About Saale-Zeitung

Saale-Zeitung

The Saale-Zeitung is the regional daily newspaper for Bad Kissingen and the Franconian Rhön region in Lower Franconia, Bavaria, published Monday through Saturday with headquarters in the spa town of Bad Kissingen. With around 8,200 sold copies (IVW, 1st quarter of 2026) and a history stretching back to the Kissinger Intelligenz-Blatt of 1847, the paper is the leading local newspaper of the Bad Kissingen district. It belongs to the Mediengruppe Oberfranken (mgo) — the Bamberg-based media group behind the Fränkischer Tag, the Coburger Tageblatt and the Bayerische Rundschau — with which it shares a national newsroom.

Overview

The Saale-Zeitung appears six times a week from its headquarters in Bad Kissingen, the historic spa town on the Franconian Saale river, and serves the Bad Kissingen district and the surrounding Franconian Rhön: the spa towns of Bad Kissingen, Bad Brückenau and Hammelburg, the town of Münnerstadt, and the villages of the Rhön foothills. The paper's identity is that of a classic German Heimatzeitung: its local pages are produced by its own newsroom in Bad Kissingen under Redaktionsleiter Karl Kovacs, while the national and international pages come from the shared national newsroom of the Mediengruppe Oberfranken's dailies.

With 8,204 sold copies (IVW 1/2026, Monday–Saturday), the Saale-Zeitung has lost 49.6 percent of its circulation since 1998 — the familiar trajectory of the German regional press — but it remains the dominant local newspaper in its distribution area. The paper belongs to the mgo's local media division alongside the Fränkischer Tag (Bamberg), the Bayerische Rundschau (Kulmbach) and the Coburger Tageblatt, which together sell around 94,550 copies. The four papers share a national editorial operation while maintaining their local identities — the Franconian model of preserving historic mastheads under a shared roof.

The readership is the classic audience of the Franconian local press: families, spa guests and the health economy's employees, farmers, craftsmen, local officials and club members in a region where the daily newspaper remains the central medium of community life. Bad Kissingen's identity as a spa town — the "Weltbad" with its historic spa architecture, the Kissinger Sommer festival and the health clinics — gives the paper a distinctive reporting beat: spa affairs, health policy and tourism alongside the standard local agenda of councils, schools, courts and clubs.

History

The Saale-Zeitung's lineage is one of the longest in the Franconian press. Its predecessor, the Kissinger Intelligenz-Blatt, appeared verifiably from 1 January 1847 — and possibly earlier — making the paper's roots nearly 180 years old. In 1868 Tobias August Schachenmayer bought the newspaper with its printing plant, and from then on it appeared in the Verlag T.A. Schachenmayer, remaining in the ownership of the Schachenmayer family until 2002 — an extraordinary 134 years of family publishing.

The paper emerged from the merger of several town newspapers in the Bad Kissingen district: the papers of Bad Kissingen itself, the Münnerstädter Zeitung of Münnerstadt, the Brückenauer Anzeiger of Bad Brückenau and the Hammelburger paper. On 1 April 1943 the National Socialists shut the paper down; it was not allowed to resume printing until 1 August 1949. After the war, Kuno Schachenmayer resumed publication, and the paper joined the Bavarian cooperative of local newspaper publishers (BHZ), from whose publisher it received its mantle pages. As the BHZ association continued to shrink in the press concentration process from the 1970s on, the Saale-Zeitung's publishing house built its own editorial team in 1982 and began supplying the remaining BHZ members as an independent journalistic unit. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the publisher also engaged in neighbouring Thuringia, founding the Meininger Tageblatt in 1990.

In 2002 the Saale-Zeitung, then with a circulation of around 17,000, was sold to the WAZ media group; the former publisher Bernd Schachenmayer, son of Kuno Schachenmayer, initially retained a minority stake. The paper continued to be printed locally and remained editorially independent under the "WAZ model". In 2010 the paper became a subsidiary of the Mediengruppe Oberfranken (mgo) of Bamberg — the Kissinger Verlagsgesellschaft as publisher, the mgo Lokale Medien GmbH & Co. KG as the publishing company. The most recent development, reported by the media trade press, is the acquisition of the Mediengruppe Oberfranken by the Mediengruppe Bayern of Passau — the publisher of the Passauer Neue Presse, the Donaukurier and the Mittelbayerische Zeitung — which would make the Saale-Zeitung part of Bavaria's largest regional newspaper house.

