CLIPS 2004

BUSINESS WEEK. December 6.
Germany's Very Public Battle Over Public TV
By William Boston in Berlin.

Private rivals complain that tax-financed networks are competing unfairly
It's Saturday night and millions of German couch potatoes are huddled around the warm glow of their television sets. For viewers tuning into one of Germany's top channels during prime time the menu includes: The Big Partnership Test , an advice show for couples; Under Suspicion , a detective show; the popular game show Who Will Be a Millionaire? ; and The 100 Most Annoying German Hits , a weekly roast of pop music.

But where's the highbrow fare Germans are paying for? Under a decades old system, Germanylevies a fee of $21 a month on every household with a TV. The resulting $7 billion a year funds the largest public broadcasting system in Europe, encompassing film production, 22 TV channels, and more than 50 radio stations. The British Broadcasting Corp., by comparison, got $5.2 billion from taxpayers in the latest fiscal year. But Germans increasingly wonder whether they're getting their money's worth. "In terms of substance there is hardly a difference anymore between the public and private stations," says Ursula Rogg, a Berlin school teacher.

BUSINESS WEEK. November 1. (interviews and reporting)
Showdown In The Ruhr Valley
By Gail Edmondson in Frankfurt, with William Boston in Bochum

A new wave of layoffs looms in Germany's industrial heartland, and unions are mobilizing for battle.

BUSINESS WEEK. October 25.
Online Extra: United Internet
By William Boston in Berlin

Germany. Rank: 48. Sales: €415 million.
Ralph Dommermuth, the 40-year-old chief executive officer and founder of United Internet, knows the blessing and curse of depending on a single big customer. Back in 1996, Dommermuth's company 1X1 was a marketing-service provider that had played a significant role in transforming the online service of phone behemoth Deutsche Telekom from a user-unfriendly Internet provider called Datex-J into a trendy Web portal called T-Online. Dommermuth provided the software and attracted customers to the service.

Then T-Online decided to stop outsourcing its marketing, and Dommermuth lost his biggest customer. "We had to decide between finding a new key customer or providing Internet service ourselves," he told BusinessWeek in a phone interview, while vacationing in Greece aboard his 30-meter sloop. "With the rise of the Internet it had become relatively inexpensive to become a service provider ourselves."

BUSINESS WEEK. October 4. (interviews and reporting)
Germany: A Brighter Sun In The East
By Jack Ewing in Frankfurt and William Boston in Leipzig - October 04, 2004
Even as labor unrest builds, East Germany's economy is growing fast

BUSINESS WEEK. October 4.
Off The Dole -- And On The Assembly Line
By William Boston in Leipzig

Heike Müller, a 37-year-old mechanic, embodies what seems to be going right in eastern Germany. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Germany was unified a year later, Müller lost her job at a chemical company. Since then, she has gotten by with make-work schemes and retraining programs. Then, in 2001, BMW decided to build a manufacturing plant in Leipzig, and Müller's life changed. She completed an orientation program, then began commuting to Munich to train at BMW's plant there for the 2005 opening of the Leipzig factory. The new plant will manufacture BMW's 3-Series limousines. "Now I am the head of the windshield mounting unit," she says with pride. "I was really fed up with being unemployed."

Müller's story shows what can be accomplished when companies work with the government and unions to turn things around.

TIME EUROPE MAGAZINE. September 21. 1,728 words.
Screen Dreams
By WILLIAM BOSTON

It's almost 2 a.m. in the English Bookstore in a cosmopolitan Berlin neighborhood near Savigny-Platz, and Markus Jonas is fiddling with a computer mouse to adjust the video image on his PC. He and three friends are watching a live broadcast of a Boston Red Sox baseball game that's taking place six time zones away. Manny Ramirez, the Red Sox left fielder, steps up to bat and belts a home run over the fence at Fenway Park, putting three runs on the scoreboard. "I've been a die-hard Red Sox fan for the past two years," says Jonas, 33, a recent American Studies graduate, who sometimes helps out at the bookstore while he looks for a job, as he sips a Berliner Kindl beer. "I subscribed to MLB.TV last year to watch the play-offs. It's a bit shaky sometimes, but lately the service has gotten a lot better." …

As more and more consumers in Europe, the United States and Asia opt for broadband — delivering everything from sporting events and live concerts to movies on demand — high-quality video services are becoming the norm. A movie buff in Poland can watch Hollywood's latest blockbuster even if it never comes to his town's cinema; a Bon Jovi fan in Weimar, Germany, can see the rock star play an English gig in real time without leaving home. The era of live events and video on demand (VOD) is finally here. …

TIME EUROPE MAGAZINE. August 2.
New Wave Wunderkind. They Don't Need Another Hero
MUSIC: With their anticonsumerist anthems, WIR SIND HELDEN are leading Germany's indie music scene in its battle against the rise of cookie-cutter pop bands

Two years ago, Judith Holofernes, lead singer of Wir Sind Helden (We Are Heroes), was, in her own words, a "mousey, shy singer-songwriter." Today, she's a rock star, stepping onto a sun-drenched stage at the University of W ürzburg in a trendy blue denim dress draped over a pair of jeans, flailing away on a metallic red electric guitar with her stringy blond hair waving like a pennant in the wind. At the end of 2002, Holofernes was already popular as a folk-rock singer on the Berlin club scene. But that really wasn't her gig. She "always wanted a band," she says. "I wanted to play big, loud music." So when she eventually met up with three bandmates, they shrugged off serial rejections from the major record labels and decided to produce and market their own CD, which features a blend of new-wave pop, indie rock and social criticism. Now, wherever they go, they play to sold-out crowds like the one in Würzburg.

