About Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung

Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung

The Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung — universally known by its initials, NGZ — is the daily newspaper of Neuss and the Rhein-Kreis Neuss in North Rhine-Westphalia. Founded in 1873, it celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2023, making it one of the oldest continuously published local newspapers in the Rhineland. The paper appears as the Rhein-Kreis Neuss edition of the Rheinische Post, the Düsseldorf-based regional daily, and is published by the Rheinische Post Mediengruppe. Its history is deeply rooted in the civic life of Neuss: it was founded by members of the city's Catholic Bürgergesellschaft during the Kulturkampf, served for over a century as the journalistic organ of that milieu, and was steered through economic crises and technological upheavals by its long-time publisher, the Gesellschaft für Buchdruckerei AG. In 2009 the publishing shares passed to the Rheinische Post Mediengruppe, with which the NGZ had been partnered since 1950.

Overview

The Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung is a regional daily newspaper published on working days in the Rhenish format, serving the city of Neuss and the surrounding Rhein-Kreis Neuss on the left bank of the Lower Rhine. Neuss, with around 155,000 inhabitants, is one of Germany's oldest cities — founded as the Roman camp Novaesium — and the economic center of a district that also includes Grevenbroich, Dormagen, Kaarst, Meerbusch, and Jüchen. The NGZ is the district's leading daily paper, the "Heimatzeitung" of city and district, and it describes itself as the official gazette (amtliches Mitteilungsblatt) of the Rhein-Kreis Neuss and the cities of Neuss and Kaarst.

The paper appears within the Rheinische Post family: in the Rhein-Kreis Neuss the Düsseldorf daily is published under the NGZ masthead, just as it appears in Solingen as the Solinger Morgenpost and in other parts of the Bergisches Land as the Bergische Morgenpost. The arrangement gives the NGZ the best of both worlds — a fully local paper with its own editorial identity and local sections for Neuss, Kaarst, Grevenbroich, and Dormagen, backed by the central newsroom of one of Germany's largest regional newspapers. The Rheinische Post as a whole sells around 179,000 copies (IVW 1/2026, Monday to Saturday), making it the second-largest regional daily in Germany after the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.

The NGZ's newsroom covers a district of considerable economic weight: Neuss's harbor and industrial areas, the aluminum and logistics industries, the energy region around Grevenbroich with its lignite heritage and structural transformation, and the affluent suburban belt of Kaarst and Meerbusch. The paper's local books — separate sections for Neuss/Kaarst and for Grevenbroich/Dormagen — reflect the district's internal geography, and its reporting spans city politics, the district administration, the courts, the economy, culture, and sport, including the region's famous Schützenfeste, the marksmen's festivals that are a cornerstone of Rhenish civic life.

History

The Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung's history begins with a "Nullnummer" — a trial issue — dated 23 December 1873. The paper was projected, financed, and launched by members of Neuss's Catholic Bürgergesellschaft, the civic association founded in 1861 as "Constantia" and then a stronghold of the Catholic bourgeoisie. The timing was no accident: the paper was created as the journalistic organ of that milieu during the Kulturkampf, the struggle between Bismarck's Prussian state and the Catholic Church that defined German politics in the 1870s. From the start, the NGZ was more than a business — it was an expression of Neuss civic identity, anchored in the city's Catholic associational life.

The paper's publisher for most of its history was the Gesellschaft für Buchdruckerei AG (GfB), the Neuss printing company that steered the NGZ through the heights and depths of German history: the Empire, the First World War, the Weimar Republic's crises, the Nazi period, the destruction of the Second World War, and the Federal Republic's economic miracle. Through economic crises and technological upheavals — from hot metal to photocomposition to digital production — the GfB adapted the paper to changing conditions while, in the words of the Forum Archiv und Geschichte Neuss, preserving the founders' ideal principles and anchoring the NGZ as the leading Heimatzeitung of city and district.

A decisive turn came in 1950, when the NGZ entered into a partnership with the Rheinische Post, the Düsseldorf daily founded in 1946 under a British military government licence by Anton Betz, Karl Arnold, and Erich Wenderoth. The partnership deepened over the decades: the NGZ drew on the Rheinische Post's supra-regional reporting while keeping its local identity, and in 2009 the GfB sold its shares in the NGZ to the Rheinische Post Mediengruppe. The paper thus became fully part of the Düsseldorf publishing house, while retaining its historic masthead and its Neuss newsroom.