Coverage and Content

The Saale-Zeitung's local pages cover the Bad Kissingen district and the Franconian Rhön in depth: the spa town of Bad Kissingen with its spa gardens, the historic spa architecture, the Kissinger Sommer and Kissinger Winterzauber festivals, the health clinics and the spa economy; the fellow spa towns of Bad Brückenau and Hammelburg; Münnerstadt with its historic old town; the district's schools, the town and municipal councils, the police and court reports, the volunteer fire brigades, the church parishes, and the dense network of clubs and associations — from traditional costume societies and brass bands to sports clubs and shooting associations — that structures social life in the Rhön.

The Rhön itself — the low mountain range whose Bavarian foothills the paper serves — is a standing reporting beat: the biosphere reserve, hiking tourism, agriculture, and the cross-border relationships with the Hessian and Thuringian Rhön. The mantle pages from the mgo's shared newsroom provide the wider context: Bavarian state politics, national and international news, business, culture and sport. The paper also serves as the official gazette for the area's municipalities, and its family notices make it the chronicle of the district's social life. The group's free weekly Anzeiger Bad Kissingen complements the daily with free household distribution.

Organization and Ownership

The Saale-Zeitung is published by the KMG Kissinger Mediengesellschaft mbH of Bad Kissingen, with the mgo Lokale Medien GmbH & Co. KG of Bamberg (Gutenbergstraße 1, 96050 Bamberg) as the publishing company. It belongs to the Mediengruppe Oberfranken, the Bamberg-based media group whose local media division comprises the four Franconian dailies Fränkischer Tag, Bayerische Rundschau, Coburger Tageblatt and Saale-Zeitung (combined sold circulation around 94,550), the inFranken.de online portal, and eight free weekly advertising papers with a combined circulation of around 380,000. The group's managing director is Eva-Maria Bauch; the Saale-Zeitung's editor-in-chief is Thomas Zeller, with Karl Kovacs as Redaktionsleiter of the Bad Kissingen newsroom.

The four dailies share a national editorial operation — the überregionale Redaktion — while maintaining their local newsrooms and historic mastheads. The group's digital editions run on the platforms fränkischertag.de, bayerischerundschau.de, coburgertageblatt.de and saalezeitung.de. The mgo also holds a 50 percent stake in the Meininger Mediengesellschaft of Thuringia (publisher of the Meininger Tageblatt) — a legacy of the Saale-Zeitung's own 1990 expansion into Thuringia. The reported acquisition of the mgo by the Passau-based Mediengruppe Bayern would place the Saale-Zeitung under the roof of Bavaria's largest regional newspaper group, alongside the Passauer Neue Presse, the Donaukurier and the Mittelbayerische Zeitung.

Digital Presence

The Saale-Zeitung's digital home is saale-zeitung.de, the paper's online platform within the Mediengruppe Oberfranken's digital network — alongside fränkischertag.de, bayerischerundschau.de and coburgertageblatt.de, and the group's high-reach portal inFranken.de, which recorded 18.7 million page views in September 2021. The platform carries the day's news from the Bad Kissingen district and the Franconian Rhön, alongside the shared newsroom's regional, national and international coverage. Readers can access the paper as an e-paper — the digital replica of the printed edition — and the portal offers breaking news, photo galleries, videos and interactive features.

The mgo's digital strategy serves all its titles: the local papers feed their reporting into the shared portals, while the portals' reach — far beyond the print circulations — gives the Saale-Zeitung's local journalism an audience across Franconia and beyond. The inFranken.de portal, the group's flagship digital product, aggregates the journalism of all four dailies for a region-wide audience. Social media channels distribute the day's local stories — from spa town events to Rhön hiking tips — and the paper's journalists use the digital platforms for reader interaction. For a spa-town daily with 8,200 print copies, the digital platforms are increasingly the growth story: the e-paper preserves the complete local edition in digital form, and the online portals keep the Saale-Zeitung present in the digital media habits of the Franconian Rhön — including the spa guests who read their holiday town's news long after returning home.