BusinessWeek wonders if American newspapers could learn anything from the success of Europe's biggest newspaper, Germany's Bild. Which, you may recall, is the paper for whom resourceful journalist Judith Bonesky (pictured, and "heh") staked out Barack Obama at the gym. (Attracting the attention of Maureen Dowd, who got to ask the politician she once described as "diffident debutante" [and a butterfly! -ed] if he thought it "creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like 'fabric softener with spring scent.'") "It's tempting to credit Bild's double-digit profit margin solely to sensationalism," concedes BW. How entrenched-old-media; we would never do something stodgy and dismissive like that! Instead we sought out someone German-speaking, who explained the subtler points of the Bildstyle:

Well, the official translation was 'barack obama trained his muscles next to me' but instead of trained, what it literally meant was "turned to steel" as in Obama "turned his muscles into steel" next to me. Then there's the last line, which Dowd translated as "What a man," but if you look on the site it's capitalized, WHAT A MAN."

And WHAT A WORK OF EXCLUSIVE REPORTAGE, yes? Anyway, Bild boasts 12 million readers a day and employs a newsroom of 800, none of whom, BW reports, look "ready to jump out of the window" the way all those sanctimonious self-important dogooder American newsroom staffers would upon reading this piece if they all hadn't been laid off already! [BW]