About Acher- und Bühler Bote

Acher- und Bühler Bote

The Acher- und Bühler Bote is the local edition of the Badische Neueste Nachrichten (BNN) for the Achern and Bühl area on the western edge of the northern Black Forest. Published on weekdays from offices in Achern and Bühl, it carries the BNN's national and regional reporting under its own historic-sounding title while a local newsroom covers the towns and villages where the Acher and Bühl valleys meet the Upper Rhine Plain. It is one of nine local editions of the Karlsruhe-based BNN, the only printed daily in the Karlsruhe region, and it serves readers in a part of Baden where the newspaper competition is fought street by street between the BNN's editions and the titles of the Mittelbadische Presse.

Overview

The Acher- und Bühler Bote is a subscription daily that appears Monday through Saturday, aimed at the households of Achern, Bühl, and the surrounding communities of the northern Ortenaukreis and the district of Rastatt. It follows the standard architecture of the German regional press: the national section, the state politics, the economy, culture, and sports pages come from the central newsroom of the Badische Neueste Nachrichten in Karlsruhe, while the local section is written by editors on the ground in Achern and Bühl.

The two names in the title describe the paper's catchment area. Achern, a town of around 25,000 on the edge of the Black Forest foothills, is the seat of a local court and a regional commercial center; Bühl, a similar-sized town a few kilometers to the north, is known for its winegrowing and the plum harvest that gives the Bühler Frühzwetschge its name. Between them lie the valleys of the Acher and the Bühlot, villages like Kappelrodeck, Ottersweier, and Sasbach, and a landscape where orchards, vineyards, and Black Forest foothills meet the Rhine plain. The paper covers this territory the way local dailies do: municipal councils, district affairs, school news, court reporting, church and club life, and the agricultural and winegrowing economy of the region.

In Achern, the paper's title is matched by a direct competitor with the same remit: the Acher-Rench-Zeitung, a local edition of the Offenburger Tageblatt, also maintains an office in Achern. Readers of the region's local news thus choose between the BNN's Boten and the Mittelbadische Presse's titles, a rivalry that has shaped the Ortenau newspaper market for decades.

History

The Acher- und Bühler Bote is the local face of the Badische Neueste Nachrichten, a paper whose history begins in the ruins of postwar Karlsruhe. After the Second World War, two journalists who had both worked before the Nazi era — Wilhelm Baur, a Christian Democrat, and Walter Schwerdtfeger, a Social Democrat — received the sole license from the American occupation's Information Control Division to publish a newspaper in Karlsruhe on 1 March 1946. The first issue of the Badische Neueste Nachrichten appeared on 4 March 1946.

Schwerdtfeger left the company in 1950, and Wilhelm Baur became the sole publisher and editor-in-chief, sitting in the Karlsruhe city council throughout. After his death in 1973, his nephew Hans Wilhelm Baur inherited the paper, with his wife Brunhilde Baur playing a leading role in management. In 1994 the ownership was transferred into the Wilhelm Baur Foundation, created to safeguard the paper's independence; its distributions flow to social institutions, and its centerpiece is a multi-generational house named for Brunhilde Baur. Since 2000 the editor-in-chief and publisher has been Klaus Michael Baur (formerly Willimek), who took the Baur name by adoption after joining the family.

The BNN's expansion into the Ortenau with local editions like the Acher- und Bühler Bote brought the Karlsruhe paper into direct competition with the Offenburg-based titles of the Reiff publishing house. The local offices the paper maintains — on Kirchstraße in Achern and Hauptstraße in Bühl — serve as the newsroom and the public face of the paper in the region, the place where readers place classified ads and family announcements and where local editors gather the news of the valleys.

Coverage and Content

The content mix of the Acher- und Bühler Bote mirrors that of its parent paper. The shared national section draws on the wire services — Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Sport-Informations-Dienst, and Agence France-Presse — and on the BNN's own correspondents, including two in Berlin and a bureau in Stuttgart. Monday editions carry two sports packages, one for world sports and one for local sports; Thursday editions preview the coming weekend's events; Saturday editions include the "Fächer" and "Reise-Fächer" magazine supplements.

The local section is where the edition earns its title. Reporters cover the municipal councils of Achern and Bühl, the district-level politics of the Ortenaukreis and the Rastatt district, the local courts, schools, and the volunteer fire brigades and clubs that structure social life in the region. The agricultural calendar of the area — the wine harvest, the fruit harvest, the seasonal labor that shapes the villages — gets regular attention, as do the tourism and spa economy of nearby Baden-Baden and the industrial employers of the region.

Advertising in the edition serves the local economy of the Achern-Bühl corridor: car dealers, furniture stores, wineries, crafts businesses, and the service trades. The paper's classified and family-announcement pages remain a fixture of local life, and the edition participates in the BNN's book and magazine projects and its annual "Wir helfen" Christmas charity campaign, which the paper has organized since 1993.

Organization and Ownership

The Acher- und Bühler Bote is published by Badische Neueste Nachrichten Badendruck GmbH in Karlsruhe. The paper is owned through the Wilhelm Baur Foundation, the 1994 vehicle that holds the majority of the shares and is intended to guarantee the independence of the newspaper. Editor-in-chief and publisher is Klaus Michael Baur. Around 90 editors work in the central and local newsrooms of the BNN.

The group's total sold circulation stands at 104,822 copies (IVW 1/2026, Monday to Saturday), with subscriptions accounting for 73.7 percent — a figure for the entire BNN group across its nine local editions; per-edition figures for the Acher- und Bühler Bote are not publicly reported. The paper is printed in the BNN's own printing plant, on a KBA Commander press that has been in operation since March 2012, in the handy Rheinisch format adopted that same year. The BNN holds a near-monopoly on the printed daily market in Karlsruhe itself, a position that has earned it the ironic nickname "Monopolzeitung," while in the Ortenau its editions compete with the Mittelbadische Presse.

In 2021 the BNN acquired 24 percent of the Badisches Tagblatt group, and the merger of the two papers was completed that July, with the higher-circulation Badisches Tagblatt replacing the BNN's "Mittelbaden" regional edition for Rastatt and Gaggenau. The Acher- und Bühler Bote was unaffected by that reorganization, continuing as the BNN's edition for the Achern-Bühl corridor.

Digital Presence

Online, the Acher- und Bühler Bote is part of bnn.de, the BNN's digital platform. The BNN has offered an ePaper since 1 October 2005 and a news app since 2013, giving readers the print edition in electronic form alongside updates on politics, business, sports, and world news. Local reporting from the Achern and Bühl offices appears on the site within the BNN's regional structure, and the ePaper editions are the digital home of the edition's local pages.

The paper's digital offering sits alongside the group's broader online services, and readers of the Acher- und Bühler Bote can follow the edition's coverage through the BNN's social media channels and newsletters. For the towns of the Acher and Bühl valleys, the edition remains what it has long been: the local daily whose masthead carries the names of their valleys, produced by editors who work on their main streets and printed by a family-owned publishing house in Karlsruhe that has been in the newspaper business since the spring of 1946.