A bitter power struggle is raging at the news magazine “Spiegel”. According to information from Business Insider, editor-in-chief Steffen Klusmann is about to be replaced. The management wants to sell Klusmann and is already in talks about canceling his contract. But now the editors are fighting back and want to prevent Klusmann from being kicked out. In an internal protest letter to the management and the employees KG (they own the majority of the publishing house), massive criticism of the processes is expressed. Business Insider documents the full letter here:
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“Dear managing directors of Mitarbeiter KG, dear shareholders of SPIEGEL, dear managing directors of SPIEGEL-Verlag,
we undersigned are shocked by the latest developments in the house. In the middle of the ongoing workshop 23 strategy process and in view of another very successful financial year 2022, the editor-in-chief is being questioned for us completely surprisingly.
In a bad tradition, many colleagues only found out about this via the rumor mill and the media services, some of which gave the impression that there was a desire in the house to depose the editor-in-chief.
We would like to counter this impression. It was only on the initiative of some colleagues that two representatives of the employees KG presented themselves to the editorial public on Wednesday afternoon – but were not able to provide clarity, but rather increased the confusion.
We don’t see why another editor-in-chief should possibly go instead of the management and editor-in-chief working out a joint strategy and ensuring stability and continuity. All colleagues in the editorial team work every day to make SPIEGEL even more successful and have made an enormous achievement in the past few years with the merger and digital reorientation of SPIEGEL, which has also led to the record profits of the last two years.
Changing the editor-in-chief would not solve any of our current problems, such as the deteriorating business outlook. On the contrary, this would result in the whole house being paralyzed again for several months. We therefore call on the KG and the management to leave this destructive course and to contribute to a constructive cooperation of the entire management in the house.