Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung German Newspaper (English literally Frankfurt General Newspaper), short F.A.Z., also known as the FAZ, is a centre right liberal-conservative German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (F.A.S.).
It has the legal form of a GmbH; the independent FAZIT-Stiftung (FAZIT Foundation) is its majority shareholder (93.7%). The F.A.Z. runs its own correspondent network. Its editorial policy is not determined by a single editor, but cooperatively by five editors. It is the German newspaper with the widest circulation abroad, with its editors claiming to deliver the newspaper to 148 countries every day.
The first edition of the F.A.Z. appeared on 1 November 1949; its founding editor was Erich Welter (de). Some editors had worked for the moderate Frankfurter Zeitung, which had been banned in 1943. However, in their first issue, the F.A.Z. editorial expressly refuted the notion of being the earlier paper’s successor or of continuing its legacy:
“Arising from the fact that some of our colleagues previously were members of the Frankfurter Zeitung, it often has been suggested an attempt was being made here to be the successor to that newspaper. Such an assumption misjudges our intentions. Like everyone, we too are astonished at the high quality of that paper; …however, showing respect for an amazing achievement does not imply a desire to copy it.”
—FAZ Editorial board, Dohrendorf, 1990.
Until 30 September 1950 the F.A.Z. was printed in Mainz.
Traditionally, many of the headlines in the F.A.Z. were styled in orthodox blackletter format and no photographs appeared on the title page. Some of the rare exceptions were a picture of the celebrating people in front of the Reichstag in Berlin on the German Unity Day on 4 October 1990, and the two pictures in the edition of 12 September 2001 showing the collapsing World Trade Center and the American president George W. Bush.
In the early 2000s, F.A.Z. expanded aggressively, with customized sections for Berlin and Munich.An eight-page six-day-a-week English-language edition distributed as an insert in The International Herald Tribune, which is owned by The New York Times Company; the articles were selected and translated from the same day’s edition of the parent newspaper by the F.A.Z. staff in Frankfurt.[6] However, F.A.Z. group, suffered a loss of 60.6 million euros in 2002. By 2004, the customized sections were later scrapped. The English edition shrank to a tabloid published once a week.
On 5 October 2007, the F.A.Z. altered their traditional layout to include color photographs on the front page and exclude blackletter typeface outside the nameplate. Due to its traditionally sober layout, the introduction of colour photographs in the F.A.Z. was controversially discussed by the readers, became the subject of a 2009 comedy film, and was still current three years later.
Currently, the F.A.Z. is produced electronically using the Networked Interactive Content Access (NICA) and Hermes. For its characteristic comment headings, a digital Fraktur font was ordered. The Fraktur has since been abandoned, however, with the above-mentioned change of layout.
After having introduced on 1 August 1999 the new spelling prescribed by the German spelling reform, the F.A.Z. returned exactly one year later to the old spelling, declaring that their experience had shown that the reform was ambiguous and partly nonsensical.[citation needed] After several changes had been made to the new spelling, F.A.Z. accepted it and started using it (in a custom version) on 1 January 2007.
