About Bezirksrundschau – Mein Bezirk Oberösterreich

Bezirksrundschau – Mein Bezirk Oberösterreich

Bezirksrundschau – Mein Bezirk Oberösterreich is a German-language local weekly newspaper serving the Austrian state of Upper Austria. It is the Upper Austrian member of one of the largest free-newspaper networks in Austria, and it reaches readers not through subscriptions or newsstand sales but through free distribution to households. Its present German reference entry describes it as a local weekly with 16 regional editions, while the Regionalmedien Austria ring listing has counted it with 17 local issues, a difference that reflects changes in the edition structure over time rather than two different newspapers. The paper's old name, used from 1971 to 2009, was Oberösterreichische Rundschau. Since 2009 it has been distributed free of charge, and since 2024 it has appeared under the nationwide umbrella brand MeinBezirk, with the old Bezirksrundschau name still carried on the masthead for the time being.

The newspaper is centred on Linz, the state capital of Upper Austria, although its publisher is based in nearby Leonding. Its official website is meinbezirk.at, the shared digital platform of Regionalmedien Austria. For readers, advertisers and researchers, the title is best understood in three layers at once: a very old Upper Austrian regional press tradition, a paid weekly that was rebuilt as a free paper in a difficult restructuring in 2009, and a cooperation partner in a national advertising and editorial network that markets more than a hundred local editions together.

Predecessor Newspapers and Nineteenth-Century Roots

The Bezirksrundschau did not begin as a single foundation. It evolved as a merger of several Upper Austrian regional papers, and its predecessor titles go back to 1876. In that year the Steyrer Zeitung was founded in Steyr and the Innviertler Volkszeitung was founded in Ried. Those two papers alone show the geography that would define the later title: industrial Steyr in the south-east of the state and Ried, the main town of the Innviertel region in the west, each sustaining its own local weekly tradition long before a common Upper Austrian title existed.

More predecessors followed in the nineteenth century. In 1881 the Neue Warte am Inn appeared in Braunau, also in the Innviertel. In 1889 the Welser Zeitung, serving Wels, and the Mühlviertler Nachrichten, serving the Mühlviertel region north of the Danube, were added to the family of papers that would eventually be combined. The English-language reference history summarises the same development more briefly, noting that the Oberösterreichische Rundschau evolved as a merger of several regional papers, the oldest of which, the Innviertler Volkszeitung, already existed in 1880.

Further regional editions were launched between 1945 and 2006, gradually filling in the map of Upper Austria district by district. That long, incremental growth matters to the paper's identity. Unlike a metropolitan daily created for a single city, the Rundschau tradition was built from local papers rooted in individual towns and districts, and the modern Bezirksrundschau preserves that structure in the form of separate regional editions under one shared name.

The Oberösterreichische Rundschau Era, 1971 to 2009

The common name arrived in October 1971. At that point the name Oberösterreichische Rundschau was introduced as the joint designation for the weekly newspapers of the Oberösterreichischer Landesverlag publishing group. For almost four decades, from 1971 to 2009, readers across Upper Austria knew the paper under that title, even though the underlying local editions retained their district identities.

Under the Landesverlag, the Rundschau grew by acquiring and adding further previously independent regional papers. Accounts of the Landesverlag group record that the number of regional editions of the Oberösterreichische Rundschau rose from seven to eleven during the 1990s as more local titles were bought in, and later counts rose further still. By the middle of the 2000s the paper was still a conventional paid weekly with a substantial subscriber base. In 2005 it could point to more than 80,000 subscribers, and around 20,000 copies a week were sold in single-copy sales, according to the Austrian circulation audit figures cited for that year.

That paid model, however, did not survive the decade. In 2008 the Rundschau had to be sold because of financial difficulties. The buyer was the Tyrolean Moser Holding, whose flagship title is the Tiroler Tageszeitung. Moser had already entered the Rundschau in 2006 with a 25 percent stake and took it over completely in 2008, a step that also brought the existence of the Oberösterreichischer Landesverlag as its former owner to an end.

