Shaping Börsen-Zeitung: Evolving from Print Media to a Leading Community Platform for Financial Market Decision-Makers

Abstract

Börsen-Zeitung (BZ), a leading German financial newspaper, is transforming from a transaction-centered print medium into a relationship-centered digital community platform for financial market decision-makers. On its transformation journey BZ encounters the “media-transformation gap”, understood as the lag between the transformative potential of digital technologies and the value actually realized in media organizations. To develop knowledge and concepts for bridging this gap, the research applies the Translational Service Research and Design Methodology (TSRDM) and adopts a service lens grounded in Service-Dominant Logic, Service Science, and Service Dominant Architecture (Warg et al., 2025, Woolf, 2008, Spohrer et al., 2022). The findings indicate that by reinterpreting BZ as a service and relationship platform and by structuring offerings as modular services, the organization can reconfigure roles, workflows, and capabilities in a way that editorial content, data, and interaction services reinforce each other in a “platform flywheel” of engagement and learning. The work demonstrates how editorial content transforms from a tangible newspaper as output to an adaptive digital value proposition and input into modular offerings like newsletters, podcasts, and community verticals. While customers move from passive readers to active co‑creators interacting on BZ value propositions and resources and thus build momentum for BZ transformation to a data driven, learning organization continuously enhancing its capacities and capabilities to create (McGowan and Shipley, 2020, Senge, 2006).

Keywords: Media-transformation Gap, Translational Service Research And Design Methodology (TSRDM), Service Dominant Architecture (SDA), Service Platform

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007711