About Nordbayerischer Kurier

Nordbayerischer Kurier

The Nordbayerischer Kurier is the regional daily newspaper of Bayreuth, the Upper Franconian festival city, and its surrounding district. First published on 2 January 1968, it is the product of a merger of Bayreuth's historic newspaper interests and has been the city's leading daily for nearly six decades. Published by the Nordbayerischer Kurier Zeitungsverlag GmbH and appearing on working days with several local editions, it sells around 19,700 copies across the city and district of Bayreuth. The paper's supra-regional pages come from the Ring Nordbayerischer Tageszeitungen, the cooperative of northern Bavarian dailies, while its local journalism is produced in Bayreuth. Its ownership reflects the consolidation of the German regional press: since 2016 the publishing interests have been divided between Laurent Fischer, the SPD's media holding DDVG, and — through the Druckhaus Bayreuth — the Frankenpost of Hof, part of the Südwestdeutsche Medienholding.

Overview

The Nordbayerischer Kurier is a regional daily newspaper published on working days in Bayreuth, Upper Franconia, Bavaria. Its distribution area centers on the city and district of Bayreuth — the city of the annual Richard Wagner Festival, the University of Bayreuth, and around 75,000 inhabitants — and extends with its local editions into the surrounding Upper Franconian districts, including Kronach, Kulmbach, and parts of the Upper Palatinate. The sold circulation stands at 19,674 copies (IVW 1/2026, Monday to Saturday), a decline of 53.7 percent since 1998 that mirrors the structural pressures on the German regional press.

The paper appears in the Berliner format and is published by the Nordbayerischer Kurier Zeitungsverlag GmbH, based at Theodor-Schmidt-Straße 17 in Bayreuth. The editor-in-chief is Stephan Sohr; the publisher (Herausgeber) is Laurent Fischer; the managing director is Andreas Heinkel. The paper's website is kurier.de, which serves as the digital home of the Kurier brand.

The Kurier's editorial model combines local sovereignty with shared production: the local pages — city and district politics, courts, schools, clubs, culture, and sport — are produced by the Bayreuth newsroom and its bureaus, while the general section (Mantel) with national and international news comes from the Ring Nordbayerischer Tageszeitungen (RNT), the long-standing cooperation of northern Bavarian regional dailies. The paper has maintained several local editions to serve the distinct parts of its territory, including a bureau in Pegnitz with its own local section established in 1984.

History

The Nordbayerischer Kurier was born on 2 January 1968 from the consolidation of Bayreuth's newspaper landscape. Two printing and publishing houses had long competed in the city: the Druckhaus Bayreuth Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (formerly Julius Steeger & Co.) and the Druckerei und Verlagsgesellschaft Bayreuther Tagblatt of the Ellwanger family. Rather than continuing as rivals, the two houses cooperated in producing the new paper: the Druckhaus Bayreuth took on the technical production of the general pages, the local sports pages, and the advertising pages as well as the printing of the district edition, while the Ellwanger printing house produced the local pages and advertisements for the Pegnitz-Auerbach secondary edition and handled the production of the city edition.

The paper's early editorial leadership reflected its ambitions: among its first editors-in-chief were Walter Fischer and Dr. Hans Arbinger, the former Süddeutsche Zeitung editor for Bavarian provincial reporting, who had led the Zeitungsring Oberfranken — renamed the Ring Nordbayerischer Tageszeitungen — since 1960. The Kurier grew into the dominant paper of its area: by its own account it reached a market share of 67.46 percent in its core distribution area of city and district of Bayreuth, and in 1982 it was read in 77.92 percent of Bayreuth households. Its circulation peaked in the late 1980s and 1990s at over 42,000 copies.

The ownership structure changed fundamentally in 2016. Wolfgang Ellwanger sold the shares of the Druckerei und Verlagsgesellschaft Bayreuther Tagblatt in the Nordbayerischer Kurier to Laurent Fischer and to the Deutsche Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (DDVG), the holding company in which the SPD bundles its newspaper investments — the DDVG had long held, through the trustee Lydia Allerdt-Kurtz, a 50 percent stake in the Druckhaus Bayreuth Verlagsgesellschaft alongside Laurent Fischer. The Druckhaus Bayreuth shares, by then 65 percent, passed to the Frankenpost in Hof, which belongs to the Südwestdeutsche Medienholding (SWMH) in Stuttgart — the group that also holds the majority of the Süddeutscher Verlag; 35 percent remained with Laurent Fischer.

