About Bergische Landeszeitung

Bergische Landeszeitung

The Bergische Landeszeitung, appearing with the line "unabhängige Zeitung für das Bergische Land," is the daily newspaper of Bergisch Gladbach and the Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis in North Rhine-Westphalia, and it is published as a Kopfblatt, a regional edition with its own title and local pages, of the Kölnische Rundschau. Its lineage reaches back to 1890, when the printer Johann Heider founded the Volksblatt für Bergisch Gladbach und Umgegend, and the paper has documented the life of the Bergisches Land through the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era and the postwar decades. Since 1952 it has belonged to the Heinen publishing house as part of the Kölnische Rundschau, within the DuMont media group, and it appears with its own local newsroom for the district.

Overview

The Bergische Landeszeitung serves Bergisch Gladbach, the district town of the Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis on Cologne's eastern edge, and the surrounding district: Burscheid, Kürten, Leichlingen, Odenthal, Overath, Rösrath and Wermelskirchen, the small towns and villages of the Bergisches Land between the Rhine and the Sauerland. Its readers find the program of the German regional daily: the town councils and district politics, the local economy between the Cologne commuter belt and the crafts businesses of the Bergisch towns, education and social affairs, the club and association life, and the court and police reporting of the area. The local pages are produced by the paper's own Bergisch Gladbach newsroom, while the Mantel, the regional, national and international section, arrives from the Kölnische Rundschau's Cologne headquarters.

Bergisch Gladbach is one of the few German cities with two subscription dailies from the same publishing group: alongside the Bergische Landeszeitung, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger also appears in the town, a legacy of the postwar press landscape that the DuMont group has preserved. The coexistence is a curiosity of German press history: two papers, two newsrooms, two mastheads, one owner, serving the same town with different editorial voices. For readers it means a choice that most Germans lost decades ago, when their towns became single-paper markets, and the rivalry, however friendly within the group, keeps both papers' Bergisch coverage honest. The paper's subtitle, "Heidersche Zeitung," kept for decades after the 1949 refounding, recalled its origins in the Heider publishing house, and its current line, "unabhängige Zeitung für das Bergische Land," asserts the editorial independence of the Bergisch edition within the Cologne group.

History

On 4 October 1890 the printer Johann Heider published the first issue of the Volksblatt für Gladbach und Umgegend as a weekly paper; from 13 December 1890 it appeared twice a week, from 1895 three times, and from 1 October 1896 as a daily newspaper. With the purchase of a thirty-two-page rotary press in 1928, Heider created the technical basis for the expanded Heidersche Zeitung, and the publishing house added further Bergisch papers: the Bensberger Volkszeitung for Bensberg, where the Bensberg-Gladbacher Anzeiger had appeared since 1867, and the Wipperfürther Zeitung for Wipperfürth. When the Mülheim district was dissolved and the new Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis created in 1932, the paper took the name Rheinisch-Bergische Zeitung, the title under which it also appeared through the Nazi era, its texts dictated by the German News Bureau and censored by local party offices, until the operation fell silent in March 1945.

After the war the Heider publishing house resumed business in the autumn of 1949 and brought out the newly founded Bergische Landeszeitung, keeping "Heidersche Zeitung" as its subtitle. In 1952 the Heinen publishing house took over the paper as a Kopfblatt of the Kölnische Rundschau, the Cologne daily founded in 1946, integrating the Bergisch title into the Cologne publishing group while preserving its name, its newsroom and its local identity. On 10 October 2019 the Bergische Landeszeitung celebrated its seventieth anniversary together with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, a joint celebration of the postwar press tradition of the region.

Coverage and Content

The paper's local pages cover the Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis in the detail of a district paper: the district administration in Bergisch Gladbach, the town councils of the district's municipalities, the development questions of Cologne's eastern commuter belt, from housing to transport, the schools and social institutions, and the cultural life of towns like the concert and theater offerings of Bergisch Gladbach. The Bergisches Land, with its hills, reservoirs and half-timbered villages, gives the paper a landscape identity distinct from the Cologne plain, and the paper covers the hiking tourism, the local history societies and the preservation of the region's industrial heritage, from the paper mills to the early industrial sites of the Wupper valley.

The shared section from Cologne delivers the coverage of North Rhine-Westphalian state politics in Düsseldorf, national and international news, business, culture and sports, produced by the Kölnische Rundschau's newsroom. The combination gives the Bergisch reader a complete daily paper: the district on the local pages, the Rhineland and the wider world inside. Special publications around local elections and regional anniversaries complement the daily paper.

Organization and Ownership

The Bergische Landeszeitung is published within the Heinen publishing house as a Kopfblatt of the Kölnische Rundschau, part of the M. DuMont Schauberg group of Cologne, one of Germany's major regional publishing houses. The publisher of the Kölnische Rundschau is Helmut Heinen, who has also served as president of the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers, and the DuMont group publishes the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger and the Express alongside the Rundschau. The Bergisch edition maintains its own local newsroom in Bergisch Gladbach within this structure.

The Kopfblatt arrangement is the organizational form of a press history: a paper founded in 1890 by a Bergisch Gladbach printer, merged into the Cologne group in 1952, keeping its title, its local pages and its claim to independence, "unabhängige Zeitung für das Bergische Land," for more than seventy years. The Heider family's imprint survived in the subtitle "Heidersche Zeitung" long after the family publishing house had passed into the Heinen group, a reminder on every front page of where the paper came from. In a media landscape where local titles are routinely folded into uniform regional editions, the Bergische Landeszeitung's survival as a named paper is itself the story.

Digital Presence

The digital home of the Bergische Landeszeitung is bergische-landeszeitung.de, where the paper publishes its Bergisch local reporting alongside the shared content of the Kölnische Rundschau group. The site offers the e-paper edition of the printed paper for digital subscribers, continuously updated local news from the Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis, photo galleries and the service content of a modern regional portal, following the subscription model of the DuMont group's titles. Social media channels distribute the day's local stories and drive traffic back to the portal.

For the readers of the Bergisches Land, the digital offering extends a paper whose history reaches back to Johann Heider's weekly of 1890 into the present: the e-paper for tablet readers, the portal's breaking news from the district, and newsletters delivering the morning's headlines. From the Volksblatt of the Empire to the Kopfblatt of the Kölnische Rundschau to the digital edition of today, the paper has kept its side of the bargain with its readers for more than one hundred and thirty years: the Bergisches Land's news, reported in the Bergisches Land, every working day, now as then.