I happen to come from Alsace Please note that this makes me French – not German. In the latter sense, the BSC resembles nothing so much as a strange cross between The Daily Telegraph’s letters page and Sam Spade. With its entirely retrospective function, it is an institutional locker of stable doors after the horses have mated.Its usefulness as an arbiter of decency may be judged by how the BSC handled a complaint about the edition of This Morning with Richard and Judy of 16 October 1998. You don’t want rules? Go and live in Chechnya; watch all the porn you like, and open your post to find your mother’s ear and a ransom note.But I draw the line at the Broadcasting Standards Commission. This is the group of worthies collected together to investigate and to rule upon complaints submitted by members of the public. These may concern mistreatment at the hands of programme-makers, or may be about Mr Pootie’s horror at being confronted by gay sex on his TV screen. Someone, after all, has to take a view on what is and what isn’t kosher.
And please spare me all the guff about “who are they to tell us what we can and cannot watch?” Civilisations have rules.

The alternative is the three-year-old, thought to have been happily occupied in front of Teletubbies, who was discovered eating its Rice Krispies to the accompaniment of Johnny Wadd’s impressive ejaculations Societies that expose kids to pornography are bad societies. So, in contrast to my student self, I am in favour of regulation; of bodies like the ITC; of documents like the BBC’s producers’ guidelines; and of individuals like our own Andreas Whittam Smith. So we parents tend to look upon censors as our allies in the task of keeping highly profitable mayhem from overwhelming us. The FT’s adventure in Germany will be a test of the pink ‘un’s fitness to rule business news in Euroland as it has in Britain.. ONLY THE foolish or the very young are opposed to all kinds of censorship. Parenthood, as I’ve learned, is a pretty continuous exercise in excision and bowdlerisation. But their start-up in Germany is more testing than the acquisition of established titles in France and Spain, which were simply a matter of establishing the right price.

Half the FT’s English-language circulation in Germany is said to be a bulk sale to Lufthansa.The new launch will be a test for Handelsblatt, quintessential organ of German capitalism They are unlikely to prove a pushover Its circulation has grown steadily but not spectacularly. Is it complacent in its market or ripe for new competition? Or are there only 150,000 people a day ready to buy a financial paper in Germany?Pearson’s objective is to command a portfolio of euro zone newspapers and web sites, including editions of the FT in English and German, Les Echos in France, and Expansion in Spain. While the English- language FT and the Wall Street Journal have been must-reads for bankers in Frankfurt and a handful of senior people, neither paper is relevant to most managers or investors. But it still sells only around 20,000 copies a day, compared to 150,000 for Handelsblatt, published in Dusseldorf.By reputation, Germans have not been excessively interested in business news, provided the mark in their pocket stayed strong. Their personal investments have traditionally been in boring, reliable bonds. But as the yields of fixed income investments have fallen, Germans have surprised many with the enthusiasm of their conversion to the joys of investing in shares.

This has all recently been stimulated by the launch of the single European capital market denominated in the euro. The newspaper is expected to be launched alongside a website which will be integrated with FT , the Financial Times Internet channel. It will be edited by Andrew Gowers, former deputy editor of the FT. It is expected to include both a strong business report as well as information orientated to investors, although this alone will not distinguish it dramatically from Handelsblatt.The English-language FT has been published in Germany for more than a decade. This year’s launches have included Springer’s Euro am Sonntag, a weekly newspaper, and the German regional press has also been bolstering business news coverage.But the German FT will be the biggest launch so far and a test of both Pearson and Gruner & Jahr’s ability to succeed with a testing cross-cultural and media joint venture. New publications have been launching in a flurry to attract Germany’s expanding new class of equity investors, who have proven a hungry audience for business news.

Schaefer thinks it will cost twice that.
The FT and their German allies are entering a torrid market. Yesterday, the FT finally confirmed the open secret that the German FT was a definite runner. The new details are: it is to be printed on pink paper, and published in a joint venture with Gruner & Jahr, publisher of the established Capital economic and business monthly, and a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, Europe’s largest media group; and start-up costs are estimated at DM170m. He laughed: “Is there space for them? I think they are going to find the competition is very strong.”

If anybody yet knows when the new paper will be launched, or even what it will be called, they are not saying. Dacre and his favourite sons from the Daily Mail back bench have a reputation for excellence. Now they have to prove it once again, so that the new Lord Rothermere can show that the dynasty is safe in his hands..