About Uckermark Kurier

Uckermark Kurier

The Uckermark Kurier is the local edition of the Nordkurier for the northern Uckermark, serving Prenzlau and the surrounding district in Brandenburg. Published daily Monday through Saturday by the Nordkurier Mediengruppe GmbH & Co. KG, based in Neubrandenburg, it is one of fourteen local editions of the Nordkurier, whose circulation area covers eastern Mecklenburg, southern Western Pomerania, and the northern Uckermark. The edition combines a dedicated local section produced by the Prenzlau newsroom with the Nordkurier's regional, national, and international pages. Its digital home is nordkurier.de, one of eastern Germany's most developed regional news portals.

Overview

The Uckermark Kurier covers Prenzlau — the Uckermark's historic capital, with around 19,000 inhabitants, set on the Unteruckersee lake — and the northern Uckermark district: Templin, Lychen, Strasburg, and the lake-dotted countryside between the Schorfheide and the Mecklenburg border. The region is the Uckermark's lake district: hundreds of glacial lakes, beech forests, and the biosphere reserves that make it a center of nature tourism.

The paper appears Monday through Saturday in the Nordkurier's format, combining the Prenzlau local section with the central newsroom's supraregional offering. The Nordkurier's total sold circulation stands at 35,134 copies (IVW 1/2026), down 73 percent since 1998 — a decline reflecting the severe pressures on the eastern German regional press, where depopulation compounds the industry-wide digital transition.

History

The Nordkurier emerged from the Freie Erde, the former organ of the SED district leadership in Neubrandenburg, which appeared from August 1952 to March 1990. On 2 April 1990, the paper was re-founded as the Nordkurier — one of the Wende era's new regional dailies, transforming a party organ into an independent newspaper in the months before reunification.

The Uckermark Kurier developed as the Nordkurier's edition for the northern Uckermark, serving the Prenzlau area that had belonged to the Neubrandenburg district in GDR times — the traditional circulation area, largely identical to the former Bezirk Neubrandenburg's borders. The paper chronicled the region's post-reunification transformation: the collapse of agricultural cooperatives, the depopulation of villages, the rise of lake tourism, and the gradual stabilization of the 2000s, when the region's natural beauty began attracting the newcomers who now sustain its revival.

A significant recent development: in 2021, the Schwäbischer Verlag (Schwäbisch Media, publisher of the Schwäbische Zeitung) became the sole shareholder of the Nordkurier Mediengruppe, connecting the Uckermark's paper to one of southern Germany's largest regional media houses. Gabriel Kords is the chief editor, according to published sources.

Coverage and Content

The local section covers Prenzlau's town politics, the northern Uckermark district, and community news from the lake villages. The Unteruckersee and the region's hundreds of lakes shape the agenda: water quality, tourism development, the conflicts between conservation and lakeside construction, and the biosphere reserves' management.

Agriculture and forestry — the northern Uckermark's economic backbone — feature prominently, alongside the tourism economy, the district's schools, and infrastructure in a sparsely populated region. The paper covers the historic towns' heritage: Prenzlau's medieval churches and Dominican monastery, Templin's completely preserved town wall, and Lychen's lake landscape. Seasonal rhythms shape the news cycle: the spring crane migrations, the summer canoe season's rescue operations and water-safety debates, the autumn harvest reports, and the winter's quiet when the lakes freeze and the villages turn inward.

Cultural coverage includes the region's music festivals, the Uckermark's literary connections (Ehm Welk, the writer of "Die Heiden von Kummerow," was born in Biesenbrow), and the growing arts scene — the village churches hosting summer concerts, the manor houses converted to galleries, the artists who followed the Berliners into the countryside. The paper's culture pages reflect a region reinventing itself: the lake district as both nature reserve and creative refuge. Beyond the local pages, the Neubrandenburg central newsroom provides Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania and Brandenburg state politics, national news, and sports.

Organization and Ownership

The Uckermark Kurier is published by the Nordkurier Mediengruppe GmbH & Co. KG, based at Flurstraße 2 in Neubrandenburg, as one of fourteen local editions of the Nordkurier. Since 2021, the Schwäbischer Verlag has been the sole shareholder of the media group, placing the Uckermark paper within the Schwäbisch Media family alongside the Schwäbische Zeitung.

The Prenzlau newsroom produces the northern Uckermark's local section, while the Neubrandenburg central newsroom supplies the supraregional pages. This division — local identity from the lake district's own journalists, professional national coverage from the group's headquarters — is the standard architecture of the German regional press, and the Nordkurier's fourteen editions each maintain the local desks that make it work. The group's digital platform, nordkurier.de, is among the most trafficked regional news portals in eastern Germany, and the media group has invested in digital subscriptions, newsletters, and apps.

The Lake District of the North

The northern Uckermark is lake country — hundreds of glacial lakes scattered across the terminal moraine landscape, from the Unteruckersee at Prenzlau's feet to the labyrinthine waters around Lychen, the "flößerstadt" (rafting town) whose lakes once carried timber to Berlin. This watery geography defines the region's character and the paper's agenda: lake water quality, the conflicts between lakeside development and conservation, the canoe tourism that fills the villages each summer, and the biosphere reserves' stewardship.

Templin — with its completely preserved medieval town wall, one of Germany's finest — anchors the region's heritage tourism, while the former Hohenlychen sanatorium complex and the Soviet-era histories add darker layers the paper does not shy from covering. The region's villages, many with only a few hundred inhabitants, depend on the paper for the community news — the volunteer fire brigades, the village festivals, the school closures and reopenings — that holds rural society together. In a landscape where the nearest neighbor may be a kilometer away, the local daily is social infrastructure.

Readership and Market Position

The Uckermark Kurier is the dominant daily in the northern Uckermark, serving a readership of townspeople, farmers, tourism businesses, and the region's growing community of newcomers — Berliners buying country houses, nature tourism entrepreneurs, and remote workers drawn by the lakes. The paper faces the characteristic challenges of the eastern German regional press: an aging, shrinking population in the countryside, compounded by the digital transition.

The Nordkurier's 73-percent circulation decline since 1998 is among the steepest in the German regional press, reflecting the severity of these pressures. The response — digital investment, the Schwäbisch Media ownership, and continued local newsroom presence — aims to stabilize the paper as the Uckermark's journalistic institution. Yet the challenge is structural: in villages losing population, each year's subscriber losses compound, and the digital transition must outpace the demographic one. The Uckermark Kurier's future depends on converting the region's newcomers — the Berlin relocators, the tourism entrepreneurs, the remote workers — into readers, convincing them that the lake district's stories are worth paying for. In a region where the paper is often the only daily voice, that mission carries civic weight beyond the business case.

Digital Presence

The edition's digital home is nordkurier.de, the Nordkurier's online portal, which publishes Uckermark local news alongside the paper's broader coverage of Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania and northern Brandenburg. The portal operates a digital subscription model with e-paper editions, newsletters, apps, and social media channels. The Nordkurier's digital platform reaches readers across the fourteen editions' territories, and the Uckermark's lake-district stories — from biosphere reserve news to tourism features — find a wide audience online, including the Berliners whose weekend houses dot the lakeshores.