About abseits

abseits

abseits is a street paper published in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony — a magazine sold on the streets by homeless and socially marginalized vendors as a way to earn supplementary income and make contact with the public. Founded on 29 July 1995, it appears six times a year with a circulation of around 10,000 copies, rising to 13,000 for the Christmas issue, and is also available by subscription. The paper is supported by the SKM Osnabrück e.V., the local association of the Sozialdienst katholischer Männer (Social Service of Catholic Men), and is a member of the International Network of Street Papers (INSP). Its stated mission is twofold: to inform readers about the life situations of people at the margins of society, awakening understanding and breaking down prejudice, while giving vendors a dignified way to earn money.

Overview

Street papers occupy a distinctive place in the media landscape: they are real journalistic publications, but their distribution model is a social project. abseits follows the classic formula. The magazine is produced by a professional editorial operation, printed in substantial runs, and sold directly to passers-by by vendors who keep a share of the selling price. For the vendors — people affected by homelessness, poverty or social exclusion — selling the paper provides not only additional income but also structured daily activity, social contact with buyers, and a recognized role in public life.

abseits appears six times per year, a rhythm that allows each issue to be produced with care while keeping the vendors supplied with a current product to sell. The standard circulation of 10,000 copies makes it a mid-sized German street paper; the Christmas issue, at 13,000 copies, reflects the seasonal peak in both public generosity and vendor activity. A subscription option serves readers who want to support the project regularly without buying on the street, and the paper's online presence extends its journalism beyond the physical sale.

Thematically, abseits covers what its mission promises: the life situations of marginalized people, told with the aim of fostering understanding. Vendor portraits and life stories are the genre's signature content — first-person accounts of homelessness, addiction, poverty and the struggle back toward stability — alongside reporting on social policy, housing, the local social landscape of Osnabrück and the region, and cultural topics. The tone is set by the paper's self-description: it wants to reach people who have not previously engaged closely with the realities of life at society's margins, and to dismantle their prejudices through information and encounter.

History

abseits was founded on 29 July 1995, in the middle of the decade when the street-paper movement spread across Germany. The model had been pioneered internationally by London's The Big Issue (1991) and taken up in Germany by papers such as Hamburg's Hinz&Kunzt (1993) and Hannover's Asphalt (1994); Osnabrück's paper belongs to this second wave of German foundations, which also produced titles in Munich, Cologne, Dresden and other cities. The International Network of Street Papers, founded in 1994 on The Big Issue's initiative, provided the new papers with a global framework for exchanging ideas, images and experience — abseits joined that network and remains listed among its German-language members.

From the beginning, the paper was anchored in Osnabrück's Catholic social services. The SKM Osnabrück e.V. — part of the nationwide SKM network of social service associations — took responsibility for the project, providing the organizational backbone: offices, coordination of vendors, and integration with the association's other social services. That institutional embedding distinguishes abseits from purely volunteer-run papers and has contributed to its longevity: more than thirty years after its founding, it is still published, still sold on Osnabrück's streets, and still supported by the same sponsoring association.

Over the decades, the paper adapted to changing conditions without abandoning its core model. The rise of cashless payment, the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic on street vending, and the shifting media habits of readers all posed challenges that street papers across Europe had to navigate. abseits maintained its print rhythm and its vendor network through these changes, and its online presence — with the abseits-os.de domain as its current web home — gives the project a digital shop window alongside the street sale.

Coverage and Content

Each issue of abseits combines several content strands. The most distinctive is the personal story: portraits of and interviews with vendors and other people affected by homelessness and poverty, in which they tell their own life stories in their own words. These pieces are the heart of the street-paper genre — they create the encounter between reader and vendor that the paper's mission describes, putting a human face on abstract social problems.

Beyond personal stories, the paper reports on social policy and the local social landscape: housing shortages, the situation of homeless services in Osnabrück, developments in welfare policy, and issues affecting the paper's readership and vendor community. Cultural coverage, city topics and general-interest features round out the mix, giving vendors a magazine that buyers want to read for its own sake, not merely as a charitable purchase. The editorial standard the paper sets for itself is journalistic rather than purely activist: informing readers, including those who have never thought deeply about marginalization, and thereby contributing to a more understanding public debate.

The Christmas issue, with its enlarged print run, traditionally carries seasonal content and serves as the paper's most important sales opportunity of the year — a pattern familiar across the street-paper world, where the holiday season brings both heightened public attention to homelessness and the year's best vending conditions.

Organization and Ownership

abseits is published under the auspices of the SKM Osnabrück e.V., the Osnabrück branch of the Sozialdienst katholischer Männer, a Catholic social-service association. The SKM provides the paper's organizational home at Bramscher Straße 11 in Osnabrück, where the project is administered and where vendors are coordinated. Public contact details, including a telephone number, are published for the project, and the association's social-media guidelines — published for its Facebook and Instagram presences — emphasize respectful, authentic communication, reflecting the organization's broader social mission.

The vendor model is the operational core. Vendors — people affected by homelessness or at risk of social exclusion — sell the paper directly to the public, earning a supplementary income and, just as importantly, entering into contact with readers. The paper's mission statement explicitly names both goals: enlightening the public and reducing prejudice on the one hand, and offering vendors earning opportunities and human contact on the other. Like other German street papers, abseits operates within the standards of the INSP network, the global association of street-paper publishers that facilitates the exchange of content, experience and ideas among more than a hundred publishers worldwide.

Digital Presence

The paper's current website, abseits-os.de, serves as its digital home, presenting the project, its mission and its issues to an online audience. An earlier domain, abseits-online.de, also remains associated with the paper. The website functions as an information platform about the street paper itself — its goals, its vendors, how to support it — complementing the physical sale on Osnabrück's streets.

On social media, the SKM Osnabrück maintains presences used to share information about the association's work, including the street paper, and to announce dates and events. The association has published detailed netiquette rules for these channels, calling for open, friendly and respectful dialogue and prohibiting defamation, inauthentic behavior and commercial spam — a framework that reflects the care with which a social-service organization manages public communication about vulnerable people. For a publication whose business model is the face-to-face encounter between vendor and buyer, the digital channels play a supporting role: they sustain visibility, attract subscribers and donors, and document the project's work, while the essential transaction — a magazine handed from one person to another on the street — remains resolutely analog.