About bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung

bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung

The bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung, today published under the shortened name BezirksZeitung, is a German-language free weekly newspaper for Vienna, the capital of Austria. Founded in 1983, it is built around a simple and distinctive idea: instead of treating Vienna as a single news market, it divides the city into 23 district editions that follow the structure of Vienna's municipal districts, so that readers receive local news from their own immediate neighbourhood. The paper is delivered free to households across Vienna and is financed entirely by advertising. Since 2009 it has belonged to Regionalmedien Austria, the nationwide group of free regional newspapers formed as a joint venture of the Styria Media Group and Moser Holding. Its digital home is meinbezirk.at, the local-news portal of Regionalmedien Austria, where the Vienna title appears at meinbezirk.at/wien. The publishing company behind it, founded in 2009 as bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung GmbH, now trades as RegionalMedien Wien.

Overview: a free weekly organised by district

At its core, the bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung is a weekly free newspaper — a Gratiszeitung, in Austrian usage — published in Vienna, in the state of Vienna, in Austria. Vienna is both a city and one of Austria's federal states, and it is divided administratively into municipal districts. The newspaper mirrors that division exactly. The title usually shortened to the bz is split into 23 Bezirksausgaben, or district editions, one for each part of the city structure, so the editorial product a household receives is the edition for its own district rather than a single undifferentiated city edition.

That structure defines almost everything else about the paper. Its journalism starts from the reader's immediate living environment — the district — and its commercial offer to advertisers is built on the same geography, allowing advertising to be placed at district level. The paper appears weekly, is written in German, and is based in Vienna. It is not sold, has no cover price for readers, and does not depend on subscription or newsstand revenue. Its longevity is part of its identity: a title founded in 1983 has published through several changes of owner and one change of name, while keeping the same basic format of a free, advertising-financed, district-by-district weekly for the Austrian capital.

History: founded in 1983 and the Mader Verlag years

The BezirksZeitung, then known as the bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung, was founded in 1983. For more than two decades it was run by the Mader Verlag, which remained in charge of the paper until 2006. That first period, from 1983 to 2006, is the longest single chapter in the title's ownership history, and it is the period in which the paper established itself as Vienna's district newspaper — a weekly presence delivered to households across the city in its separate district editions.

The surviving public record of those early Mader years is comparatively thin. Reference sources confirm the founding year, the identity of the publisher and the length of its stewardship, but they do not provide a detailed year-by-year account of the paper's early editorial development, its founding personnel or its circulation growth during the 1980s and 1990s. What can be said with confidence is that the format itself endured: when the title changed hands in 2006, it did so as an established weekly free newspaper with a district-edition structure for Vienna, not as a new or experimental product. The continuity of the 23-edition model across every later change of owner suggests that the district structure created in this period was the paper's defining asset.

From Österreichische Post to Regionalmedien Austria

In spring 2006, the newspaper was taken over by Österreichische Post AG, the Austrian postal company. The Post period was relatively brief, but it was the bridge between the paper's independent publishing history under Mader and its present life inside a large regional-media group. In 2009 the former bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung moved under the umbrella of the newly formed Regionalmedien Austria AG, and its Vienna publishing company was founded that year as bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung GmbH under that umbrella; the company is today known as RegionalMedien Wien.

Regionalmedien Austria AG itself was founded in 2009 as a 50/50 joint venture between the Styria Media Group AG and Moser Holding AG. It was created by bringing together several established regional media, while preserving their regional structure and local anchoring. The bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung was one of the titles brought into the new company, alongside the Bezirksblätter titles in Burgenland, Lower Austria, Salzburg and Tyrol and the WOCHE titles in Carinthia and Styria, with the Bezirksrundschau in Upper Austria and the Regionalzeitungen in Vorarlberg connected as cooperation partners. In that structure, the Vienna paper became the capital-city component of a nationwide network of free local weeklies, marketed together but still produced locally, district by district.

