About Bergische Morgenpost

Bergische Morgenpost

The Bergische Morgenpost is the local edition of the Rheinische Post for the Bergisches Land, the hilly region east of Düsseldorf and Cologne in North Rhine-Westphalia, with its editorial base in Remscheid and local editions for Hückeswagen, Radevormwald and Wermelskirchen. As one of the thirty-one local editions of the Rheinische Post, the Düsseldorf daily founded in 1946, it combines locally produced pages for the Bergisch towns with the shared regional, national and international section of the RP group. The paper appears Monday through Saturday in Rheinisch format and shares the rp-online.de news portal, one of Germany's most-visited regional news sites, with the group's other editions.

Overview

The Bergische Morgenpost serves the eastern Bergisches Land: Remscheid, the city of tools and mechanical engineering in the Wupper valley, Solingen, the blade city, and the smaller towns of the Oberbergischer fringe, Hückeswagen, Radevormwald and Wermelskirchen, with their reservoirs, forests and half-timbered old towns. Its readers find the program of the German regional daily: the city councils and district politics, the metalworking and tool industry that has defined the region since the early modern period, the schools and social institutions, the club and association life, and the court and police reporting of the area. The local pages are produced by the paper's Bergisch newsrooms, with the main editorial office in Remscheid-Lennep under regional editorial head Guido Radtke and local editions for Hückeswagen, Radevormwald and Wermelskirchen.

In Remscheid the paper competes with the Remscheider General-Anzeiger, the independent daily founded in 1889 and published by the J. F. Ziegler house, which remains the city's highest-circulation paper. The Bergische Morgenpost's circulation was last reported at 14,368 copies, against the General-Anzeiger's 20,656, a genuine two-paper competition of the kind that has become rare in the German regional press. The Rheinische Post as a whole is one of Germany's largest regional dailies, with a print circulation of around two hundred and eighty thousand copies, and its thirty-one local editions stretch from the Bergisches Land to the Dutch border.

History

The Rheinische Post was founded on 2 March 1946, nine months after the end of the Second World War, under license from the British military government. Its founders, the newspaper publisher Anton Betz, the Christian Democratic politician Karl Arnold and the lawyer Erich Wenderoth, all opponents of the Nazi regime, campaigned for a political, economic and moral new beginning, and the paper has defended democracy, freedom and human dignity as its self-declared values since its first issue. The founding families, the Arnolds, Betzes, Drostes, Alts and Ebels, remain the paper's owners through the Rheinische Post Mediengruppe, and the Droste family joined the publishing house in 1970.

The Bergische Morgenpost emerged as the edition for the Bergisches Land within this structure, carrying the RP's journalism into a region with its own strong press traditions: the Remscheider General-Anzeiger of 1889, the Solinger Tageblatt, founded in 1809 as the Verkündiger and still owned by the Boll family, and the long-defunct Bergischer Volksbote of Burscheid, which was absorbed into the Remscheider General-Anzeiger's Wermelskirchen edition in 2019. The RP's Bergisch edition, with its newsroom in Lennep, Remscheid's historic old town, and its local editions for the surrounding towns, positioned itself as the regional alternative to the independent city papers, backed by the resources of the Düsseldorf publishing house.

Coverage and Content

The Bergische Morgenpost's local pages follow the life of the Bergisches Land in the detail its readers expect. The tool and metalworking industry, the world-famous blades of Solingen, the tool manufacturers of Remscheid, the locks, fittings and small ironwares of the region's Mittelstand, gives the paper an industrial beat of unusual depth, and it covers the companies' fortunes, the apprenticeship questions and the structural change of the manufacturing sector with the attention of a business paper. Municipal reporting follows the city councils of Remscheid and Solingen, the Oberbergischer Kreis administration and the town councils of Hückeswagen, Radevormwald and Wermelskirchen, with the infrastructure questions of a hilly region: roads, public transport, school locations and medical care.

The landscape itself is a standing subject: the reservoirs, the Wupper valley, the forests and the half-timbered old towns that make the Bergisches Land a recreation area for the Rhine-Ruhr metropolis. The Müngsten Bridge, Germany's highest railway bridge, spanning the Wupper between Remscheid and Solingen, is the region's landmark and a recurring subject of the paper's reporting, from its renovation to its role in the region's industrial heritage tourism. The early industrial sites of the Wupper valley, where the grinding workshops and hammer mills of the pre-industrial era gave rise to the tool industry, give the paper a historical depth that few regional dailies can match. The shared section from Düsseldorf delivers the coverage of North Rhine-Westphalian state politics, national and international news, business and sports, produced by the RP's central newsroom under editor-in-chief Moritz Döbler, in office since 2020, with the paper's Berlin bureau and foreign correspondents in Washington, London, Brussels, Paris and Moscow contributing. The RP considers itself a writers' paper, with some eighty percent of its articles written by its own journalists, a proportion unusually high for a regional daily and a point of pride the paper has maintained since its founding.

Organization and Ownership

The Bergische Morgenpost is published by the Rheinische Post Verlagsgesellschaft mbH of Düsseldorf, part of the Rheinische Post Mediengruppe, which also publishes the Saarbrücker Zeitung and the Trierischer Volksfreund among its regional dailies. The owners are the descendants of the founding families, and the editor-in-chief is Moritz Döbler. The Bergisch edition operates within the group's network of thirty-one local editions, each with its own regional news pages, from the Neuß-Grevenbroicher Zeitung to the Bocholter-Borkener Volksblatt.

The edition's newsroom organization reflects the geography of its territory: the main editorial office in Remscheid-Lennep, local editions with their own pages for Hückeswagen, Radevormwald and Wermelskirchen, all under the regional editorial leadership. For the readers of the eastern Bergisches Land this means a daily paper that covers their towns specifically, while drawing on the journalism of one of Germany's largest regional publishing houses for everything beyond.

Digital Presence

The digital home of the Bergische Morgenpost is rp-online.de, the RP's news portal, where the Bergisches Land edition appears with its own local news stream among the group's editions. The portal, which has counted more than a billion page impressions in peak years, publishes continuously updated regional news, breaking stories, the e-paper edition of the printed paper for digital subscribers, photo galleries and videos, following the subscription model of the group's titles. Social media channels for the local editions distribute the day's stories and drive traffic back to the portal.

For the readers of the Bergisches Land, the digital offering extends a paper rooted in the 1946 founding of the Rheinische Post into the present: the e-paper for tablet readers, the portal's breaking news from the region, and newsletters delivering the morning's headlines. In Remscheid, where two dailies still compete every morning, the Bergische Morgenpost's digital presence is part of a rivalry that keeps both papers' local journalism sharp, to the benefit of the readers of the tool city and its Bergisch neighbors. From the grinding workshops of the Wupper valley to the newsrooms of the digital age, the paper's task has remained constant: to tell the Bergisches Land, every day, what is happening in its own hills and valleys.