (Helmut Dietl’s “Schtonk!”, 1992) that was actually shot, and Schulte-Hillen stayed. He is still at his peak as a manager, he is a promoter, deputy chief executive officer and member of the supervisory board of Bertelsmann Group.
He remained in this state until a turning point occurred after the resignation of CEO Thomas Middelhoff in 2003. Since then, the Moen family once again took charge of the group. Gone are the days of confident managers who acted like founders, publishers, and impeccable bosses.
Gruner + Jahr is a proud publisher, founded in 1965 by Richard Gruner, John Jahr, and Gerd Bucerius. Because even if the parent company Bertelsmann bought all the shares of Gruner + Jahr in 2014 and sold its subsidiary Mediengruppe RTL and the merger of Gruner + Jahr, which was officially announced on Friday, it was actually another matter: acquisition. Gruner + Jahr became a delivery service, a text studio for the multimedia group, in which RTL set the pace.
In fact, the current publisher of Gruner + Jahr, Stephan Schäfer, is the content leader of RTL and is the favorite of open management of the merged company. From a business perspective, this is logical. Bertelsmann hopes to compete with platform giants internationally and is transforming itself into a network platform on which it owns everything that belongs to the group: TV, radio, books, news. Others do the same, especially the Springer Group in Germany. The “talk” of Brigitte magazine alone shows that there is no harm in using multimedia. In the past few days, this news brand has not received as much attention as Brigitte’s conversation with the prime minister candidate.
As a magazine and newspaper company, Gruner + Jahr has become more and more powerful, but in the era of Schulte-Hillen, in the early 2000s, the newspaper business began to falter. Julia Jäkel, the boss of Gruner + Jahr, has completely changed the publishing house in the past ten years. She had to close the German Financial Times she co-founded, published a new book, dealt with other issues, and most importantly, it relied on digitalization. . The fact that she left Gruner + Jahr and Bertelsmann on April 1st of this year should be seen as a warning sign, even if you believe that after ten years at the top of the company, she left voluntarily and just wanted to leave to do something different. The chapter that Gruner + Jahr now starts has nothing to do with the time of Julia Jäkel, and it has nothing to do with the time of Gerd Schulte-Hillen.
