About Altmühl-Bote

Altmühl-Bote

The Altmühl-Bote is a regional daily newspaper published in Gunzenhausen, a historic town in Middle Franconia, Bavaria, and it is among the oldest continuously published local papers in the region, with its first issue dating to 1848. Named after the Altmühl river that flows through its circulation area, the paper serves the town of Gunzenhausen and the surrounding district of Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen, an area known for its lakes, the Franconian Lake District, and its position between Nuremberg and the Altmühl valley. It appears Monday through Saturday in Berliner format, takes its national and regional news section from the Nürnberger Nachrichten, and is published by MILLIZER + RIEDEL GmbH, with its newsroom on the Gunzenhäuser Marktplatz.

Overview

The Altmühl-Bote is the daily paper of record for Gunzenhausen and the western part of the Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen district, a region where tourism around the Altmühlsee and Brombachsee lakes, agriculture, and small industry shape the local economy. Its sold circulation is 5,537 copies, with more than ninety-six percent of those going to subscribers, a subscription share that testifies to the paper's deep anchoring in its community even as its total circulation has fallen by nearly thirty-eight percent since 1998, in line with the broader erosion of German regional print. The paper's readers are concentrated in Gunzenhausen itself and the surrounding municipalities of the Altmühl region, where it competes for attention with the free weeklies and the digital offerings of the larger Nuremberg media houses.

As a local edition within the Nürnberger Nachrichten group, the Altmühl-Bote combines pages produced by its own Gunzenhausen newsroom with the Mantel, the shared national, Bavarian and regional section produced in Nuremberg. This structure gives readers a paper that reads as their town's own on the front local pages while delivering professionally produced coverage of state, national and world news inside. The paper's digital presence lives under the nordbayern.de portal, the online home of the Nürnberger Nachrichten, where Gunzenhausen has its own local news stream. The editorial leadership on the ground changed recently, with Patrick Shaw taking over as Redaktionsleiter on 1 May 2025.

History

The Altmühl-Bote traces its origins to 1848, the revolutionary year in which a wave of new newspapers appeared across the German states as press censorship collapsed. The founding is attributed to the publisher C. H. Beck, whose name connects the paper to one of Germany's great publishing dynasties, and the title took its name from the Altmühl, the river that defines the landscape of its home region. Few German local papers can claim an unbroken lineage back to the mid-nineteenth century, and the Altmühl-Bote's 1848 founding makes it a contemporary of the Frankfurt National Assembly and the birth of the modern German press.

For much of its modern history the paper was published by the Emmy Riedel Buchdruckerei und Verlag GmbH, a Gunzenhausen printing and publishing house that carried the title through the twentieth century. In 2024 the publishing operation was reorganized under the name MILLIZER + RIEDEL GmbH, which has published the paper since then. Like nearly every German regional daily, the Altmühl-Bote has lost circulation steadily over the past quarter century, shedding close to two fifths of its sold copies since 1998, with an average annual decline of around three percent over the last decade. The paper has responded with the standard repertoire of the regional press: a tighter local focus, a digital edition, and integration into the larger Nuremberg newsroom network for everything beyond its home territory.

Coverage and Content

The heart of the Altmühl-Bote is its local section, produced by the Gunzenhausen newsroom on the town's Marktplatz, covering the city council and district administration, the development of the Franconian Lake District as a tourism destination, local business and crafts, schools and clubs, church and cultural life, and the police and court reporting that readers of a local daily expect. The paper's territory sits at an interesting intersection: historically Franconian, administratively part of the Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen district, and economically tied both to the Nuremberg metropolitan region and to the rural Altmühl valley, and its reporting reflects all three orientations.

The national and regional pages come from the Nürnberger Nachrichten, one of Germany's large regional dailies with a circulation approaching one hundred and eighty thousand copies across its many local editions. Through this arrangement the Altmühl-Bote's readers receive the same Mantel as readers of the Erlanger Nachrichten, the Fürther Nachrichten, the Fränkische Landeszeitung in Ansbach and the dozen other local titles of the NN group, while the Gunzenhausen pages remain the paper's own. Special publications and supplements around local events, elections and the tourism season round out the offering. The tourism economy of the Franconian Lake District gives the paper a distinctive beat: the Altmühlsee, on whose shore Gunzenhausen lies, and the nearby Brombachsee draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a year for sailing, cycling and holidays, and the paper follows the infrastructure, environmental and business questions that come with that role, from lakeside development to water management. The paper also documents the region's industrial side, including the manufacturing employers around Gunzenhausen and Weißenburg, and the interplay between the rural communities of the district and the pull of the Nuremberg job market an hour to the north.

Organization and Ownership

The Altmühl-Bote is published by MILLIZER + RIEDEL GmbH of Gunzenhausen, which took over the title in 2024 from the Emmy Riedel Buchdruckerei und Verlag GmbH. Through its Mantel relationship it belongs to the sphere of the Nürnberger Nachrichten, whose publisher is the Verlag Nürnberger Presse Druckhaus Nürnberg GmbH & Co. KG; the NN group is owned by Bärbel Schnell and Sabine Schnell-Pleyer, the heirs of the publisher Bruno Schnell. The editors-in-chief named for the group include Michael Husarek, alongside Armin Jelenik, Barbara Zinecker, Patrick Shaw and Marianne Natalis in the roles reported for the title.

Day-to-day editorial responsibility in Gunzenhausen lies with the local newsroom under its Redaktionsleiter, Patrick Shaw, who took the position on 1 May 2025. The newsroom's location on the Marktplatz, in the historic center of Gunzenhausen near the town hall and the Stadtkirche St. Mariä Virginis, is itself a statement of the paper's identity: a town paper physically present in the town square, close to the institutions and the readers it covers.

Digital Presence

Online, the Altmühl-Bote appears as the Gunzenhausen section of nordbayern.de, the digital portal of the Nürnberger Nachrichten, where local stories from the Altmühl region sit alongside the group's regional and national coverage. The e-paper offers the printed edition in digital form for subscribers, and the portal carries the usual complement of a modern regional news site: continuously updated local news, photo galleries, service information and the advertising and classifieds business that has always underpinned the local press. For a paper whose print circulation is just over five thousand copies, the digital reach through the NN group's portal substantially extends its audience beyond the subscriber base, carrying Gunzenhausen news to former residents and interested readers across Franconia and beyond. The title's history as an independent Gunzenhausen publishing house, first under the Riedel printing family and now under MILLIZER + RIEDEL, remains visible in the paper's self-presentation: even as the Mantel pages arrive from Nuremberg, the masthead, the Marktplatz newsroom and the local edition's identity emphasize that this is Gunzenhausen's own daily, a paper whose lineage reaches back to the revolutionary year of 1848 and whose task today is the same as it was then, to report on the town and the river valley it is named for.