So farewell then, FTD

TRUE to form, the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) will not go quietly. On December 7th the daily newspaper launched in 2000 is due to print its last edition, celebrating its biggest scoops, outlining the stories it would have loved to write, and inviting its star columnists to forecast the future. Memorabilia, including a sofa in salmon-pink FTD livery, are being auctioned; the proceeds will go to Reporters Without Borders, an NGO that defends press freedom.

In its short life the paper shook up German journalism with fearless, well-informed reporting—and pushed its big rivals, Handelsblatt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), to shape up. But it failed to pinch market share and is said to have accumulated losses of €250m ($327m). Gruner + Jahr, a German publisher, which had started the FTD as a joint venture with the Financial Times (part-owner of The Economist), took full control in 2008 and last month said it would shut it down.

It is not the only casualty in Europe’s biggest newspaper market, in which 18.4m papers are sold daily and read, allegedly, by two out of three people over 14. On November 13th M. DuMont Schauberg, another German publisher, declared the Frankfurter Rundschau (FR) insolvent. The paper will close unless a buyer is found.

Most German dailies are local monopolies. But more and more people, especially the young, are getting their news online, mostly for nothing. Print advertising is dwindling, and online ads are failing to make up the difference.

In Frankfurt and Berlin several dailies have been slugging it out. The FAZ is a national paper but competes with the FR. In the capital the Berliner Zeitung, Berliner Morgenpost and Tagesspiegel battle for the same readers and advertisers. The Berliner Zeitung shares some of its editorial team with FR. If it folds or is sold, the Berliner Zeitung will have to make do with fewer staff.

Some hope that the FTD team will resurface online. A possible model is Mediapart in France, which started five years ago as a provider of investigative journalism with no advertising. It now has 60,000 paying subscribers and makes an annual profit of more than €500,000. But France, where big industrial firms control large parts of the press, is an easier place in which to excel than more competitive Germany.

Correction: A previous version of this article wrongly abbreviated the Berliner Zeitung as BZ. The BZ is another Berlin newspaper published by Axel Springer AG.