About Acher-Rench-Zeitung

Acher-Rench-Zeitung

The Acher-Rench-Zeitung is the Oberkirch edition of the Offenburger Tageblatt, the daily newspaper of the Ortenau district in southwestern Baden-Württemberg. Published on weekdays for the towns and villages where the Acher and Rench valleys open onto the Upper Rhine Plain, it carries the Offenburger Tageblatt's national and regional reporting under its own masthead while a local newsroom in Oberkirch covers the valley communities. It is one of the four head titles of the Mittelbadische Presse — alongside the Offenburger Tageblatt itself, the Kehler Zeitung, and the Lahrer Anzeiger — the newspaper group of the Offenburg-based Reiff publishing house, a family company whose history stretches back more than two centuries.

Overview

The Acher-Rench-Zeitung is a subscription daily appearing Monday through Saturday, serving the northern Ortenaukreis from its editorial base in Oberkirch. The two river valleys in its name define its territory: the Acher valley around Achern and the Rench valley around Oberkirch, Oppenau, and Bad Peterstal-Griesbach, with the foothill towns of Kappelrodeck, Ottersweier, and Sasbach in between. It is a landscape of orchards, vineyards, and Black Forest foothills, and the paper reads like a chronicle of that landscape: municipal councils and local courts, the wine harvest and the fruit harvest, the spa and tourism economy, and the dense network of clubs and associations that organize social life in the valleys.

The paper's structure follows the Kopfblatt model of the German regional press. The national pages — federal politics, the economy, culture, sports, the world news — are produced by the central newsroom of the Offenburger Tageblatt in Offenburg, while the local pages are written in Oberkirch by editors who work in the town on the Rench. The local publishing company is the Acher-Rench-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, based at Am Marktplatz 4 in Oberkirch, a subsidiary structure within the Reiff group.

In Achern, the paper's northern outpost, it competes head-on with the Acher- und Bühler Bote, the local edition of the Karlsruhe-based Badische Neueste Nachrichten. The two papers' offices sit streets apart in Achern, and the rivalry between the Ortenau's Reiff titles and the BNN's editions is one of the defining features of the region's newspaper market.

History

The Acher-Rench-Zeitung belongs to a publishing tradition that reaches back more than 200 years. The Reiff family company, reiff medien, describes itself as having grown over its two-century history from a traditional printing and newspaper business into a cross-media regional media group, with the daily newspapers of the Mittelbadische Presse still at its center. The Offenburger Tageblatt, the parent title, is the flagship of that group: a daily that has chronicled the Ortenau since the early 19th century and that, in 1976, became the first German newspaper to acquire a Linotype phototypesetting system for its newsroom, switching to a five-column layout two years later.

The four titles of the Mittelbadische Presse — the Offenburger Tageblatt with its Schwarzwald-Zeitung edition, the Kehler Zeitung, the Lahrer Anzeiger, and the Acher-Rench-Zeitung — operate as head papers, sharing the national section produced in Offenburg while each maintains its own local identity and local newsroom. The total sold circulation of the Mittelbadische Presse group stands at 33,798 copies (IVW 1/2026, Monday to Saturday); the Offenburger Tageblatt alone sells 11,235 copies, 93.8 percent of them by subscription. Edition-level figures for the Acher-Rench-Zeitung are not publicly broken out.

The paper's online home is bo.de, the "Baden Online" portal that serves as the shared digital platform of the Mittelbadische Presse, marketed as "Mittelbadische Presse – Zeitungen der Ortenau." The portal carries the local reporting of all four titles alongside regional news, and the group also operates Mittelbadische-Presse.tv, an online video offering.

Coverage and Content

The Acher-Rench-Zeitung's content follows the familiar division of the regional daily. The shared national section covers federal and state politics, the economy, culture, and sports, while the local pages are the paper's calling card: reporting from the municipal councils of Oberkirch, Achern, Oppenau, and the valley communities; court reporting; school and education news; and coverage of the region's churches, clubs, and volunteer organizations.

The agricultural and winegrowing economy of the valleys gets sustained attention. The Rench valley and the surrounding foothills are wine country, and the paper covers the wine harvest, the vintners' cooperatives, and the tourism that the spas of Bad Peterstal-Griesbach and the hiking trails of the Black Forest bring to the region. The fruit harvest — the region is known for its orchards — and the seasonal rhythms of farm life are regular subjects, as are the industrial employers of the area and the commuter economy that ties the valleys to Offenburg, Strasbourg, and Karlsruhe.

The paper's advertising sections serve the local businesses of the Acher and Rench valleys, and its classified and family-announcement pages remain among the most-read parts of the paper. Special advertising sections and supplements mark the seasons: the wine harvest, the Christmas markets, the tourism season in the Black Forest.

Organization and Ownership

The Acher-Rench-Zeitung is published within the Reiff group, the Offenburg-based family media company that has been in the printing and newspaper business for over 200 years. The local edition is issued by the Acher-Rench-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG in Oberkirch, operating within the group's Mittelbadische Presse structure. The group's flagship, the Offenburger Tageblatt, is published by Reiff Verlag GmbH & Co. KG in Offenburg.

The four head papers of the Mittelbadische Presse share the national section and the group's technical infrastructure while maintaining separate local newsrooms. The group's combined sold circulation of 33,798 copies (IVW 1/2026) makes it the dominant newspaper voice of the Ortenaukreis, the district whose boundaries essentially define its distribution area. The paper's digital operations are centered on bo.de, the group's online portal, which also hosts classified advertising, jobs, and real-estate sections, and on the ePaper editions of the individual titles.

The editor-in-chief of the Offenburger Tageblatt leads the group's central newsroom; the names of the group's senior editors are published in the papers' imprints. For the Acher-Rench-Zeitung, the relevant editorial leadership is the local newsroom in Oberkirch, whose editors produce the edition's local pages.

Digital Presence

The digital home of the Acher-Rench-Zeitung is bo.de, the "Baden Online" portal of the Mittelbadische Presse. The site carries the local reporting of the Acher-Rench-Zeitung alongside the other Ortenau titles, with sections for local news, classified ads, jobs, and real estate. Readers can access the paper as an ePaper, the digital replica of the printed edition, and the group operates Mittelbadische-Presse.tv for online video.

The portal's structure reflects the group's head-paper model: readers choose their local edition — Offenburger Tageblatt, Acher-Rench-Zeitung, Lahrer Anzeiger, or Kehler Zeitung — and find the local reporting of their valley alongside the shared regional and national coverage. On social media, the Mittelbadische Presse titles maintain channels that distribute local stories, and newsletters serve the group's subscribers.

For the readers of the Acher and Rench valleys, the Acher-Rench-Zeitung remains the daily paper of their valleys: a local edition with a local newsroom in Oberkirch, a masthead that names their rivers, and a publishing house in Offenburg whose family has been printing newspapers since the days when the Ortenau was still a patchwork of small states. In a media landscape where local papers are increasingly produced far from the towns they serve, the paper's continued presence on Oberkirch's market square is itself part of the story.