About Prinz

Prinz

Prinz (PRINZ) is the German city-lifestyle magazine network — a combination of lifestyle and city magazine whose regional culture-and-leisure recommendations are embedded in a supra-regional thematic environment, now published exclusively online. Founded in 1978, the title appeared for 34 years in print with a distributed circulation of 211,000 copies (IVW 2008); in December 2012 the last printed issue appeared — the publisher citing the profound media change — and since then Prinz has been available only on the internet. Its operator: the Urbanite Location Based Media GmbH in Hamburg; the editor-in-chief: Alexander Richter; the CEO: Sebastian Ganske. The portal prinz.de runs city pages — Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf — with event calendars, city tours, cultural tips. The motto: "Die Stadt gehört UNS."

Overview

Prinz is a German-language lifestyle and city magazine, today an online-only network with city editions. The concept: the combination of city magazine and lifestyle magazine — the information and recommendations on the regional culture and leisure scene embedded in a supra-regional thematic environment. The combination's logic: the local event calendar needs the national lifestyle context — the Hamburg theatre premiere next to the Berlin trend, the Düsseldorf exhibition next to the Munich style. The regional culture-and-leisure recommendations — the insider tips, the editors' choices — are the city magazine's core: the "where to go" authority. The supra-regional thematic environment — the lifestyle topics, the national culture — is the magazine's roof: the cities' common world. The portal prinz.de organises the content by city — Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf — with event calendars (theatre, readings, concerts, lectures), city tours (the Michel-to-Elbphilharmonie walk, the former Jewish quarter with Heinrich Heine), cultural tips (Norbert Gstrein's readings, planetarium shows), and the "Die Stadt gehört UNS" community claim. The readers: the urban leisure seekers — the Hamburg, Berlin and Düsseldorf event-goers, the culture tourists, the city explorers. The event-goers use the calendars: the theatre dates, the reading nights, the lecture evenings. The culture tourists use the city tours: the Michel-to-Elphi walk, the Jewish quarter. The city explorers use the tips: the planetarium, the family theatre. The print era's scale: a distributed circulation of 211,000 copies (IVW 2008) — the city magazine's national reach at its peak. The digital era's format: the continuously updated event portal with city pages — the real-time calendar replacing the monthly print. The only printed offshoot: the "Prinz Top Guide" — later converted into the PRINZ TopGuide App, the curated city's mobile companion.

History

Prinz's history spans the German city magazine's golden age and its digital transformation. The first issue appeared in 1978 — the late-1970s wave of alternative city magazines, the Hamburg scene's print voice. The 1978 context — the alternative press's boom, the cities' counterculture finding its magazines — gave Prinz its birth: the Hamburg lifestyle's printed forum. Over the decades Prinz grew into a national city-lifestyle network with regional editions and a distributed circulation of 211,000 copies (IVW 2008) — the events magazine's heyday. The growth's engine: the cities' leisure economies — the theatres, the clubs, the restaurants advertising; the readers' event hunger — the calendars as the weekends' bibles. The December 2012 caesura: the last printed issue appeared; the publisher gave the profound media change as the reason — the events business moving online, the print advertising collapsing. The caesura's context — the 2008–2012 print crisis, the smartphones' event apps, the Facebook events — made the print city magazine's model obsolete: the monthly calendar against the real-time feed. The publisher's reason — the "tiefgreifende Medienwandel" — was the industry's euphemism for the inevitable: the print city magazine's end. Since then Prinz has existed only on the internet — one of the prominent German city magazines to complete the print-to-digital transformation. The transformation's preservation — the 1978 title, the city pages, the event calendars — kept the brand's equity: the readers' trust, the advertisers' addresses. The operator: the Urbanite Location Based Media GmbH in Hamburg — the location-based media company; the CEO: Sebastian Ganske. The Urbanite name — the location-based media — signals the business model: the city content monetised by location, the events by proximity. The Hamburg headquarters — the 1978 founding city — anchors the brand: the Elbe metropolis's magazine. The editor-in-chief: Alexander Richter — the content's guardian. The brand's digital continuation — the city pages, the event calendars, the TopGuide app — preserves the 1978 title's urban mission: the cities' leisure, the readers' weekends, the "Stadt gehört UNS" promise.

Coverage and Content

The portal's programme is the cities' culture and leisure. The event calendars: the theatre (the Christmas stories after Dickens, the "Vroudenspil & Die Habenichtse"), the readings (Norbert Gstrein), the lectures (the Portugal travelogue, the Elbe-suburbs poets), the concerts. The theatre listings — the seasonal (the Advent evenings), the touring (the multi-city casts) — are the calendars' backbone: the stages' programmes. The readings — the authors' appearances — are the literary cities' pulse. The lectures — the travelogues, the local history — are the curious cities' forums. The city tours: "Unser Hamburg" — the Michel-to-Elphi walk (St. Michaelis to the Elbphilharmonie), the former Jewish quarter with Heinrich Heine (the 1844 visit, the Israelite Temple's opening), the harbour and Speicherstadt. The tours' narratives — the two landmarks' stories, the Heine history, the harbour's trade — are the cities' self-discovery: the tourists' and the locals' shared heritage. The cultural tips: the planetarium's celestial history, the family theatre. The city pages — Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf — localise the content: the addresses, the dates, the tickets. The "Die Stadt gehört UNS" motto is the community claim: the readers' city, the magazine's city. The journalism is the city magazine's: the recommending, the insider, the event-driven — the urban leisure's guide, from the 1978 print to the prinz.de portal.

Organization and Ownership

Prinz is operated by the Urbanite Location Based Media GmbH, headquartered in Hamburg. The CEO (Geschäftsführer): Sebastian Ganske. The editor-in-chief: Alexander Richter. The commercial model is the digital city magazine's: the event listings, the location-based advertising, the ticket partnerships — and the TopGuide brand (the printed guide, then the app). The event listings monetise the organisers: the theatres, the tour operators, the venues. The location-based advertising monetises the proximity: the restaurants, the shops, the services near the reader. The ticket partnerships monetise the transactions: the event sales' commissions. The TopGuide brand — the printed guide's heritage, the app's continuation — is the premium product: the curated city in the pocket. The 1978 founding's publisher history and the Ganske group's role are documented in the trade press; current ownership details beyond the Urbanite operation are not publicly confirmed in the sources available.

Digital Presence

Prinz's home is prinz.de — the city portal with the Hamburg, Berlin and Düsseldorf pages, the event calendars, the city tours, the cultural tips. The city pages' structure — the /hamburg/events/, /berlin/events/, /duesseldorf/events/ paths — is the network's architecture: the cities' parallel worlds. The PRINZ TopGuide App continues the printed guide's brand on mobile — the curated city in the pocket, the "Top Guide" promise. In the German city-magazine landscape Prinz occupies the digital-pioneer pole: the 1978-founded title — the 211,000-copy print era, the December 2012 online-only transformation — on prinz.de, the cities' lifestyle network, online since 2012, urban since 1978, digital forever. The digital-pioneer positioning — the early print exit, the online-only city magazine — was the necessity's virtue: the brand surviving the medium's death. The city-lifestyle network — the Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf pages — is the scale: the cities' common platform. The "Die Stadt gehört UNS" motto — the readers' ownership claim — is the community: the city magazine's democratic promise.