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Jeff Jarvis seems to be annoyed by all that horse race-talk about the primaries.

Well, Jeff. You really can’t imagine how crazy it is to see more or lesse exact copies of what’s reported in the US in Germany these days. It might be interesting stuff since I’d never say that the election of a new US president would not affect us here. But the details of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, the life, jive and drive of John Edwards and details of the life of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton and more or less nothing about their plans for the future, even little about their foreign policy (except positions on Iraq).

I think they only matter for one reason: it’s easy to cover for media around the world. Just copy and translate the US sources, mix it up and shake it once or twice. What you will get is a nice story of famous (well, not here) people fighting (well, not here, too) each other in “Highlander” mode: In the end, there can be only one.

That’s sensationalism, not journalism. It’s easy to cheer someone up when you already know he’ll come down again. And if you have about 10 people to write into the sky, you’ll be wrong just 8 times until primaries end.

I wrote a lengthy article on a very specific german topic for the march issue of the german magazine “Journalist“, which all members of one of the two big german journalist associations (DJV) receive. The situation is quite complex: since more than 50 years a self control institution run by journalist associations and publishers called Presserat is checking  (on demand) whether printed publications are following the ethical codex of the Presserat or not. Though it’s effectiveness is despited by critics since many years, it’s at least some kind of general benchmark for the minimum quality of content. The codex includes rules such as a clear separation of business and editorial stuff.

What I was writing about: even though most of the most popular german websites are run by traditional media, the press codex did not apply on any content that was not deriving from printed magazines or news. The Presserat would like to change that now, but in fact it’s still not clear whether this effort will show any effects: the publishers don’t want to be judged too hard and many others involved in some way don’t seem to have a real clue about what’s going on at online media in Germany.

In fact, we see some quite specific new problems arriving with online journalism. Publishers, formerly print, now do audio and video. User Generated Content is thought to be beatific, but brings a lot of new problems. There are just a few and some badly reasoned decisions by courts on responsibiliy and quality assurance duties for the publishers in the field of UGC, laws are fragmentary and some classic approaches turn out to be non-applicable nowadays.

What are we going to expect now? Either it will become a very weak online media codex and it’s effects will be none, so it’s wasted time. Or it’s going to become a real sign of quality, that gives good measuring possibilities and includes strong sanctions. Well, what’s your guess?

Some minutes ago, the german federal court Bundesverfassungsgericht published a ruling on a complaint against a  law which was set up to provide the intelligence service of the state of Northrhine-Westphalia to so called “online searching”. Most of the badly conceptualized law was ruled to be incommensurate with the german constitution.

In Germany, many people awaited this leading decision. Even though it was just a ruling on a state law, it was clearly becoming a decision on how the police and intelligence have to deal with computer systems in general. The federal court ruled, that a new basic right is now to be respected by legislative and executive branches of the state: “a guarantee on integrity of information-based systems” is derived from and included in the personal rights.

The case which the Karlsruhe based court had to rule on now was just one in a series of rulings on the question, how laws for the internet age have to be designed and applicated. A lot of laws curtailing basic rights more or less like the european directive on data retention have to be ruled in the next months and several new ones will follow.

It will be a very huge discussion during the next days and weeks, to what extent todays ruling will affect the work of the parliament, the police and intelligence. Many people in Germany have started to watch what their politicians are doing in this very specific field of politics regarding the daily internet usage life. The expertise of politicians in the field of internet politics is still improvable, as the german minister of justice Brigitte Zypries (social democrats) was showing a few months ago in a now famous interview situation. A children reporter was asking about her online behaviours and she was answering: «What is this browser you are talking about?»

«The first real internet news site» is here, former news anchorman and now publisher of Zoomer Ulrich Wickert says in a video advertorial. The german publishing house Holtzbrinck launched Zoomer a few minutes ago, targeting at young users. It’s an ambitious project, with joint forces of the staff of the last year discontinued Business News and the online department of the Berlin based Tagesspiegel.

The new site is meant to be new in several ways, especially in terms of user participation. But right now, there’s not much to see on that: you got to know that it’s the average of editorial and user voting which gives a news item it’s place on the front page.

Noticeable: a lot of flash toys, and captchas appear as soon as you try to interact with the site. Another eye catching feature is the personalization login.

In a more journalistic view, the site looks quite lurid to me («Attempted Murder?», «Mother drown baby in bath tube») and show oriented - football, pop culture…
You should take a closer look at the footer section, since there are many publications of Holtzbrinck Group named, which texts now could appear on Zoomer, too. But golem.de is missing, a german tech ticker which belongs to Holtzbrinck eLab at the moment. Unlike the Lausitzer Rundschau, which fits to the target group just like Ulli Wickert: the man who retired from TV news some year ago could be the grandfather of the young targeted group.

(Disclaimer: Right now I’m employed by a company which is part of the Holtzbrinck Group, too)

 Some german newspaper publishers believe in some diffuse future online, but if you take a closer look at it, you won’t get the impression it has to be the online journalism.

In a survey, the “Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft” (translates “Institute of the german Economy”) learned that average german online editorial staff is at 4.2 editors plus 6.3 freelancers. At many local newspapers, ratio and absolute no. of staff is 1 on 1.