About Vorpommern Kurier

Vorpommern Kurier

The Vorpommern Kurier is the Nordkurier's local edition for Anklam and the surrounding Vorpommern-Greifswald district in Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, appearing as a Kopfblatt of the Neubrandenburg-based regional daily. Published Monday through Saturday by the Nordkurier Mediengruppe GmbH & Co. KG, the edition sells around 3,300 copies. It serves the Peene river town of Anklam — the birthplace of aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal — and the western Pomeranian countryside between the Baltic coast and the Mecklenburg lake district. Its digital home is nordkurier.de.

Overview

The Vorpommern Kurier covers Anklam — with around 12,000 inhabitants, a historic Hanseatic town on the Peene river — and the surrounding Vorpommern-Greifswald district: the Peene valley villages, the countryside toward the Szczecin Lagoon (Stettiner Haff), and the communities between Anklam and the Baltic. The paper appears Monday through Saturday, combining the Anklam newsroom's local section with the Nordkurier's regional, national, and international pages.

Western Pomerania's identity blends Hanseatic heritage, Baltic tourism, agriculture, and the post-reunification transformation of the east German countryside. The paper's readership consists of Anklam's townspeople, farmers, the tourism sector, and the district's village communities — readers whose families have often subscribed for generations, through the GDR's Freie Erde era and the Nordkurier's independent decades alike.

History

The Vorpommern Kurier developed as the Nordkurier's edition for the Anklam region, part of the Neubrandenburg paper's expansion across its traditional circulation area — largely identical to the former GDR Bezirk Neubrandenburg's borders. The Nordkurier itself was re-founded on 2 April 1990 from the Freie Erde, the SED district organ, becoming one of the Wende era's new independent regional dailies.

The Anklam edition chronicled western Pomerania's post-reunification decades: the agricultural cooperatives' collapse and restructuring, the depopulation of villages, the Bundeswehr's presence and withdrawals, the rise of Baltic and Peene-valley tourism, and the gradual stabilization. Anklam's own history — a Hanseatic town, heavily damaged in World War II, the Lilienthal heritage, the post-war reconstruction — provides deep background.

In 2021, the Schwäbischer Verlag (Schwäbisch Media) became the sole shareholder of the Nordkurier Mediengruppe, connecting the Vorpommern edition to the southern German media house. Gabriel Kords serves as chief editor, according to published sources.

Coverage and Content

The local section covers Anklam's town politics, the Vorpommern-Greifswald district, and the Peene region's village affairs. The Lilienthal heritage — Otto Lilienthal, the aviation pioneer born in Anklam in 1848 — gives the town a distinctive cultural asset: the Otto-Lilienthal-Museum, the annual aviation commemorations, and the town's identity as the "Lilienthalstadt" feature regularly.

The Peene valley's nature — one of Germany's last unspoiled river landscapes, the beavers, otters, and white-tailed eagles — shapes environmental coverage. Agricultural reporting follows the region's large farms, the rapeseed and grain economy, and the structural challenges of east German agriculture. The Baltic tourism spillover, the Szczecin Lagoon's development, and the Polish border's proximity add further dimensions. The lagoon — the Stettiner Haff, shared with Poland — is an emerging tourism and nature destination, and the paper covers the cross-border cooperation, the Polish shoppers and workers in the region, and the shared challenges of the borderland's development.

Beyond the local pages, the Neubrandenburg central newsroom supplies state politics from Schwerin, national news, business, culture, and sports.

Organization and Ownership

The Vorpommern Kurier is published by the Nordkurier Mediengruppe GmbH & Co. KG, based at Flurstraße 2 in Neubrandenburg, as one of the Nordkurier's Kopfblatt editions. Since 2021, the Schwäbischer Verlag has been the sole shareholder. The Nordkurier appears with editions including the Neubrandenburger Zeitung, Demminer Zeitung, Strelitzer Zeitung, Pasewalker Zeitung, Prenzlauer Zeitung and Templiner Zeitung (in the Uckermark Kurier), the Haff-Zeitung (Ueckermünde), the Müritz-Zeitung (Waren), the Mecklenburger Schweiz editions, and the Vorpommern Kurier (Anklam, with the Usedom Insel-Zeitung in the Usedom Kurier).

