About Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung

Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung

The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) is a German regional daily newspaper published in Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia — the Ruhr's commercial capital, once the city of Krupp and now a European Green Capital. Founded by Erich Brost and first published on 3 April 1948, it is the largest regional newspaper in Germany, published by the Funke Mediengruppe — the media group that grew out of the WAZ itself. Appearing in numerous local editions across the Ruhr region — 28 at last count, stretching from the Ruhr's core cities to Heiligenhaus and Velbert — it holds the most readers among dailies in Essen, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, Duisburg, Oberhausen, and Mülheim. About 320 editors and photographers work for the paper in various employment arrangements — a newsroom that, even after the cuts, remains one of the largest regional editorial teams in Germany — and the paper appears in Rhenish format. Its website is waz.de, the digital home of the Ruhr's largest newspaper.

Overview

The WAZ is the newspaper of the Ruhr — Europe's largest industrial conurbation, the land of coal and steel reinvented as a cultural and service region. Headquartered in Essen with a partial presence in Dortmund, the paper appears in 28 local editions spanning the Ruhr region to Heiligenhaus and Velbert. In the third quarter of 1992 its circulation reached 626,000 copies — making it not just the Ruhr's paper but one of the great German dailies of its era; by July 2009 it sold about 397,000.

The editor-in-chief is Andreas Tyrock (since July 2014), succeeding Ulrich Reitz (2005–2014). The paper is published by Zeitungsverlag Ruhrgebiet GmbH & Co. Essen KG.

History

Brost and Funke's 1948 founding

After the Second World War, the journalist Erich Brost received a license from the British occupation authorities to build an independent daily newspaper. Together with Jakob Funke he founded the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in Bochum — Brost became editor-in-chief and Funke took the commercial side as publishing director, a division of labor between journalism and business that defined the paper's early culture. The first issue appeared on 3 April 1948. In 1953 the publishing house on Friedrichstraße in Essen was inaugurated — the paper moved to the Ruhr's commercial capital — and in 1961 a new printing plant on Schederhofstraße. In parallel, numerous local editorial offices were built up across the Ruhr region, creating the dense network of city newsrooms that made the WAZ the region's paper of record.

In Mülheim the WAZ sees itself in the tradition of the Mülheimer Zeitung, and the Mülheim local edition carried the additional title "Mülheimer Zeitung" until 2017 — when a new logo dropped the subtitle, ending a decades-long nod to local history.

The WAZ media group

From the WAZ seed cell grew the WAZ media group in the 1970s (Funke Mediengruppe since 2013), after the WAZ took majority stakes in the competing papers Westfalenpost, Westfälische Rundschau, and Neue Rhein/Ruhr Zeitung. The papers cooperated commercially while remaining editorially independent — a model that allowed the group to dominate the Ruhr's newspaper market without formally merging its titles. The group expanded internationally under leaders like Bodo Hombach (from 2002), acquiring papers in Eastern Europe and beyond, becoming one of Europe's major regional media houses — a remarkable trajectory from a single Ruhr daily founded with a British license.

Crisis and restructuring

After the turn of the millennium the WAZ came under economic pressure amid media change: several cost-cutting programs were adopted and editorial offices closed, with the last foreign bureaus — once a point of pride for a regional paper with global ambitions — shut in 2013. In 2015 the local edition in Lünen — whose local content had already been supplied by Ruhr Nachrichten rather than produced in-house — was discontinued. Editorial independence was gradually reduced: national reporting was outsourced to a Funke central editorial office in Berlin in 2015, while a Funke-wide sports "competence center" was established in Essen in 2016 — concentrating the group's sports journalism in the Ruhr, fittingly, the heartland of German football.

At the same time the publisher invested in digital: in 2007 the online portal DerWesten.de went live, bundling all WAZ group editorial reporting in North Rhine-Westphalia on one platform — but the strategy was abandoned in 2012, DerWesten was turned into a tabloid site, and the WAZ newsrooms' digital content has since appeared on waz.de again.

In 2019 the WAZ central editorial office and the Essen local office moved into the Funke group's new media building, and the former publishing house was demolished — a symbolic break with the Brost-Funke era, as the paper's home of 66 years gave way to a new corporate headquarters. As part of a cost-cutting program the Essen printing plant was closed in 2021; since then all WAZ editions have been produced at the Funke printing center in Hagen-Bathey.

Content and Programming

The WAZ's content centers on the Ruhr: city politics across the region's great cities — from Essen's Rathaus to Dortmund's, each with its own rivalries — the transformation of the coal-and-steel region (the end of hard-coal mining in 2018 was the region's epochal moment), Borussia Dortmund and Schalke 04 football — the region's twin passions, dividing families and cities — and the cultural life of the Ruhr metropolis, from the Zollverein coal mine (a UNESCO World Heritage site) to the Ruhrtriennale festival and the Folkwang Museum. The 28 local editions give each city dedicated coverage — from the great industrial cities to smaller towns like Heiligenhaus and Velbert — while the shared national section, now produced by the Funke central office in Berlin, covers German and world news, and the Essen sports competence center serves the whole group.

Coverage and Audience

The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung serves the Ruhr region — Essen, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, Duisburg, Oberhausen, Mülheim, Dortmund, and beyond — where it holds the most readers among dailies in the major cities. Its readership is the classic Ruhr profile: working-class and middle-class, loyal, subscription-based, with deep local identification — the kind of readers who identify their city before their region. The paper's reach extends across the densest newspaper market in Germany, where competition from the NRZ, Ruhr Nachrichten, and others has always been fierce.

Ownership

The WAZ is published by the Zeitungsverlag Ruhrgebiet GmbH & Co. Essen KG and belongs to the Funke Mediengruppe; some 320 editors and photographers work for the paper, and its online offering waz.de reached about 2.99 million unique users per month in 2020.

The WAZ is published by Zeitungsverlag Ruhrgebiet GmbH & Co. Essen KG, part of the Funke Mediengruppe — the group that grew from the paper itself, in one of German media's great ironies: the Ruhr daily that conquered its competitors and became an empire. The editor-in-chief is Andreas Tyrock, who took over in July 2014 from Ulrich Reitz. The Funke family, which built the group with the Brost heirs, controls one of Germany's largest regional media empires.

Digital Presence

The website waz.de carries the paper's regional journalism online, with continuously updated Ruhr news, e-paper editions, and newsletters. After the DerWesten experiment of 2007–2012 — an ambitious attempt to bundle all the group's NRW journalism on one portal — waz.de re-emerged as the digital home of the WAZ newsrooms, operating with digital subscriptions within the Funke group's digital network. The paper is active on social media with Ruhr-focused content, serving one of Germany's most densely populated and digitally connected regions — the five-million-strong Ruhr metropolis that remains the paper's heartland. The WAZ title, once the flagship of an empire, now carries the Funke group's Ruhr journalism into the subscription age.