Germany's Bild began as a paper of pictures and became Europe's biggest seller
In 1977 the undercover reporter Günter Wallraff joined Bild's Hanover newsroom for four months under the false name Hans Esser. His books described colleagues who showed contempt for ordinary people's privacy, and they later inspired a film. The tabloid he exposed was, and remains, the best-selling newspaper in Europe.
Axel Springer launched Bild in 1952, and early issues were made up mostly of photographs, which is where the name, German for picture, comes from. He took cues from Britain's Daily Mirror, blending celebrity gossip, crime and politics, though Bild's pages are larger and its stories generally shorter. It is tabloid in tone but broadsheet in size, and it is often compared with The Sun. For most of its life it was based in Hamburg before moving to Berlin in 2008, and it prints 32 regional editions plus runs in Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey for German holidaymakers.
Sales peaked above five million copies a day in the 1980s. Circulation has declined like most newspapers', to 3.8 million by the end of 2005 and about 2.2 million printed in 2018, but the paper leads Europe in subscribers. For its 60th anniversary in 2012 it delivered a free edition to almost all of Germany's 41 million households, a print run Guinness certified as a record.
Its early line was conservative and nationalist. For decades it called East Germany the Soviet Occupation Zone, only later using the state's official name in quotation marks. Critics accused its campaign against the student movement of fuelling the climate before the 1968 shooting of activist Rudi Dutschke. Heinrich Böll attacked it and modelled the scandal sheet in his 1974 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum on it.
The German Press Council reprimanded Bild twelve times in 2004 alone, a third of all its rebukes that year, and a blog called BILDblog was founded to log the paper's errors. Its slogan, Bild dir deine Meinung, puns on the verb bilden: form your own opinion.
Source: Bild
