About Bayerische Rundschau

Bayerische Rundschau

The Bayerische Rundschau is the regional daily newspaper for the town and district of Kulmbach in Upper Franconia, Bavaria, and with a first issue dating to 1 January 1903 it is among the oldest continuously published dailies in northern Bavaria. Appearing under the masthead line "Tageszeitung für Kulmbach Stadt und Land," it serves the town of the Plassenburg and its surrounding district with locally produced pages, while sharing a supra-regional newsroom with its sister papers in the Mediengruppe Oberfranken, the Fränkischer Tag of Bamberg, the Coburger Tageblatt and the Saale-Zeitung. The paper appears Monday through Saturday in print and as an e-paper, sells 8,672 copies, and publishes digitally at bayerische-rundschau.de.

Overview

The Bayerische Rundschau serves Kulmbach, the Upper Franconian town dominated by the Plassenburg castle and known for its brewing tradition, and the surrounding district, a territory of small towns, villages and farmland between the Franconian Forest and the Franconian Switzerland. Its readers find the full program of the German regional daily: the town council and district politics, the local economy with its breweries, manufacturers and crafts businesses, education and social affairs, the dense club and association life of Franconia, and the court and police reporting of the area. The local pages are produced by the Kulmbach newsroom under local editorial head Mark Hildebrandt, while the überregionale Redaktion, the shared national and regional desk in Bamberg, supplies the pages the four dailies of the group hold in common.

The sold circulation of 8,672 copies reflects the paper's position as the undisputed daily of its district, though it has fallen by nearly half since 1998, in line with the structural decline of the German regional press. The paper's publishing house in Kulmbach, the historic seat of the Baumann group with which the Fränkischer Tag merged in 2003, remains the editorial home of the title. The Bayerische Rundschau is the paid daily complement to the group's free weeklies in the town, the Anzeiger Kulmbach and its weekend edition, which reach every household while the Rundschau serves its subscribers.

History

The Bayerische Rundschau was first published on 1 January 1903, in the press boom of the late German Empire, and it has appeared, through the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, the postwar reconstruction and the reunification decades, ever since. For much of the twentieth century it was the paper of the Baumann group of Kulmbach, a family publishing house with its own printing operations and a book and specialist publishing business alongside the newspaper. In 2003 the Fränkischer Tag GmbH & Co. KG of Bamberg merged with the Baumann Group, bringing the Bayerische Rundschau, the Coburger Tageblatt and the Fränkischer Tag into a single publishing group, and in 2009 the combined house adopted the name Mediengruppe Oberfranken.

The merger created one of the largest media houses in northern Bavaria, with four regional dailies selling a combined 94,550 copies, eight free weeklies with some 380,000 copies of weekly reach, the inFranken.de online portal, and the Pressedruck Oberfranken printing plant in Bamberg, which prints the group's own titles as well as outside work including the Heinrichsblatt, the church paper of the Archdiocese of Bamberg. In 2005 the Fränkischer Tag underwent a relaunch with a newsdesk reorganization that also reshaped the shared editorial structures. On 1 January 2019 the group's dailies, including the Bayerische Rundschau, received a new editor-in-chief, Boris Hächler, succeeding Frank Förtsch after nineteen years; the current editors-in-chief are named as Thomas Zeller, with Mark Hildebrandt leading the Kulmbach newsroom. The pending acquisition of the Mediengruppe Oberfranken by the Mediengruppe Bayern of Passau would carry the 1903-founded Kulmbach daily into Bavaria's largest regional publishing group.

Coverage and Content

The Rundschau's local pages cover Kulmbach town and district in the detail its readers expect from a paper that has served the area for more than one hundred and twenty years: the town council, the district administration, the mayors of the surrounding municipalities, and the standing issues of a rural Franconian district, from school locations to medical care, from road infrastructure to the development of tourism around the Plassenburg and the brewing heritage. The town's beer culture, the Kulmbacher Brauerei, the annual Bierwoche and the town's identity as a beer capital, gives the paper a distinctive local beat, and the club life, the sports associations, music societies, volunteer fire brigades and carnival clubs, fills its pages week after week.

The shared überregionale Redaktion in Bamberg delivers the coverage of Bavarian state politics in Munich, national and international news, business and sports for all four of the group's dailies. The arrangement gives the Kulmbach reader a complete daily paper: the town and district on the local pages, produced on the spot, the wider world inside, produced by the shared desk. Special publications around local elections, the Bierwoche and regional anniversaries complement the daily paper.

Organization and Ownership

The Bayerische Rundschau is published by the Mediengruppe Oberfranken, mgo Lokale Medien GmbH & Co. KG, the Bamberg-based media house whose local media division comprises the four Franconian dailies and the eight free weeklies of the franken-aktuell.de group. The managing director named for the paper is Eva-Maria Bauch, and the editors-in-chief are Thomas Zeller, with Mark Hildebrandt as Redaktionsleiter in Kulmbach. The group's local media business is supported by its own delivery companies, the Z+S Zustell- und Service GmbH and Presse Vertriebs-Service Kulmbach, and stakes in regional direct-distribution firms.

The acquisition by the Mediengruppe Bayern, led by managing director Simone Tucci-Diekmann and already the publisher of the Passauer Neue Presse, the Donaukurier of Ingolstadt and the Mittelbayerische Zeitung of Regensburg, would integrate the Kulmbach daily into a Bavarian publishing group of unprecedented scale. The transaction has been presented as an answer to the structural challenges facing the regional press: the investment demands of digital transformation and the long decline of print circulation and advertising are more easily borne at scale, while the local titles keep the newsroom presence and the historic names that are their market value.

Digital Presence

The digital home of the Bayerische Rundschau is bayerische-rundschau.de, where the paper publishes its local reporting alongside the shared content of the group's überregionale Redaktion. The site offers the e-paper edition of the printed paper for digital subscribers, continuously updated local news, photo galleries and the service content of a modern regional portal, following the subscription model standard in the German regional press. The group's wider digital ecosystem surrounds the Kulmbach title: the inFranken.de portal, which counted 18.7 million page views in September 2021, aggregates the content of the dailies and weeklies for a pan-Franconian audience, and the jobs.inFranken.de platform extends print job advertisements into thirty-day online listings.

For a paper first published in 1903, the digital channels are the newest form of a very old promise: Kulmbach's news, reported in Kulmbach, every working day. The e-paper replicates the familiar structure of the printed edition for readers who have moved to tablets, the portal serves the breaking news of the district throughout the day, and newsletters deliver the morning's headlines to inboxes across the town and district, keeping a one-hundred-and-twenty-two-year-old daily present in the routines of a new generation of readers, in print and on screen alike, as it has been since the first issue of 1903.