In 2023 the NGZ celebrated its 150th anniversary — a jubilee marked in Neuss with a morning matinee organized by the Bürgergesellschaft zu Neuss, the successor of the association that had founded the paper. The celebration of the 1873 Nullnummer was, as the local press noted, a moment of intact Stadtkultur: a city honoring the newspaper that has documented its life for a century and a half. A descendant of the paper's founders is today the president of the Bürgergesellschaft — a living link between the paper's origins and its present.

Coverage and Content

The Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung is organized in the classic structure of a German regional daily. The front sections carry national and international news, North Rhine-Westphalia state politics, business, and features from the Rheinische Post's central newsroom in Düsseldorf — a newsroom the RP describes as an authors' newspaper, with around 80 percent of articles written by its own journalists, supported by a parliamentary bureau in Berlin and correspondents in Washington, London, Brussels, and Paris. The Rheinische Post is counted among the most-cited regional newspapers in Germany, which lends weight to the NGZ's shared pages.

The paper's distinctive content is its local journalism, organized in separate books for the district's sub-regions: local editions for Neuss and Kaarst on the one hand, and for Grevenbroich, Dormagen, and surrounding areas on the other. These sections cover the city councils and the district council, the administrations of the district's towns, the local courts, police reporting, schools, churches, clubs, and cultural life. The district's economy — the Neuss harbor, the aluminum industry, logistics, the energy transition in the Grevenbroich area — receives close attention, as does the Rhenish associational life: the Schützenfeste, the carnival, and the myriad clubs that structure social life on the Lower Rhine.

Sport is a staple of the local pages, from football in the district's leagues to the full range of club sports. The paper also serves the traditional functions of a Heimatzeitung: family announcements, church news, club reports submitted by local associations, and extensive coverage of municipal affairs that larger papers would never touch. Its self-description as the official gazette of the Rhein-Kreis Neuss and the cities of Neuss and Kaarst reflects this role as the district's paper of record — the place where official notices appear and where the district's public life is documented day by day.

Organization and Ownership

The Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung is published by the Rheinische Post Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, part of the Rheinische Post Mediengruppe headquartered in Düsseldorf. The publishing house is controlled by the descendants of the Rheinische Post's founders — the Betz, Droste, and Wenderoth families — who remain the paper's publishers; Florian Merz-Betz, Martin Ebel, Tilman Droste, and Esther Betz (as honorary publisher) are named as publishers, and the managing directors are Johannes Werle, Hans Peter Bork, and Matthias Körner. The editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Post is Moritz Döbler. The paper's central newsroom is in Düsseldorf.

The NGZ's own history as a publishing entity runs through the Gesellschaft für Buchdruckerei AG, the Neuss company that published the paper from its early years until 2009. The GfB's sale of its NGZ shares to the Rheinische Post Mediengruppe in 2009 completed a process that had begun with the 1950 partnership: the paper moved from a Neuss-owned publisher within the RP's orbit to full ownership by the Düsseldorf group. The masthead, the local newsroom, and the paper's identity as Neuss's Heimatzeitung survived the transition intact.

The paper appears in the Rhenish newspaper format and is published on working days. Its website, ngz-online.de, is the digital home of the NGZ brand within the Rheinische Post's online network. The paper's long institutional continuity — 150 years under essentially the same civic mission — is unusual in German regional publishing, where mergers and closures have thinned the ranks of historic local titles. The NGZ's survival reflects both the economic strength of its district and the loyalty of a readership that has regarded the paper as its own since the days of the Kulturkampf.

Digital Presence

The Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung's digital presence is centered on ngz-online.de, the paper's website within the Rheinische Post's digital network, whose flagship portal is rp-online.de. The site carries the NGZ's local reporting alongside the Rheinische Post's regional and national coverage, with continuous updates through the day, and serves as the platform for digital subscriptions and the e-paper edition of the print paper. The RP's article archive, extending back to 2001, is available on a paid basis.

The Rheinische Post Mediengruppe has pursued the standard digital strategy of the larger German regional publishers: a subscription-based website with metered or paid access, e-paper editions, mobile apps, newsletters, and a presence on the major social media platforms. For the NGZ, the digital channels extend the paper's local journalism beyond the printed page — breaking local news between editions, reaching younger readers in the district, and competing with the growing number of digital-only local news sources.

In the Rhein-Kreis Neuss, the NGZ's digital offer competes with the online portals of neighboring papers, with municipal and district administrations' own communications, and with social media as a source of local information. The paper's advantage remains its newsroom: a staffed local editorial operation producing original district journalism daily, in print and online. After 150 years, the Nullnummer of December 1873 has grown into a cross-media local news organization — but its mission, documenting the life of Neuss and its district, is the one its founders in the Bürgergesellschaft set for it.