German Publisher Axel Springer Seeks Classified Profits

Mathias Döpfner may be the only chief executive of a major European company to have written a book on German New Wave bands and a treatise on eroticism in music. The former music critic might also be the only European CEO who’s confident he’s figured out how to save the newspaper business. Döpfner, 50, runs Axel Springer, a German publisher whose titles range from the proudly trashy tabloid Bild to Die Welt, a high-minded broadsheet originally intended to counter Nazism after World War II.

As the 6-foot-7 Döpfner sees it, getting newspapers back in the black is a matter of returning to basics: in particular, classified ads. The big three classified categories—jobs, homes, and cars—were for decades newspapers’ cash cow, until free alternatives like Craigslist and Trulia pushed the market almost entirely online. Döpfner has tried to grab some of that business back, spending almost $1 billion in 2009 and 2010 to buy classified-ad hubs like France’s Seloger.com and Norway’s StepStone, a job-seeker site. Döpfner says he’s eyeing Deutsche Telekom’s Scout24, Germany’s biggest online classified site.