About Bayerwald-Bote

Bayerwald-Bote

The Bayerwald-Bote is the local edition of the Passauer Neue Presse for the Bavarian Forest, appearing for the town of Regen, for Zwiesel and, as Der Viechtacher Bayerwald-Bote, for Viechtach. As one of the twenty local editions of the PNP, the regional daily for eastern and southeastern Lower Bavaria published in Passau, it combines locally produced pages for the Regen district with the shared regional and national section of the PNP group. The paper appears on working days in Rheinisch format and shares the pnp.de news portal with the group's other editions, from the Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger to the Trostberger Tagblatt.

Overview

The Bayerwald-Bote serves the district of Regen in the heart of the Bavarian Forest: the district town of Regen on the Regen river, Zwiesel, the glassmaking town beneath the Großer Arber, Viechtach, and the villages scattered through the forests and valleys of one of Germany's best-known low mountain ranges. Its readers find the program of the German regional daily adapted to a rural, tourism-shaped territory: the town councils and district politics, the tourism economy around the Arber mountain, the Bavarian Forest National Park and the winter sports, the glass industry that has defined Zwiesel for centuries, agriculture and forestry, the schools and social institutions, and the club and association life.

The local pages are produced by the paper's own newsrooms, with the Regen editorial office at Am Sand 11 in the district town and a Zwiesel newsroom serving the glass town and its surroundings. The Mantel, the regional, national and international section, arrives from the PNP's Passau headquarters, produced for all twenty local editions. The Passauer Neue Presse as a whole sells 124,319 copies, making it, alongside the Mittelbayerische Zeitung and the Straubinger Tagblatt, one of the three dailies of eastern Bavaria, and it is printed in the group's own Druckzentrum Passau. The Bayerwald-Bote is the edition that carries this paper into the Bavarian Forest.

History

The Passauer Neue Presse was founded in 1946, its first issue appearing on 5 February under the founding publisher Johannes Kapfinger, and it grew in the postwar decades into the dominant newspaper of eastern Lower Bavaria. The publishing house, the Mediengruppe Bayern GmbH of Passau, formerly the Verlagsgruppe Passau, built a network of local editions that today numbers twenty, each with its own title, newsroom and local identity, from the Burghauser Anzeiger in the south to the Bayerwald-Bote in the Bavarian Forest. The group also built an international publishing arm in the 1990s, with holdings in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Austria, before refocusing on its Bavarian core.

The Bayerwald-Bote emerged within this structure as the edition for the Regen district, taking its name from the Bavarian Forest itself, the Bayerwald, the landscape that defines its readers' home. The edition for Viechtach appears under the extended title Der Viechtacher Bayerwald-Bote, following the group's practice of giving distinctive sub-regions their own masthead variants. The paper is led within the group by editor-in-chief Martin Wanninger and managing director Simone Tucci-Diekmann, who have steered the PNP through the digital transformation of the regional press and the group's expansion, including the pending acquisition of the Mediengruppe Oberfranken.

Coverage and Content

The Bayerwald-Bote's local pages follow the life of the Bavarian Forest in unusual depth. Tourism is the standing beat: the Großer Arber, the highest peak of the Bavarian Forest, the national park, the cross-country ski trails and the summer hiking economy, the development of the region's holiday infrastructure and the balance between tourism growth and nature protection. The Bavarian Forest National Park, Germany's first national park, lies within the paper's territory, and its wilderness philosophy, the bark beetle debates and the wolf's return to the region are subjects the paper returns to regularly, reporting a nature conservation story of national significance from the perspective of the people who live with it. The glass industry of Zwiesel, with its centuries-old tradition of glassmaking, glass art and the town's glass schools and museums, gives the paper a distinctive economic and cultural subject, and the paper follows the fortunes of the remaining glassworks and the artisan workshops with close attention. The town's identity as a glass town reaches back to the forest glassworks of the early modern period, and the paper documents both the craft heritage, the exhibitions, the studio glassmakers and the training of new generations, and the industrial present, in which a handful of specialized manufacturers carry the tradition into global markets. Few German local papers have such a singular industrial-cultural beat as their own.

Municipal reporting covers the district administration in Regen, the town councils of Regen, Zwiesel and Viechtach, and the village mayors, with the infrastructure questions typical of a rural low-mountain district: roads, public transport, broadband, medical care and school locations. The Czech border, only a short distance to the east, brings cross-border stories, from the cooperation with Czech municipalities to the shopping and working relationships across the frontier. Forestry and agriculture, the winter sports clubs and the summer festival calendar complete the picture of a paper deeply embedded in its region.

Organization and Ownership

The Bayerwald-Bote is published by the Mediengruppe Bayern GmbH of Passau, the publishing house of the Passauer Neue Presse, one of Bavaria's largest regional media groups. The group publishes the PNP with its twenty local editions, the Donaukurier of Ingolstadt and the Mittelbayerische Zeitung of Regensburg, and is moving to acquire the Mediengruppe Oberfranken of Bamberg, which would make the Passau house the largest regional newspaper publisher in Bavaria. The editor-in-chief is Martin Wanninger, and the managing director is Simone Tucci-Diekmann.

The edition structure is the organizational form of the group's regional strategy: twenty local editions with their own titles, newsrooms and local pages, sharing the Passau-produced Mantel and the commercial and technical infrastructure, including the Druckzentrum Passau. For the Regen district this means a daily paper that is unmistakably the Bayerwald's own, the Bayerwald-Bote, backed by the newsroom resources of eastern Bavaria's leading publishing house. The Regen newsroom at Am Sand 11 and the Zwiesel newsroom keep the paper's journalists close to the councils, businesses and clubs they cover.

Digital Presence

The digital home of the Bayerwald-Bote is pnp.de, the news portal of the Passauer Neue Presse, where the Bayerwald edition appears with its own local news stream among the group's twenty editions. The portal publishes continuously updated regional news, the e-paper edition of the printed paper for digital subscribers, photo galleries and videos, following the subscription model standard in the German regional press. The PNP established a YouTube channel as early as December 2008, distributing news in video form, and the group's digital products have been developed steadily since.

For the readers of the Bavarian Forest, the digital offering extends the paper beyond the breakfast table: the e-paper for tablet readers and for the many former residents who follow their home region from Munich, Nuremberg and beyond, the portal's breaking news from the district, and newsletters delivering the morning's headlines. The paper's local email addresses for the Regen and Zwiesel newsrooms keep the connection between readers and journalists direct, in the tradition of a local paper that has always lived from the participation of its community, from the glassworks to the mountain farms.