About Ahlener Tageblatt

Ahlener Tageblatt

The Ahlener Tageblatt is the Ahlen edition of Die Glocke, the regional daily of the Warendorf district published in Oelde. It appears under its own title in Ahlen, the largest town of the district, carrying Die Glocke's regional and national reporting with a local section for the Ahlen area. Since March 2020 it has operated under an arrangement almost unheard of in the German newspaper market: after its own Ahlen editorial office was closed, the paper's local pages have been supplied by its direct competitor, the Ahlener Zeitung — so the two rival titles on Ahlen's newsstands share the same local journalism while remaining separate papers.

Overview

The Ahlener Tageblatt is a subscription daily appearing Monday through Saturday, aimed at the households of Ahlen in the southern Münsterland. Ahlen, a former coal-mining town on the eastern edge of the Ruhr region's orbit, is the largest town of the Kreis Warendorf and the commercial center of its southern half. The paper serves it in the classic manner of the German local daily: town council and district politics, schools, courts, church life, the sports clubs, and the everyday business of a community whose newspaper history reaches back to 1898, when the Ahlener Volkszeitung first appeared.

The paper's structure is that of a local edition. The national and regional pages — federal politics, the economy, culture, sports — are produced by the central newsroom of Die Glocke in Oelde, which works on the newsdesk principle and supplies the paper's four local newsrooms in Gütersloh, Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Warendorf, and Beckum/Oelde. The local pages for Ahlen are, since the spring of 2020, no longer written by a Glocke newsroom in the town: the Ahlen editorial office was dissolved at the end of February 2020, and since March 2020 the Ahlener Tageblatt has drawn its local content from the Ahlener Zeitung, the competing daily published by the Aschendorff group.

Online, the paper lives inside die-glocke.de, the shared digital platform of Die Glocke, where Ahlen's local reporting appears alongside the paper's regional and national coverage.

History

The Ahlener Tageblatt's parent paper, Die Glocke, was founded in 1880 by Engelbert Holterdorf, then 21 years old and a farmer's son who had originally wanted to become a local administrator but was talked into journalism by friends. He founded the daily Oelder Zeitung, the E. Holterdorf printing house, and a bookshop in Oelde; his aim was a newspaper whose language everyone could understand. The first issue appeared on 14 May 1880. Four years later the paper was renamed Die Glocke, and it grew gradually into one of the largest dailies of the region.

Production was interrupted only between 1944 and 1949, by the Allied invasion and its aftermath. In 1949 Die Glocke received a new license, and the first postwar issue appeared on 2 November 1949. The paper established itself as the regional daily for the Kreis Warendorf and the southern part of the Kreis Gütersloh, with a reputation — in its reporting and its commentary on political topics — as a rather conservatively oriented paper.

The Ahlen edition's recent history took its unusual turn in early 2020. At the end of February 2020 the paper's Ahlen editorial office was dissolved, and from March 2020 the Ahlener Tageblatt began sourcing its local content from the Ahlener Zeitung — the very paper it competes with on Ahlen's newsstands. The arrangement, in which a daily's local journalism is produced by its direct competitor, is a stark illustration of the economic pressures on Germany's local press: rather than abandon the Ahlen market, Die Glocke kept the title alive with local pages written by the rival newsroom.

Coverage and Content

The Ahlener Tageblatt's content follows the division of labor of the edition model, with a twist. The central newsroom in Oelde supplies the national section — politics, business, culture, Westphalia, sports, advice, and world news — produced by 61 permanent editors and five trainees, supported by 300 freelancers and a Berlin correspondent. The paper's regional coverage focuses on the Kreis Warendorf and the southern Kreis Gütersloh, with sports, local sports, and weather taking up broad space.

The local pages for Ahlen cover the town council and administration, the district politics of Warendorf, school and education news, court reporting, and the clubs, churches, and volunteer organizations of the town. Since March 2020 these pages have been produced by the newsroom of the Ahlener Zeitung, the Aschendorff-group daily that is Die Glocke's competitor in the town. The two papers thus carry the same local journalism under different mastheads and with different national sections — the Glocke's Oelde-produced pages in one, the Westfälische Nachrichten group's pages in the other.

Special publications for selected target groups supplement the offering, including the quarterly magazine "hierzulande – das Magazin für Lebensart im Herzen Westfalens" and the twice-yearly supplement "drinnen & draußen" with excursion and event tips. In the northern part of the Warendorf district, Die Glocke competes with the Westfälische Nachrichten of Münster; in the Gütersloh district, with the Neue Westfälische and the Westfalen-Blatt.

Organization and Ownership

The Ahlener Tageblatt is published by the Verlag E. Holterdorf GmbH & Co. KG in Oelde, the publishing house founded by Engelbert Holterdorf in 1880 and still the home of Die Glocke. The editor-in-chief of Die Glocke is Fried Gehring. The paper maintains local newsrooms in Gütersloh, Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Warendorf, and Beckum/Oelde, and branch offices in Ahlen — under the Ahlener Tageblatt title — as well as in Beckum, Gütersloh (as the Gütersloher Volkszeitung), Lippstadt, Oelde, Warendorf, and Wiedenbrück (as the Wiedenbrücker Zeitung).

The publishing house holds majority stakes in the local radio stations Radio WAF (Kreis Warendorf) and Radio Gütersloh (Kreis Gütersloh), which broadcast in the paper's main distribution area, and holds shares in the Bielefeld-based service provider for local radio, audio media service (ams). Circulation figures for the individual editions are reported for the paper as a whole; the Ahlener Tageblatt's standalone sold circulation was last separately reported at 2,525 copies (Q4/2014), a figure that predates the 2020 reorganization.

Digital Presence

The publisher describes its internet offering, www.die-glocke.de, as a regional news portal. Information from the paper's distribution area appears there alongside advice topics and registration for the ePaper, the electronic one-to-one image of the printed Glocke. In 2022 the news portal recorded an average of 1 million visitors and 3.3 million page views per month. Since March 2014 the paper has also been readable via an app developed for iOS and Android.

Local reporting from Ahlen appears on the portal within Die Glocke's regional structure, and readers of the Ahlener Tageblatt can follow the edition's coverage through the paper's social media channels and newsletters. The ePaper editions give subscribers the printed paper in digital form, and the app extends the paper's reach to mobile readers across the Warendorf district.

For the readers of Ahlen, the Ahlener Tageblatt remains a daily paper of their town — even as its local pages are now written by the newsroom of its competitor, a compromise that keeps a second masthead alive on Ahlen's newsstands. In a town whose newspaper history began in 1898, the title continues as the local face of a publishing house that has been printing dailies in Oelde since 1880, and as a reminder of how Germany's local press is adapting — sometimes in unexpected ways — to the economics of the 21st century.