About Offenburger Tageblatt

Offenburger Tageblatt

The Offenburger Tageblatt is the daily newspaper of Offenburg and the Ortenau district in Baden-Württemberg. Founded in 1812 by the Innsbruck printer Andreas Patsch as the Offenburger Intelligenz- und Wochen-Blatt, it has been owned by the Reiff family since 1867 — one of the longest family ownerships in the German press — and has carried its current name since 1913. Published Monday through Saturday with a sold circulation of around 11,200 copies, it is the flagship of the Mittelbadische Presse, the group of Ortenau district papers whose general section comes from the Tageblatt's Offenburg newsroom. The group's combined editions sell around 33,800 copies, making the Mittelbadische Presse the journalistic voice of the Ortenau — the district between the Black Forest and the Rhine.

Overview

The Offenburger Tageblatt is a regional daily newspaper published Monday through Saturday in Offenburg, Baden-Württemberg — a city of around 60,000 inhabitants at the western edge of the Black Forest, the administrative center of the Ortenaukreis. The sold circulation stands at 11,235 copies (IVW 1/2026, Monday to Saturday), a decline of 55.2 percent since 1998; the subscription share is 93.8 percent, testifying to the paper's entrenched position as the district's home newspaper.

The paper is published by the Reiff Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, the family publishing house based in Offenburg. The managing directors are Peter Reiff and Rouven Reiff. The paper's website is offenburger-tageblatt.de; the group's regional news portal is baden-online.de (Baden Online), and the group's sites include mittelbadische.de.

The Offenburger Tageblatt is the flagship of the Mittelbadische Presse — "the newspapers of the Ortenau": alongside the Offenburg edition itself, the group's general section is taken by the Ortenau district's other dailies — the Offenburger Tageblatt Schwarzwald-Zeitung, the Kehler Zeitung, the Lahrer Anzeiger, and the Acher-Rench-Zeitung — published as Kopfblätter, local editions with their own mastheads. The combined editions of the Mittelbadische Presse sell 33,798 copies, covering the Ortenaukreis from the Rhine plain to the Black Forest heights.

History

The Offenburger Tageblatt's history begins in 1812, when the Innsbruck-born printer Andreas Patsch founded the Offenburger Intelligenz- und Wochen-Blatt in Offenburg — in the era of the Grand Duchy of Baden, when the press of the German southwest operated under Napoleonic and then Restoration press regimes. In 1834 Patsch's stepson Joseph Otteni took over the paper, renaming it Der Ortenauer Bote in 1851. In 1867 Otteni's son-in-law Johann Joseph Alexander Reiff acquired the newspaper and printing works — and the publishing house has remained in the Reiff family's possession ever since, through the Empire, two world wars, and the Federal Republic.

The paper took its current name, Offenburger Tageblatt, in 1913. In 1936 the Offenburger Zeitung was merged into the Tageblatt, which continues to carry that title — alongside its earlier name, Ortenauer Bote — as a second subtitle. From December 1944 to October 1949 the paper could not appear for war-related reasons; it resumed publication in the young Federal Republic and rebuilt its position as the Ortenau's daily.

The postwar decades brought technological pioneering: in 1976 the Offenburger Tageblatt acquired, by its own account, the first Linotype phototypesetting system of any German newspaper for its newsroom, and in 1978 it switched to a five-column layout. The family publishing house expanded its group structure: the Ortenau district's neighboring dailies — in Kehl, Lahr, Oberkirch, and the Black Forest edition — took the Tageblatt's general section as their Kopfblatt arrangement, forming the Mittelbadische Presse group under the Reiff roof.

Coverage and Content

The Offenburger Tageblatt's content combines its own general section — national and international news, federal and Baden-Württemberg state politics, business, culture, and sport produced in Offenburg — with local pages for the city and district. The local journalism covers the Offenburg municipal council and the Ortenaukreis district council, the administrations of the district's towns and municipalities, the local courts, police news, schools, churches, and the clubs and associations of the Ortenau.

The paper's territory gives its journalism a distinctive Rhine-Black Forest profile. The Ortenau is one of Germany's premier wine regions — the Baden wine road runs through the district's villages — and the paper reports on viticulture, on the fruit-growing of the Rhine plain, on tourism in the Black Forest, and on the district's Mittelstand economy, including Offenburg's role as a publishing and logistics center. The French border across the Rhine — with Strasbourg a short drive from Kehl — adds a cross-border dimension to the region's affairs.

The Kopfblatt papers extend that coverage across the district: the Kehler Zeitung for the Rhine border town and its surroundings, the Lahrer Anzeiger for the southern Ortenau around Lahr, the Acher-Rench-Zeitung for the Achern and Oberkirch area, and the Schwarzwald-Zeitung for the Black Forest communities. Each carries its own local pages within the shared Mittelbadische Presse framework. The group also serves the traditional functions of the district daily: comprehensive municipal reporting, family announcements, church news, club reports, and the court and police journalism of the Ortenau.

Organization and Ownership

The Offenburger Tageblatt is published by the Reiff Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, the family publishing house of the Reiff family, based in Offenburg. The managing directors are Peter Reiff and Rouven Reiff. The family's ownership since 1867 — more than 150 years — is one of the longest continuous family holdings in the German newspaper industry.

The Mittelbadische Presse group is organized on the Kopfblatt model: the Offenburger Tageblatt's Offenburg newsroom produces the general section, which is taken by the district's sister papers — the Offenburger Tageblatt Schwarzwald-Zeitung, the Kehler Zeitung (published by the Reiff Verlag's Kehl office), the Lahrer Anzeiger (Lahrer Anzeiger Verlagsgesellschaft), and the Acher-Rench-Zeitung (Acher-Rench-Verlag in Oberkirch) — each with its own local editorial staff and masthead. The model preserves local editorial identities across the Ortenaukreis while sharing the costs of the general section.

The names of individual editors-in-chief are not publicly confirmed in the sources consulted; what is publicly documented is the family's management, the Offenburg newsroom, and the daily output — the Tageblatt and its four sister titles, appearing every publishing day across the Ortenau. The publishing house's address, Marlener Straße 9 in Offenburg, houses the group's operations.

Digital Presence

The Offenburger Tageblatt's digital home is baden-online.de — Baden Online — the regional news portal of the Mittelbadische Presse for the Ortenau, with current news, video contributions, and photo galleries, alongside the papers' own sites including offenburger-tageblatt.de and mittelbadische.de. The group also operates Mittelbadische-Presse.tv, an online video offering — an unusually developed video operation for a regional publisher.

The group's digital strategy is comprehensive: e-paper editions of all five local editions (with evening-before availability from 8 p.m., multi-device reading, and archive access), digital subscription models including trial, short-term, and student offers, combination packages of digital weekday reading with the printed weekend edition, newsletters, and social media channels. The e-paper's test subscription explicitly offers access to all five local editions and the archive — the digital expression of the Kopfblatt group's shared journalism.

In the Ortenau's digital media environment, Baden Online competes with the portals of neighboring papers, municipal communications, and the tourism marketing of the Black Forest and the Baden wine region. The group's advantage is its newsroom network: journalists in Offenburg, Kehl, Lahr, Oberkirch, and the Black Forest producing original Ortenau journalism daily. A newspaper founded in 1812 — family-owned since 1867, a phototypesetting pioneer in 1976 — now serves the Ortenau in print, e-paper, portal, and video: the district's daily paper in every medium.