magazine for women with "time, money and a desire for high-end gossip." The circulation of the Bunte stabilized and in 2001 even reached a new record. Under the leadership of Riekel, the magazine developed into one of Germany's most "enigmatic media brands". In 2001, the Berlin daily, Der Tagesspiegel, declared that the Bunte was the new "key medium of our Republic". Whereas other magazines were struggling to make ends meet, the Bunte was able to expand its market share. The publication moved into the center of the so-called "Burda People Group", which later also included the magazines Amica and Tomorrow. In 2002, the Bunte launched its first website in cooperation with T-Online. By contrast, "Bunte TV" was unsuccessful: The magazine aired on ARD was cancelled after only six shows due to low ratings. In 2003, Burda-Verlag invested several million in the relaunch of the Bunte, including better paper quality and a more modern layout. Despite declining circulation, the Bunte was a business success in the years that followed. Together with Focus, the Bunte achieved the lion's share of its publisher's profits. In 2016, Patricia Riekel left the publication after 1,000 issues of the Bunte. Since then Editor-in-chief Robert Pölzer has been at the helm of the people magazine. Circulation The Bunte is one of the most popular media brands of Hubert Burda Media. Like other magazines, however, it saw its reach diminished in recent years. Paid circulation has declined by 31.3 percent since 1998 and is currently 468,710 copies. The share of subscriptions is at around 19.1 percent. Criticism The Bunte was repeatedly embroiled in court cases with celebrities. In 1995, for example, Caroline, Princess of Hanover, won what up to that time was the largest-ever award for damages for pain and suffering in the history of the German press before the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg, because the Bunte had published a totally fabricated interview with her. The interview contained numerous untruthful details on her private life. The Bunte'''s chief editorial staff's counterargument was that they had been duped by an outside agency, which had sold the interview to the publication. In 1996, Tom Cruise sued the Bunte for damages because it wrongly quoted him in an interview as allegedly being "sterile". The Deputy Editor-in-chief Günter Stampf, who had manipulated the interview, was then forced to leave the publishing company. The Bunte apologized to Cruise, who subsequently dropped the