The 2009 Relaunch as a Free Weekly

The change of ownership produced the most radical break in the paper's history. In January 2009 the district editions of the Rundschau were radically rebuilt. Around 100 employees had to leave the company. The newspaper was converted into a free paper, has been published in small format since then, and its name was changed to Bezirksrundschau, with Rundschau am Sonntag used for a separate Sunday edition. Although both papers traded under the Rundschau brand, they were run as independent companies from one another under the roof of the Tyrolean Moser Holding.

The Rundschau itself described the step as a new start. The Bezirksrundschau appeared free of charge with 14 editions and was distributed to all households, while the Rundschau am Sonntag cost 50 cents and was sold through dispensing bags. The Sunday experiment was short-lived: the last Rundschau am Sonntag appeared in November 2009, the owners discontinued the title and dismissed its entire editorial staff. The free Bezirksrundschau, by contrast, endured and became the lasting form of the paper.

The switch from a paid subscription weekly to a free, advertising-funded household paper changed the economics of the title completely. Instead of depending on more than 80,000 subscribers and weekly single-copy buyers, the Bezirksrundschau would from 2009 depend on reaching every household in its distribution areas and selling that reach to advertisers — the same model used across the Regionalmedien Austria network, whose newspapers are free, are distributed to households throughout Austria and are entirely funded by advertising revenue.

Regional Editions and Coverage of Upper Austria

The defining feature of the Bezirksrundschau is its system of regional editions. A single shared title is produced in multiple local versions, so that a reader in one district receives reporting, announcements and advertising centred on that district rather than a state-wide edition in which local news is a small supplement. The current German reference entry counts 16 regional editions. Regionalmedien Austria's ring listing has counted the Bezirksrundschau Oberösterreich partner title with 17 local issues, within a national total that the English-language listing gives as 129 local editions marketed nationally and published weekly from Wednesday to Friday.

The edition structure follows the historic geography of its predecessor papers. Steyr, Ried, Braunau, Wels and the Mühlviertel all had their own papers in the nineteenth century, and towns and districts across Upper Austria received further editions in the decades after 1945. An imprint reference from March 2026, for example, is taken from the Bezirksrundschau – Mein Bezirk Kirchdorf edition, showing that district editions such as Kirchdorf continue to be identified by name on the printed paper. For local councils, clubs, businesses and readers, that district-level identity is the practical product: the Bezirksrundschau is less one newspaper than a family of closely related district newspapers sharing a brand, a publisher and a digital home.

Ownership, Publisher and the Regionalmedien Austria Network

The media owner, manufacturer and publisher of the Bezirksrundschau is Regional Medien Oberösterreich GmbH, based in Leonding, just outside Linz. That company is a cooperation partner of Regional Medien Austria, known as RMA. This distinction is important and is often simplified in summaries of the paper. The Bezirksrundschau is not simply a directly owned RMA title in the same way as the Bezirksblätter in other states; reference accounts of Moser Holding describe the Oberösterreichische BezirksRundschau as a cooperation partner of RMA that is 100 percent owned by Moser Holding.

RMA itself was formed in 2009 as a 50/50 joint venture of Styria Media Group AG and Moser Holding AG. By bringing several established regional media together, the venture created an Austria-wide network while preserving the regional structure and anchoring of each title. Into that network were brought, among others, the bz – Wiener Bezirkszeitung, the Bezirksblätter for Burgenland, Lower Austria, Salzburg and Tyrol, and the WOCHE titles for Styria and Carinthia, with the Bezirksrundschau Oberösterreich and the Regionalzeitungen Vorarlberg connected as cooperation partners.

Scale is the point of the arrangement. According to the Austrian Media Analysis for 2020, the local weekly newspapers under the RMA umbrella reached 3,336,000 readers, or 44.3 percent of the total national audience, and the Austrian Circulation Audit put RMA's overall distribution with partners at 3,374,561 copies for the second half of 2020. Editorial content and sales in the group are managed at three levels — locally in each district, regionally in each province and nationally throughout Austria — so advertising can be booked and tailored at district, state or national level. The Bezirksrundschau gives Upper Austrian advertisers access to that system, and gives the national network its Upper Austrian household coverage in return.

