Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - History

History

The first edition of the F.A.Z. appeared on November 1, 1949; its founding editor was Erich Welter. Some editors had worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung which was banned in 1943.

Traditionally, many of the headlines in the F.A.Z. were styled in orthodox blackletter format and no photographs appeared on the title page. Some of the rare exceptions were a picture of the celebrating people in front of the Reichstag in Berlin on the German Unity Day on 4 October 1990, and the two pictures in the edition of 12 September 2001 showing the collapsing World Trade Center and the American president George W. Bush.

On October 5, 2007, the F.A.Z. altered their traditional layout to include color photographs on the front page and exclude blackletter typeface outside the nameplate. Due to its traditionally sober layout, the introduction of colour photographs in the F.A.Z. was controversially discussed by the readers.

Currently, the F.A.Z. is produced electronically using the Networked Interactive Content Access (NICA) and Hermes. For its characteristic comment headings, a digital Fraktur font was ordered. The Fraktur has since been abandoned, however, with the above-mentioned change of layout.

After introducing on August 1, 1999, the new spelling prescribed by the German spelling reform, the F.A.Z. returned exactly one year later to the old spelling, declaring that their experience had shown that the reform was ambiguous and partly nonsensical. After several changes had been made to the new spelling, F.A.Z. accepted it and started using it (in a custom version) on January 1, 2007.