The Anklam newsroom produces the local section; the central newsroom supplies the supraregional pages and the nordkurier.de digital platform.
The newsroom's journalists know the Peene valley's villages by name — the mayors, the pastors, the fire brigade chiefs — and the paper's pages reflect that intimacy. In a region where the nearest daily competitor is dozens of kilometers away, the Vorpommern Kurier's local monopoly is sustained by the quality of its community journalism, not merely the absence of alternatives.
The paper's challenge — converting the region's newcomers and younger readers into subscribers — will determine whether the Vorpommern Kurier's second century of local journalism (counting its Freie Erde predecessor) continues. The Lilienthalstadt's paper has the heritage, the community roots, and the digital platform; the readers must follow.

Anklam: Lilienthalstadt on the Peene

Anklam's identity as Otto Lilienthal's birthplace shapes the paper's cultural coverage like nothing else. Lilienthal — who made the first controlled gliding flights in the 1890s, the pioneer on whose shoulders the Wright brothers stood — is commemorated in the Otto-Lilienthal-Museum, one of Germany's notable technology museums, and the town's aviation heritage draws visitors from around the world. The paper covers the museum's exhibitions, the anniversary commemorations, and the town's efforts to leverage its most famous son.

The Peene river — the "Amazon of the North," Germany's last free-flowing lowland river — provides the environmental beat: the wilderness river's ecology, the canoe tourism, the fishing, and the conservation debates. The town's Hanseatic brick-Gothic heritage — the Marienkirche's ruins, the Steintor gate — and the post-war reconstruction's architectural layers complete a townscape the paper documents with local pride.

Western Pomerania's Transformation

The Vorpommern Kurier has documented one of Germany's most profound regional transformations. In 1990, western Pomerania's economy rested on the agricultural cooperatives (LPGs), the shipyards' supply chains, and the state institutions of the GDR; within a few years, the cooperatives were privatized or collapsed, the villages emptied as young people moved west, and the region faced the question of what its future could be. The paper's archive records the painful answers: the farm consolidations, the village school closures, the Bundeswehr withdrawals, and the slow emergence of new livelihoods.

The turnaround — partial, ongoing — came through tourism, nature conservation, and the region's rediscovery by outsiders: the Baltic coast's renaissance, the Peene valley's emergence as a canoeing destination, the manor houses converted to hotels, and the Berliners buying village houses. The paper covers both the successes and the persistent problems — the skilled-worker shortage, the aging population, the infrastructure gaps — with the long memory of a newsroom that witnessed the whole arc. In a region where history moves in decades rather than news cycles, the Vorpommern Kurier provides the continuity.

Readership and Market Position

The Vorpommern Kurier, with 3,334 sold copies, is the Anklam region's local daily, serving a readership of townspeople, farmers, and village communities in one of Germany's most sparsely populated districts. Its market position is the classic east German regional monopoly: the only daily covering the area, deeply embedded in community life.

Like all German regional dailies — and east German titles particularly — the paper faces severe circulation pressure; the Nordkurier's 73-percent decline since 1998 reflects the compounded effects of depopulation and digital transition. The response includes the nordkurier.de platform, e-paper editions, and digital subscriptions, backed by the Schwäbisch Media ownership's investment.

Digital Presence

The edition's digital home is nordkurier.de, the Nordkurier's online portal — among eastern Germany's most developed regional news platforms. The portal operates a digital subscription model with e-paper editions, newsletters, apps, and social media channels. The Anklam newsroom's stories — from Lilienthal commemorations to Peene valley nature reports — reach both the region's online readers and the wider Nordkurier audience across Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, northern Brandenburg, and beyond.