The negative prize “Closed Auster” this year goes to Holger Friedrich, the publisher of the Berlin newspaper. The 56-year-old received the award “for his frightening and destructive handling of journalistic informant protection,” said the Journalists Association Network Research on Saturday in Hamburg.
According to his own statements, publisher Friedrich had the name of an informant, namely the former Picture-editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt, passed it on to Springer-Verlag. Reichelt had offered him confidential documents from the Springer Group in spring 2023, the publisher announced at the end of April manager magazine with the fact that it was about “communication between the Management Board and private communication from Axel Springer employees”. Friedrich and his editors decided “not to use them because this would have violated personal rights and other professional standards”. Instead, he destroyed the material and “informed Axel Springer SE of the facts,” he says.
With this, Friedrich broke the protection of sources and thus one of the basic principles of journalism, network research justified the award. “We usually give the ‘Sealed Oyster’ to people who withhold information,” said Daniel Drepper, chairman of the journalists’ association.
However, the breach of source protection by Holger Friedrich was so serious that the research network made an exception this year and awarded the publisher the negative price. With this behavior, Friedrich not only had his colleagues at the Berlin newspaper, but harmed all journalists in Germany because it shook the trust of informants in the press, explained Netzwerk Recherche. This breach of trust could make people shy away from sharing their information with reporters in the future.
According to the journalists’ association, Holger Friedrich wrote in response to the invitation to the award ceremony that he was unfortunately unable to take part because he was abroad. Last Thursday, the German Press Council had already reprimanded Holger Friedrich for “violating the protection of informants”.
Since 2002, the Recherche network has been awarding the “Closed Oyster” to the “Information Blocker of the Year”. So far, the negative prize has gone to the US car manufacturer Tesla, the Hohenzollerns, the armaments company Heckler & Koch, the ADAC, the world football association FIFA and the Catholic German Bishops’ Conference. The journalists’ association claims to have more than 1,100 members. Its goal is to promote educational and investigative journalism.