"In addition to rifling through telephone records for a year from 2005 to 2006 to determine the extent of contacts between management and journalists, it now looks as though Telekom was also using mobile phone signals to keep track of their locations."

"For years, Deutsche Telekom hired outside companies to spy on journalists and members of its own supervisory board, hoping to uncover internal leaks."

"Lufthansa said it did an analysis of passenger movements in 1999 and 2000 to try to identify who on its 20-member supervisory board was regularly leaking information to [the FT Deutschland]."

"Germany’s Bertelsmann AG will publish what could be the first in a series of annual yearbooks whose content is derived from the many hundreds of thousands of user-created entries on Wikipedia."

Der Spiegel refuses to rule out print-online integration…

German encyclopaedia giant Brockhaus is moving out of printed encyclopaedias and is to concentrate on a free online version. The 21st edition is likely to be the past printed edition

"’The German public was within a hair’s breadth of never learning of the end of an era,’ wrote Der Spiegel, until someone updated his death notice on the internet encyclopaedia site, Wikipedia."

Beijing to Hamburg in 15 days by rail. Biggest snag: the switch between standard-gauge to Russian-gauge at the Chinese-Mongolian and Belarusia-Polish borders.

Germany’s Die Zeit is expanding its online archives by 250,000 articles dating back to 1946.

Germany’s journalism magazine has named a blogging media correspondent its "journalist of the year"… Stefan Niggemeier is one of the founders of the widelyread Bildblog.de, which critiques the tabloid Bild.

"And here is one key pillar of Mecom’s European strategy: the notion that all journalists have to be able to work across different media. … This idea may be old hat to Brits but it is a big step in Germany, where two of the biggest newspapers … still

FAZ publisher Frank Schirrmacher’s full speech on the negative impact of the internet on "Qualitätsjournalismus". The time delay involved in print as a virtue. etc etc. Yawn.

Here we go again. The Internet threatens not only the souls of children, but also quality journalism, says Frank Schirrmacher, publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Spiegel Online’s Christian Stöcker responds.