The 2021 relaunch as BezirksZeitung

In 2021 the bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung was renamed BezirksZeitung as part of a brand redesign — a Neugestaltung of the brand. The change shortened the familiar bz name into a clearer descriptive title, while the paper itself, its weekly rhythm, its 23 district editions and its free household distribution in Vienna continued. The renaming formed part of a wider moment for the parent group: from October 2021, Regionalmedien Austria and its subsidiaries and cooperation partners across Austria appeared in a uniform look, with a common logo and standardised company names as the connecting elements.

For readers and for this directory, the naming history matters because the same newspaper appears under different names in different sources and periods. Older references, circulation listings and the English-language account of Regionalmedien Austria generally call it the bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung; current German-language references describe the product as Die BezirksZeitung, formerly bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung, published by RegionalMedien Wien. They are one and the same Vienna title, founded in 1983, and not two separate newspapers. The bz abbreviation survives in everyday usage — the source record itself notes that the paper is called die bz — even after the formal move to the BezirksZeitung brand.

Twenty-three district editions for one city

The 23 district editions are the feature that most distinguishes this title from other free weeklies in the Regionalmedien Austria group and from Vienna's other newspapers. National and citywide papers report on Vienna as a whole; the BezirksZeitung fragments that coverage deliberately, edition by edition, so that local news is sorted by the district in which the reader actually lives. The editions follow the structure of the Wiener Gemeindebezirke, Vienna's municipal districts, which means the newspaper's map of the city is the city's own administrative map.

Within the wider Regionalmedien Austria network, the Vienna title sits alongside much larger combined families of local editions in other states — the group's ring of media has been described as 129 local editions marketed nationally, published weekly between Wednesday and Friday, of which the bz's 23 district editions form the Vienna share. Looked at that way, a single-city newspaper accounts for a substantial block of the national group's local editions, which underlines the scale of Vienna as a market in its own right: one city, divided finely enough to sustain 23 separate local editions of one weekly title.

Editorial concept and content

The editorial concept is explicitly local. The BezirksZeitung's newsroom is described as independent, and its stated job is to deliver local news from the immediate living environment of its readers — their district. In addition, it reports on topics of relevance at state and national level, with the stated aim of making the connection back to the regions. In practice, that means district news comes first, and wider Viennese or Austrian stories are framed in terms of what they mean locally.

Alongside its district reporting, the paper regularly publishes focus topics built around central reader interests. The Vienna title's recurring special themes are listed as Motor and Mobility, Travel and Health, Building and Living, and Workplace; the wider Regionalmedien Austria group describes similar regular special sections for its papers under headings such as Health, Motor and Mobility, Business and Career, and Building and Living. These service-oriented sections are a characteristic part of the free-weekly format: practical, advertiser-friendly subject areas that sit alongside the local news from the districts and give the paper content of interest to readers across all 23 editions, not only in one neighbourhood.

Business model: free, advertising-financed and delivered to households

The business model is stated plainly in the sources: the BezirksZeitung is free, its delivery takes place across Vienna on a one-per-household basis — in the publisher's formulation, delivery Vienna-wide an einen Haushalt — and the newspaper is financed exclusively through advertising revenue. There is no reader revenue in the model at all. That makes the paper's reach itself the product: the value offered to advertisers is guaranteed physical presence in households in a chosen district, a chosen part of the city, or across Vienna as a whole.

This is the same model used across the Regionalmedien Austria group, whose newspapers are free, distributed to households throughout Austria and entirely funded by advertising. The group's structure supports that model commercially: editorial content and sales are managed at local, regional and national levels, so advertising can be booked and tailored at district, state or national level. For a Vienna advertiser, the bz offers the finest-grained version of that choice — a single district edition — while a national advertiser can buy into the Vienna title as part of the group's nationwide ring of local papers.

Audience, circulation and reach

Because the paper is free and delivered rather than sold, its audience is measured in reach and distributed circulation rather than in paid sales. According to publisher figures as at January 2024, the BezirksZeitung had a print circulation of 501,125 copies. That figure reflects the scale required to deliver a weekly paper to households across a capital city in 23 district editions, and it should be read as a publisher-stated distribution figure rather than a paid-circulation figure.

