The News
Earlier this week, the editor of Axel Springer’s highbrow German newspaper Die Welt announced that he was stepping down.
In a post on Linkedin, Jan Philipp Burgard said that he’d recently needed medical attention on a plane, and his doctors had advised him to focus more on his health.
The recent health scare wasn’t the only factor leading to his departure.
Burgard had been the subject of internal scrutiny in recent days by Die Welt’s parent company, three people familiar with the situation told Semafor. Axel Springer leadership — led by head of communications Peter Huth — had been investigating claims that Burgard had behaved in an inappropriate way at a holiday party in December. The company became aware of rumors about Burgard’s behavior at the party after an editor at the Germany publication Correctiv made a post on Bluesky seeking information about a recent holiday party.
Executives became increasingly frustrated by what they felt were Burgard’s evasive responses to the informal probe, including his claims that he was too intoxicated to remember all of the evening’s events, prompting the company to discuss his removal from the top editor role.
An Axel Springer spokesperson declined to comment, citing sensitive personnel matters. The New York Times was the first to report the news Sunday afternoon.
Burgard did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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Max’s view
Burgard’s investigation and his subsequent exit comes as Axel Springer is entering a new and uncertain phase in the company’s decades-long digital transformation — and raises questions about whether the company under CEO Mathias Döpfner is truly ready to change a leadership culture that had allowed multiple figures to rise to positions of power, only to be forced out later amid investigations into less than savory behavior.
The German media conglomerate has undergone a massive corporate evolution over the last decade. Döpfner aggressively pursued expansion into North America with purchases of Business Insider, Politico, and Morning Brew. The company took itself private with the help of KKR, then Döpfner consolidated power by selling off its lucrative classifieds and advertising business to the global investment firm in exchange for full control of the company.
Now, armed with cash and free to execute his vision without public shareholders or the constraints of a shared ownership structure, Döpfner is on the hunt for new media properties in the US and Europe. As Semafor first reported last year, Axel Springer’s top target is The Wall Street Journal if it ever becomes available. Döpfner talked to Bari Weiss about buying her opinion site, The Free Press, and has mused privately to people close to him about buying CNN if it is eventually spun out from Warner Bros. Discovery. He also expressed interest in buying Bloomberg Media if it were decoupled from Bloomberg’s financial information business, and looked under the hood at Air Mail and podcast company Lemonada.
In an era of increasingly bland corporate media moguls, Döpfner has been an outlier, a music journalist-turned-billionaire with eccentric taste and a social circle that includes celebrities, executives, and powerful political figures, including many on the political right in Europe and the United States. And at a time when many media moguls with global media aspirations have focused on the less fraught parts of the business, Döpfner’s interest still seems rooted in news.
But with complete autonomy, close observers of the company and many in its upper ranks have questioned whether Döpfner has real interest in shifting the company culture, or whether he will continue to empower a revolving cast of male executives whose personal behavior has spilled into public in embarrassing ways.
Burgard is just the latest executive to depart amid a cloud of controversy.
In 2018, the head of Axel Springer’s US business and digital left the company following a reported human resources investigation around sexual misconduct. In 2021, Axel Springer was forced to remove the editor of Bild months after investigating and defending his sexual relationships with women in the workplace. At the time, Döpfner said “the culture at Bild was not up to our standards and does not reflect the broader culture at the company,” but also privately lauded the editor, Julian Reichelt, for his journalism pushing back against the left-leaning German government. Reichelt, who denied wrongdoing at the time, replaced Kai Diekmann, who had also left the job amid reported harassment claims (which he also denied).
It’s a trend that has not escaped German media or other senior executives at the company, who feel that Döpfner has surrounded himself with flawed leaders. Even Burgard’s departure from the company was a headache; as Axel Springer leaders probed the holiday party incident, Burgard’s health disclosures complicated his exit, I’m told.
The episode also raises questions about the company’s future ambitions. If the company ever wants to hunt major US media assets like the Journal or Bloomberg’s news business, it will likely once again need outside investment. Will investors trust that Döpfner has pushed out leaders who have proved to be a liability? Or will they decide the messy news cycles aren’t worth the headache? The answer could decide Axel Springer’s future
Notable
- Axel Springer is continuing to shift its American business. Last week, Politico laid off 3% of its staff, and announced that editor John Harris was moving into a role as chairman while the company searches for its next top editor. As Semafor first reported, the company also told staff it was launching a new paid premium subscription in the coming months aimed at finance and investing professionals.