The television group RTL Deutschland and the Hamburg publishing house Gruner + Jahr are merged to form a new, cross-media media company with TV, radio, streaming services, online and magazines.

The new company will start operations at the beginning of next year, announced the Bertelsmann Group, to which the two companies belong, on Friday.

“There is still no model for such an approach,” said Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Rabe in an interview with the FAZ

Carsten Germis

Business correspondent in Hamburg.

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RTL will completely take over the magazine businesses and brands from Gruner + Jahr.

These include magazines such as Stern, Brigitte, Geo, Capital, Schöner Wohnen, Eltern and Art. A purchase price of 230 million euros was agreed.

He pointed out that RTL and Gruner + Jahr had been working together successfully for many years.

“So we're not starting from scratch if we merge them now.” It has not yet been decided who will be the head of the new company.

"We will decide on the exact structure of the organization and personnel issues in the coming months," said Rabe.

There should be large, overarching thematic sections such as news, business, people, food and knowledge, the content of which will be played out via video, audio, online and print.

“As far as the head of the company is concerned, we will make a decision in one to two months.” The challenge is “how we can shape it in such a way that the identity of the individual brands is also preserved”.

"National Media Champions"

There has been speculation about a possible merger of the two media houses since February.

"We were faced with the question of whether we should stick to the collaboration that we already have with joint journalistic projects and in the advertising market, do we expand the collaboration or do we dare to take the big step and go completely together," said Rabe, who also works alongside Bertelsmann also leads the European RTL Group.

The responsible committees had examined this thoroughly and "decided on the third option as the most promising answer to the competition with the global tech platforms," ​​he said.

For Bertelsmann, the decision is a further building block in the strategy to consolidate the European media landscape in the increasingly fierce competition with global platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Google and Facebook.

RTL has already started this in France, the Netherlands and Belgium.

“Our strategy is about building national media champions in Europe,” said Rabe.

In Germany, with the merger of RTL and Gruner + Jahr, Bertelsmann is now going one step further than in neighboring countries.

Who is in the running for the chief post

In the media industry, Julia Jäkel's retirement as CEO of Gruner + Jahr in April of this year was seen as the first sign that the “open-ended process” started in February on the future of the two companies should lead to a joint venture.

Stephan Schäfer, who succeeded Jäkel as Gruner + Jahr boss, is also content manager at RTL and in this dual role one of the top managers at Bertelsmann, who played a key role in driving the project forward.

Internally, according to observers, he will therefore be given greater chances of becoming head of the new company.

Also in the running is Bernd Reichart, who has been head of Mediengruppe RTL-Deutschland since January 2019.

According to the plans, some of the Gruner + Jahr stores such as Territory, Applike and the stake in the Hamburg news magazine Spiegel will not go to RTL, but will remain with the Bertelsmann Group. "If we want to systematize cooperation, that means that the editorial teams are also connected across the media," said Rabe.