Content and Editorial Approach

Editorially, the Bezirksrundschau follows the formula documented for the RMA local weeklies as a whole. The editors of the newspapers across Regionalmedien Austria are independent, and the local weekly newspapers and online portals deliver local news from the immediate environment of the reader. In addition, they report on state-wide and Austria-wide news and events, so a district edition combines neighbourhood reporting with the larger Upper Austrian and national stories that affect its readers.

Alongside that local and regional news, articles on topics of interest to all readers are provided under recurring national headings. RMA lists those special-topic areas as Health, Motor and Mobility, Business and Career, and Building and Living. Regular special sections are also produced for those central reader interests. For a free household weekly, that mix is deliberate: practical service journalism on health, cars, work, homes and careers sits alongside council, club, school, court and community reporting, giving both readers and local advertisers a reason to keep and use the paper each week.

The paper's language throughout is German, in both print and digital form. No separate English-language or other-language edition is documented in the sources consulted for this profile, which is consistent with its role as a district newspaper for German-speaking Upper Austrian households.

Digital Presence on MeinBezirk.at

The digital home of the Bezirksrundschau is meinbezirk.at, the online platform operated by Regionalmedien Austria for its many regional newspapers, including its cooperation partners. The seed website for this profile, meinbezirk.at, is therefore not a stand-alone site for Upper Austria alone; it is the shared portal through which readers select their district and reach the Bezirksrundschau's local reporting alongside the other RMA regions.

A distinctive part of that portal is its user-generated content strategy. On MeinBezirk.at, registered users can act as reader-reporters, known as Regionauten, offering local and regional information as well as consuming it. That model extends the district-paper idea online: club notices, local photographs, event reports and community stories can originate with readers themselves, moderated within a professional regional news platform, rather than only with a central newsroom in Linz or Leonding.

The digital offer also includes apps documented for the RMA group, including meinbezirk espresso, described as news for swiping, and the meinbezirk ePaper app, both for Android and iOS. RMA has offered an app for current news from the districts since 2020, and since 2024 those services have run under the MeinBezirk brand. In October 2021 RMA and its subsidiaries and cooperation partners adopted a uniform look across Austria, with a common logo and unified company names as the connecting elements. In 2024 RMA then introduced MeinBezirk as the umbrella brand and standardised the appearance of its regional newspapers nationwide; the old Bezirksrundschau name, as with the papers from the other federal states, continues for the time being to be named on the newspaper's masthead, a position recorded as still applying in 2026. The strength of the digital audience was already measurable before the rebrand: Austrian web analysis figures cited for meinbezirk.at put its reach at 33.6 percent of the population, corresponding to a monthly average of 2,212,000 unique users.

Competition and Place in the Upper Austrian Media Market

The Bezirksrundschau does not operate in an empty market. Its main competitor is documented as Tips, from the Wimmer Media Group, the house that also publishes the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten daily newspaper in Linz. Tips likewise reports on current events from the regions, so the two free regional titles compete directly for the same local readers and, crucially for free papers, for the same local and regional advertising budgets.

That competition helps explain both the 2009 restructuring and the value of the RMA partnership. A stand-alone paid weekly with falling finances was vulnerable; a free district paper backed by Moser Holding, sold in part through a national ring of 129 local editions, could offer advertisers household coverage in Upper Austria combined with comparable coverage in almost every other Austrian state. At the same time, the district structure and the 1876 roots of its predecessor papers give the Bezirksrundschau a local legitimacy that a newly launched free sheet would have to build from nothing.

Today, Bezirksrundschau – Mein Bezirk Oberösterreich stands as Upper Austria's contribution to Austria's free regional weekly system: a German-language weekly with roots in the Steyrer Zeitung and Innviertler Volkszeitung of 1876, a shared name dating from 1971, a hard relaunch as a free household paper in 2009, a publisher in Leonding, a cooperation partnership with Regionalmedien Austria, and a digital presence unified since 2024 under MeinBezirk. Its history is a compact example of how Austrian regional journalism consolidated — from independent nineteenth-century district papers, through a provincial publishing house, to a Tyrolean-owned title inside a Styria and Moser national joint-venture network — while keeping the district edition, not the state or the nation, as the unit its readers recognise.