TIME MAGAZINE. April 27. 752 words.
The Intelligence Test
By William Boston | Berlin

For the past month, the world has watched as the U.S. Congress investigates whether intelligence failures kept the FBI and CIA from stopping the Sept. 11 attacks. But at the same time, Germany has quietly been doing some soul searching of its own. In the late 1990s, a surveillance action dubbed Operation Tenderness, carried out by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), came close to uncovering the Hamburg cell that harbored several of the 9/11 plotters. But German intelligence officials, like their American counterparts, were unable to connect the dots. Now the German government is finally debating whether it can effectively fight terrorism without a radical overhaul of its cherished federalist system. "It must be a cause for concern that we didn't recognize what the perpetrators, who resided in Germany for some time, were brewing up before Sept. 11," Interior Minister Otto Schily told TIME.

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE. March 29. 1,016 words.
Skip the DVD; instead, dial up a flick

BERLIN After its run in German movie theaters last year, the latest James Bond adventure, "Die Another Day," was rolled out for home viewers, but this time with a twist.
Instead of arriving first in German living rooms via pay TV, the Bond film was available about six weeks earlier for download over high-speed phone lines in near-DVD quality from T-Online, the Internet service provider owned by the phone giant Deutsche Telekom that is the largest ISP in Europe.
A novelty for movie buffs, perhaps, the early release underscores a trend that is quickly gathering pace acrossEurope. Telecommunications companies, from behemoths like Deutsche Telekom and France Télécom to upstarts like e.Biscom inItaly, are rolling out commercial movie download services and multichannel television packages over fast Internet connections. Though still in the early stages, a new video service is emerging that could be worth nearly E2 billion, or $2.4 billion, in just a few years.

TIME MAGAZINE. March 18. 1046 words.
SAP Thinks Small
By WILLIAM BOSTON |Berlin

Sudden success can be more challenging than failure. In 2000, for example, the German soft pretzelmaker Brezelbäckerei Ditsch GmbH found itself growing faster than it had planned. The Mainz-based company's hottest product — a line of frozen oven-ready soft pretzels — fueled a growth spurt and Ditsch's managers knew they needed to overhaul their computers and software in order to cope with expansion. Ditsch's sales of baked goods to more than 160 bakeries across Germany grew from €40 million in 2000 to about €70 million in 2003.

A committee was appointed to explore new software, and Michael Roche, a Briton who had only recently joined the company's three-member executive board, lobbed a simple question at the team. "Has anyone considered SAP?" he asked, referring to Germany's largest software firm. There was a long silence. Then someone replied: "Why? They just make software for big companies like Daimler."

Once upon a time, that was true. … These days, however, it's not just pretzel companies that need SAP; SAP needs the pretzel companies. Having sold its wares to most of the world's largest businesses, SAP now believes it has to tap into the small- and midsized-business market to keep growing. …

THE NEW YORK TIMES. March 1. 1,156 words.
'Airlift for Art': Modern Painting Returns to One of Its Cradles
By William Boston

The Neue Nationalgalerie here, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's airy minimalist temple to the modern, is housing an exhibition of 212 works from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which is undergoing renovation before reopening at the end of the ... Not far away, on Pariser Platz, the …

TIMEEUROPE.COM. January 20. 776 words.
Goodbye Is Hard To Say
By William Boston

A German town loves and needs its American GIs
The end of the Cold War more than a decade ago left Western troops all dressed up with nowhere to go. As if frozen in time, the city of Baumholder reflects the days when America and Germany stood shoulder to shoulder against the Soviet threat. But time is catching up and the U.S. troops here could soon be headed home, leaving Baumholder with an uncertain future. For each of the town's 4,800 residents there are nearly three Americans, most attached to "Old Ironsides", the 1st Armored Division that has stood guard here with its tanks and heavy artillery since the end of World War II. Even as the rest of Germany adjusted to the fall of communism, Baumholder seemed caught in a cold war time warp: American GIs and their families walk the streets, hang out in the local bars, eat at local restaurants and play the on local soccer teams. Some 5,500 U.S. troops are currently stationed in Baumholder. But with America's strategic focus shifting to the Middle East and the war on terror, the Americans may be heading out, a move that would gut Baumholder's economy. Many people fear the city would lose much more than just money.