About Auer Zeitung

Auer Zeitung

The Auer Zeitung is the local edition of the Freie Presse for Aue-Bad Schlema, the Große Kreisstadt in the western Erzgebirge of Saxony, and it serves a town whose identity is inseparable from five centuries of mining history. As one of the nineteen local editions of the Freie Presse, Saxony's largest subscription daily, the Aue edition combines locally produced pages for the town and the surrounding Erzgebirgskreis with the shared regional and national section produced in Chemnitz. The paper appears Monday through Saturday and shares the freiepresse.de news portal with the group's other editions.

Overview

The Auer Zeitung serves Aue-Bad Schlema, a town formed in 2019 through the merger of Aue and the neighboring spa town of Bad Schlema, and the surrounding communities of the western Erzgebirge. Its readers find the full program of a German regional daily: the town council and district politics, the local economy between the remaining industry, crafts, health services and tourism, education and social affairs, the dense club and association life of the Erzgebirge, and the court and police reporting of the region. The paper's local pages are produced for the Aue area specifically, while the Mantel, the national and regional section, arrives from the central newsroom in Chemnitz under editor-in-chief Torsten Kleditzsch, who has led the paper since March 2009.

The Freie Presse as a whole sells 161,181 copies, with nearly eighty-seven percent going to subscribers, making it the dominant newspaper of southwestern Saxony despite a circulation decline of more than sixty percent since 1998. The Aue edition is one of nineteen local editions mapping the territory of the former Bezirk Karl-Marx-Stadt, from Annaberg and Aue in the Erzgebirge through Chemnitz and Zwickau to Plauen in the Vogtland. Each edition keeps its local identity and newsroom while the shared Mantel keeps the economics viable, a structure that has allowed the group to maintain daily local papers in towns the size of Aue long after standalone papers there would have become unviable.

History

The Freie Presse was founded on 20 May 1946 in the Soviet occupation zone and took its present form in 1963, when the Volksstimme of Karl-Marx-Stadt merged with the Freie Presse of Zwickau to create the SED party organ for the Bezirk Karl-Marx-Stadt. In the GDR it grew into the largest regional daily in East Germany, printing 600,000 copies a day in January 1990. Unlike most East German papers it was not sold through the Treuhandanstalt's public tender but went directly to the Medien-Union of Ludwigshafen, the publishing house of Die Rheinpfalz, a transaction later reported to have involved pressure from Chancellor Helmut Kohl on behalf of the publisher Dieter Schaub. Under Medien-Union ownership the paper was rebuilt as a commercially run regional daily, and the Auer Zeitung emerged as its edition for the Aue area.

Aue's own press history is bound up with the mining that shaped the town: the silver mining of the early modern period, the industrialization of the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century the uranium mining of the Soviet-German Wismut company, which made the Schlema area one of the centers of the East German uranium industry and left a legacy of remediation landscapes that the paper has covered for decades. The 2019 merger of Aue with Bad Schlema, the spa town that grew out of the same mining geology through its radon springs, gave the edition a newly enlarged home town and a new name to reflect, and the Auer Zeitung documents the merged town's efforts to build a shared identity from two distinct histories.

Coverage and Content

The Aue edition's local pages cover the Große Kreisstadt and the surrounding Erzgebirgskreis: the town council's work on the merged administration, the district politics, the remediation and reuse of the former mining landscapes, the health economy around the spa facilities of Bad Schlema, and the manufacturing and crafts businesses of the western Erzgebirge. Tourism built on the mining heritage, the hiking trails and the winter sports of the region, is a standing beat, as is the demographic transition of a region working to keep its young people and attract newcomers.

The shared section from Chemnitz delivers Saxon state politics from Dresden, national and international news, business and sports. The group's traditions include a chess column published since 1960 that won international recognition, and until 2018 the Pressefest in the Chemnitz Küchwald, a public festival rooted in the GDR era. In the neighboring Vogtland, the group's 2018 takeover of the insolvent Vogtland-Anzeiger and the transfer of its subscribers to the Freie Presse editions when that paper closed in January 2022 further consolidated the group's position as the region's paper of record.

Organization and Ownership

The Auer Zeitung is published by the Chemnitzer Verlag und Druck GmbH & Co. KG, based in the publishing house on Brückenstraße in Chemnitz, which belongs to the Medien Union GmbH of Ludwigshafen am Rhein. The Chemnitz operation, also known as the CVD Mediengruppe, includes the newspaper, its printing activities and related media businesses. The nineteen local editions give the group a decentralized reporting structure, with local newsrooms across southwestern Saxony feeding their editions while Chemnitz produces the shared pages and runs the commercial operation.

The edition structure is the economic answer to the geography of the readership: towns the size of Aue could not sustain a standalone daily paper in the contemporary market, but as editions of the Freie Presse they keep their local newsrooms, their local pages and their local titles. The Auer Zeitung's journalists cover the town council meetings, the club festivals and the court sessions of their area with the same thoroughness as the newsroom of a much larger paper, because for their readers there is no other daily paper doing it. The edition's reporting on the mining legacy is a specialty with few parallels in the German regional press: the recultivated spoil heaps, the flooded pits, the radon spa that turned a uranium town into a health resort, and the ongoing monitoring of the old workings are subjects the paper returns to year after year, documenting one of Europe's most remarkable landscape transformations.

Digital Presence

The digital home of the Auer Zeitung is freiepresse.de, where the Aue edition appears with its own local news stream alongside the eighteen other editions. The portal publishes continuously updated regional news, breaking stories, photo galleries and videos, and offers the e-paper edition of the printed paper for digital subscribers, following the subscription model standard in the German regional press. Social media channels for the individual editions distribute the day's local stories and drive traffic back to the portal.

For the readers of the western Erzgebirge, the digital offering extends the paper beyond the breakfast table: the e-paper serves subscribers who have moved to tablets or away from the region, the portal's free content draws in casual readers, and newsletters deliver the morning's local headlines to inboxes across the district. The transformation from the SED district organ of the GDR to a contemporary multi-platform local news service is complete, but the Auer Zeitung's core task has not changed since the first Freie Presse appeared in 1946: to report, every day, on the town and the region its readers call home.