Independent audience measurement gives a picture of readership rather than distribution. According to the Österreichische Media-Analyse, the Austrian Media Analysis, for 2022/23, the BezirksZeitung reached 349,000 readers each week, corresponding to a reach of 21.1 per cent. In other words, the measurement attributes a weekly readership in the hundreds of thousands to the Vienna title alone, within its own city market. Figures of this kind carry the statistical margin of variation that the source itself notes for media data, and they date from the survey periods cited rather than from the present day, but they establish the order of magnitude: the bz is a mass-reach medium inside Vienna, not a niche district circular, precisely because its 23 editions together cover the whole city.

Digital presence on meinbezirk.at

The paper's digital home is meinbezirk.at, the online portal of Regionalmedien Austria, where the Vienna operation appears as meinbezirk.at/wien and the official website given for this title is www.meinbezirk.at. The portal carries local and regional news from across Austria, and the Vienna section is the online counterpart of the printed BezirksZeitung. The digital strategy described for the title is based on user-generated content: registered users can act as reader-reporters, called Regionauten, on the regional online portals, offering local and regional information as well as consuming it. That model extends the print paper's district logic online, inviting readers themselves to supply the hyperlocal material their districts generate.

The Vienna digital audience has been measured separately. The Österreichische Webanalyse, ÖWA Plus, reported for the fourth quarter of 2023, for the meinbezirk.at Vienna offering within the meinbezirk.at portal, 643,000 unique users projected for an average month in the survey period in Austria among those aged 14 and over, with the usual statistical variation noted for such media data. Regionalmedien Austria also offers its content through apps, including the meinbezirk ePaper app and a news-swiping app, and since 2020 the group has offered an app for current news from the districts, which since 2024 has run, together with its other services, under the MeinBezirk brand. The print weekly and the portal therefore operate as one local-news service in two forms: the paper delivered to the household, and the district news available continuously online.

Leadership and organisation

The Vienna company, RegionalMedien Wien, is the organisation that produces and distributes the group's print and online media in the capital. Gerhard Riedler has been its managing director since June 2020. Riedler had spent many years in the media business before taking the Vienna role, holding senior positions at the Red Bull Media House, Mediaprint and IP Österreich, and he succeeded Maximilian Schulyok, who had been managing director from February 2014 to March 2020. Until her retirement in March 2023, authorised signatory Sandra Ritzberger shared in overall responsibility for the company.

On the editorial side, Nicole Gretz-Blanckenstein has led the BezirksZeitung as editor-in-chief since 2016, and she is listed as the title's Chefredakteurin in its reference entry. Thomas Haas has been responsible for the combined marketing and digital department since 2021; in July 2022 the team was further expanded with Barbara Schuster in the position of editor-in-chief for digital; and since January 2024 Mario Popp has served as sales manager. That combination of roles — a long-serving print editor-in-chief, a dedicated digital editor-in-chief added in 2022, and a merged marketing and digital department — reflects the paper's twin existence as a printed household weekly and as the Vienna section of a national local-news portal.

Place in Austria's free regional press

The bz-Wiener Bezirkszeitung occupies a specific place in Austrian media: it is the Vienna member of the country's defining free regional newspaper group. Regionalmedien Austria, formed by Styria and Moser Holding in 2009, has been described as producing more than 100 local newspapers distributed free of charge all over Austria and reaching a large share of the population, and within that network the Vienna title is the one that covers the capital — a city-state in which more editorial and commercial weight is concentrated than in any single district market elsewhere in the country.

Its significance for readers is practical rather than ceremonial. In a media landscape dominated nationally by Vienna-based daily newspapers, broadcasters and magazines, the BezirksZeitung is one of the few media whose unit of coverage is smaller than the city itself. Its four decades of publication since 1983, its survival through the Mader, Österreichische Post and Regionalmedien Austria ownership periods, its 2021 rebirth under the BezirksZeitung name, its half-million-copy publisher-stated distribution and its measured weekly readership of 349,000 together describe a durable piece of Vienna's local infrastructure: a free weekly, in German, still arriving at households district by district, with its reporting mirrored and extended online at meinbezirk.at.