A further rationalization followed in production: the Bayreuth printing operation was shut down at the end of April 2019, and all of the publishing house's titles have since been printed at the Druckzentrum in Hof. The Kurier thus completed the journey from a Bayreuth-printed, Bayreuth-owned paper to a Bayreuth-edited paper within a larger publishing network — while keeping its masthead, its newsroom, and its local editions.

Coverage and Content

The Nordbayerischer Kurier's content combines the Ring Nordbayerischer Tageszeitungen' shared general section — national and international news, federal politics, business, and features — with extensive local journalism produced in Bayreuth. The local pages cover the Bayreuth city council and the district council, the courts, the University of Bayreuth, the schools, the economy, and the cultural life of the festival city: the Richard Wagner Festival, the city's theaters, museums, and concert life are standing topics, as are the fortunes of the city's sports clubs, led by the footballers of SpVgg Bayreuth.

The paper's local editions extend that coverage into the surrounding districts. The Pegnitz bureau, established in 1984 with its own local section, covers the Franconian Switzerland's eastern approaches — a territory where, the paper's chroniclers note, the Nürnberger Nachrichten also maintains a bureau, producing a direct local rivalry. The district editions report on the small towns and villages of the Bayreuth district and beyond: municipal politics, club life, school news, church affairs, and the agricultural and craft economy of the Upper Franconian countryside.

The Kurier also performs the traditional roles of the regional daily: comprehensive court and police reporting, family announcements, church news, and the club reports that make the local paper the community's bulletin board. In a festival city whose cultural institutions draw national attention, the paper mediates between the world-famous Bayreuth of the Festspiele and the everyday Bayreuth of its readers — covering both with the authority of the city's paper of record.

Organization and Ownership

The Nordbayerischer Kurier is published by the Nordbayerischer Kurier Zeitungsverlag GmbH, based in Bayreuth. The editor-in-chief is Stephan Sohr, the publisher is Laurent Fischer, and the managing director is Andreas Heinkel. The ownership, reorganized in 2016, is divided among Laurent Fischer, the SPD's media holding DDVG, and — through the Druckhaus Bayreuth Verlagsgesellschaft — the Frankenpost of Hof, part of the Südwestdeutsche Medienholding (SWMH) group in Stuttgart.

The paper's production is integrated into the Hof printing center since the closure of the Bayreuth print plant in April 2019. Its general pages come from the Ring Nordbayerischer Tageszeitungen, the cooperative that has supplied the supra-regional section of northern Bavaria's dailies for decades. The local newsrooms in Bayreuth and the edition bureaus produce the pages that distinguish the Kurier from its sister papers in the ring.

The ownership constellation — a private publisher, a party media holding, and a large southwestern German media group — is characteristic of the contemporary German regional press, in which historic local titles survive through integration into larger networks. For the Kurier, the arrangement has preserved what matters most to its readers: a staffed Bayreuth newsroom, local editions for the surrounding districts, and a masthead that has marked the city's daily journalism since 1968.

Digital Presence

The Nordbayerischer Kurier's digital home is kurier.de, the paper's website, which carries its local and regional reporting with continuous updates through the day. The site serves as the platform for digital subscriptions and the e-paper edition of the print paper, alongside the print subscription that remains the economic foundation of the title. The paper's newsroom produces online-first local news between print editions, and the website extends the Kurier's reach beyond its print distribution area.

The paper's digital strategy follows the established pattern of German regional publishers: a subscription-based website, e-paper, mobile apps, newsletters, and social media channels carrying the paper's journalism to readers who no longer take the print edition. In Bayreuth's digital media environment — which includes the portals of competing regional papers, the city's and university's communications, and the festival's global media attention — the Kurier's website holds the local-news position: the daily-updated record of the festival city and its district.

The transformation of the German regional press is visible in the Kurier's trajectory: from a peak circulation above 42,000 to under 20,000, from a Bayreuth print plant to Hof production, from family ownership to a networked publishing group. Through it all, the paper has maintained its core proposition — the daily local journalism of Bayreuth and Upper Franconia — in print at kurier.de's e-paper and online at kurier.de itself.