About Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger

Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger

The Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger is the local edition of the Passauer Neue Presse for the Altötting and Neuötting area of Upper Bavaria. Published on weekdays from the Inn valley towns, it carries the PNP's regional and national reporting under its own local title while a local newsroom covers the district of Altötting — the pilgrimage town of Altötting, its twin town Neuötting, and the surrounding Inn valley communities. It is one of the local editions with which the Passauer Neue Presse, the regional daily of eastern Bavaria, serves its territory beyond its Passau heartland.

Overview

The Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger is a subscription daily appearing Monday through Saturday, aimed at the households of Altötting, Neuötting, and the surrounding communities of the Altötting district. Altötting, one of Bavaria's great pilgrimage towns with its Chapel of Grace, and Neuötting, its historic twin town on the Inn, anchor a district shaped by the Inn river, the chemical industry of the Burghausen area, and the deeply Catholic traditions of southeastern Bavaria. The paper covers this territory in the classic manner of the German local daily: the town councils and district administration, the schools, the courts, church life, the sports clubs, and the pilgrimage and festival calendar that structures the region's year.

The paper's structure is that of a local edition within the PNP group. The national and regional pages come from the central newsroom of the Passauer Neue Presse in Passau, while the local pages for the Altötting area are produced by the edition's own newsroom. The group's total sold circulation stands at 124,319 copies (IVW 2/2026, Monday to Saturday) across its local editions; edition-level figures for the Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger are not publicly broken out. Online, the paper lives inside pnp.de, the shared digital platform of the Passauer Neue Presse.

History

The Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger belongs to a newspaper tradition that begins on 5 February 1946, when the first issue of the Passauer Neue Presse appeared. Its founder was Johannes Kapfinger — Hans Kapfinger — who had worked as an editor at the Straubinger Tagblatt until 1933 and who received the newspaper license from the American occupiers in Passau, classified as a victim of Nazi persecution. The first issue appeared with a starting circulation of 100,000 copies. Kapfinger led the paper until his death in 1985; after him, his son Heinz Kapfinger, his wife Edith Berger-Kapfinger, and her daughter from her first marriage, Angelika Diekmann, took over the management. Since 2002 all shares have been held by the Diekmann family.

The PNP grew into the regional daily of eastern and southeastern Lower Bavaria and the Altötting district of Upper Bavaria — the third daily of eastern Bavaria alongside the Mittelbayerische Zeitung and the Straubinger Tagblatt/Landshuter Zeitung. Its distribution area covers mainly eastern and southeastern Lower Bavaria and the Altötting district; the Straubing/Landshut/Kelheim area is not part of its territory. The paper appears in Rheinisch format and is produced in the group's own Druckzentrum Passau.

The local editions extend the paper's reach into the region's sub-landscapes: the city edition for Passau itself, the district edition for the Passau district, the Osterhofener Zeitung for Osterhofen, the Plattlinger Zeitung for Plattling, the Grafenauer Anzeiger for the Freyung-Grafenau area — and in the Altötting district, the Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger for Altötting and Neuötting and the Burghauser Anzeiger for the southern district around Burghausen, the paper's southernmost outpost toward Upper Bavaria.

Coverage and Content

The Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger's content follows the division of labor of the edition model. The Passau newsroom produces the national and regional section — federal and state politics, the Bavarian state politics from Munich, the economy, culture, sports — while the local pages are the edition's reason for being: reporting from the town councils of Altötting and Neuötting, the district administration and district politics of Altötting, school and education news, court reporting, and coverage of the clubs, churches, and volunteer organizations of the Inn valley.

The paper pays particular attention to the pilgrimage economy and religious life of Altötting: the Chapel of Grace, one of the most-visited pilgrimage sites in the German-speaking world, draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year, and the paper chronicles the pilgrimage seasons, the church festivals, and the civic life of a town defined by its shrine. The chemical industry of the Burghausen area — the district's economic engine — and the Inn valley's agriculture and mid-size businesses are regular subjects, as are the schools and the sports clubs of the district's towns and villages.

The paper's advertising sections serve the local businesses of the Altötting district, and its classified and family-announcement pages remain among the most-read parts of the paper. The pilgrimage calendar gives the paper's service pages a distinctive rhythm, from the great pilgrimages of the spring to the Christmas season in the shrine town.

Organization and Ownership

The Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger is published within the Mediengruppe Bayern GmbH of Passau — formerly the Verlagsgruppe Passau — the media group behind the Passauer Neue Presse. The publisher is represented by the shareholders' meeting of the Passauer Neue Presse GmbH; the managing director is Simone Tucci-Diekmann, and the editor-in-chief of the Passauer Neue Presse is Martin Wanninger. The group's address is Medienstraße 5, 94036 Passau.

The group's total sold circulation of 124,319 copies (IVW 2/2026) makes the PNP the largest regional daily in Bavaria outside the conurbations, reaching around half a million readers daily. The paper is produced in the group's own printing center in Passau and appears in Rheinisch format. The Mediengruppe Bayern — long known as the Verlagsgruppe Passau — was for years an internationally active publishing group, with newspapers in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Austria alongside its Bavarian titles; its Czech subsidiary Vltava-Labe-Press owned the majority of the Czech regional press. That international chapter gave the Passau publishing house a scale unusual for a regional German daily, even as its local editions — from the Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger to the Grafenauer Anzeiger — kept their focus on the towns and valleys of eastern Bavaria. The names of the group's senior editors are published in the papers' imprints.

Digital Presence

Online, the Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger is part of pnp.de, the digital platform of the Passauer Neue Presse. The site carries the local reporting of the Altötting edition alongside the regional and national coverage of the group, with sections for local news, sports, and service content. Readers can access the paper as an ePaper, the digital version of the classic print format, and the group's digital offerings include apps and newsletters.

The platform's structure reflects the group's edition model: readers find the local reporting of their district — Altötting, Passau, Freyung-Grafenau, Deggendorf — alongside the shared coverage of the Passau newsroom. On social media, the group's titles maintain channels that distribute local stories, extending the reach of the Altötting newsroom beyond the printed paper's circulation area.

For the readers of the Altötting district, the Alt-Neuöttinger Anzeiger remains the daily paper of their Inn valley: a local edition with its own newsroom, a masthead that names the twin towns, and a publishing group in Passau whose history began with Hans Kapfinger's licensed first issue of February 1946. In the pilgrimage district of southeastern Bavaria, it continues the tradition of the local daily — from the shrine town's council to the Inn valley's clubs, from the pilgrimage seasons to the chemical park's shifts.