Spandauer Volksblatt
The Spandauer Volksblatt is a Berlin advertising paper that emerged from the former daily Spandauer Volksblatt and the advertising paper Spandauer Anzeiger (founded around 1970). It appears as the regional edition of the Berliner Woche advertising newspaper for the Spandau district . The Berliner Woche appears in all Berlin districts - with a weekly circulation of 1.53 million copies.
Beginnings
After the Second World War , Erich Lezinsky (1886–1952) founded a new newspaper for the Berlin district of Spandau. By 1933, Lezinsky had already published a newspaper of the same name as the SPD party newspaper . After lengthy efforts, the politically unaffected Lezinsky received a license for a daily newspaper from the British military government - as one of the first Germans after the war. The first edition appeared on March 5, 1946. The first editions of the newspaper, which appeared three times a week with four to six pages, comprised 10,000 to 20,000 copies. The Volksblatt , which was initially rather liberal , was available by subscription from May. Every day except Mondays - as was common in West Berlin for decades - the paper was launched on the market from September 1946.
Shaped by the publishing family
After Erich Lezinsky's death, his wife Margarete and son Kurt took over the publishing business in 1952 together with changing managing directors. When both died in 1967, his widow Ingrid Lezinsky (née Metzler) continued the business. In 1970 she married the actor and Coca-Cola manager Joachim Below. In the 1970s, the publishing house published the Spandauer Almanach annually. After Below's death in 1987, Ingrid Below-Lezinsky and son Rainer took over the management of the publishing house. The second son Olaf Lezinsky worked in the advertising department since 1991.
After many newspapers in West Berlin had to give up ( Der Abend , Der Telegraf , Nachtdepesche ) , the Erich-Lezinsky-Verlag dared to move beyond Spandau to the entire West Berlin newspaper market. From 1981 it was called Spandauer Volksblatt Berlin . Ten years later the newspaper was renamed again and was briefly called Volksblatt Berlin . The editor-in-chief, Hans Höppner , was influential for many years ; after a dispute with the SPD over old license claims, he reopened the paper to a social-liberal readership from the 1960s . The Spandauer Volksblatt was the first newspaper to omit the quotation marks from the term "GDR" and at times employed authors such as Günter Grass and Wolfgang Neuss . Many well-known German journalists emerged from the small publishing house on Neuendorfer Strasse. Even Anne Will , later evening news presenter and talk show host , is a former People's Journal staffer. Hagmut Brockmann headed the culture department for many years. Manfred Volkmar, former deputy editor-in-chief, later took over the management of the Berlin School of Journalism . Hans Höppner died in 2006.
In the early 1970s, at the suggestion of advertising manager Gerhard Dünnhaupt, the publisher founded the Spandauer Anzeiger, one of the first and quickly very successful free advertising papers. The publisher also made a living from contract printing in the publisher's own rotary printing plant . Among other things, the taz Berlin was printed here every night for years . Ingrid Below-Lezinsky was also known for many years for organizing very personal reader trips. Despite a significant expansion of the Spandauer Volksblatt into the other West Berlin districts, the Spandau readership and the local section formed the economic backbone of the newspaper.
Big changes
Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and shortly after the death of Joachim Below, the Lezinsky family - the younger sons Olaf and Lars were also involved - initially held a 24.9 percent share in Axel Springer Verlag in Erich Lezinsky Verlag. The move was controversial in West Berlin, as Springer was considered conservative, while the Spandauer Volksblatt had more of a left-liberal orientation. However, the family was of the opinion that the newspaper had the greatest possible independence within the Springer press network and that a majority stake was not possible under antitrust law. The aim was to ensure that the family would remain in society, which would have been difficult if another newspaper company had been included. In fact, however, the merger was retrospectively prohibited in 1990 by the Federal Cartel Office, since the merger would have strengthened Springer's already existing dominant position "on the reader market for regional subscription daily newspapers and the advertising market in the western part of Berlin".
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the daring step was to expand to the neighboring Havelland . But this expansion failed. The Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung , which emerged from the Märkische Volksstimme , initially remained the market leader. The Volksblatt therefore withdrew from Brandenburg , where the Havelland-Anzeiger was initially a very successful advertising paper, and concentrated again on the Spandau market. This went hand in hand with the renaming in Spandauer Volksblatt . However, the economic problems had grown so that the daily publication on February 29, 1992 was discontinued.
Some editors were taken over by other Berlin newspapers, the Berliner Morgenpost and the Berliner Zeitung set up their own editorial offices in Spandau and each produced a daily Spandau page for the readers of this district for several years. The first edition of the Volksblatt as a weekly newspaper came on March 5, 1992 on the market. On June 24, 1992, the frequency of publication was changed to a weekly and free advertising paper. Strictly speaking, the Spandauer Volksblatt was completely discontinued, while the free weekly advertising newspaper Spandauer Anzeiger continued and only the better-known name of the former daily was transferred to the advertising paper. The Spandauer Anzeiger , as well as the previous titles Spandauer Zeitung and Havelländische Zeitung, live on in the title subline.
The majority in the Erich-Lezinsky-Verlag took over after the suspension of the daily publication also the obstacle of the Federal Cartel Office, now the Axel Springer Verlag. Kurt Lezinsky’s widow, Ingrid Below-Lezinsky, remained the editor until her death in 2005. After the publishing house had belonged to the Lezinsky family for decades under company law, the Axel Springer Verlag settled the old license disputes from the late 1940s and early 1950s between the family and the SPD with a payment to the SPD holding company concentration GmbH .
Since 1994, the Volksblatt has been a local edition of Berlin's highest-circulation advertising paper, Berliner Woche . The Spandauer Volksblatt appears weekly with 108,220 copies throughout Spandau, reaches 138,000 readers per week according to LA 2014 (approx. 63% of the district's population) and is the only local edition of the Berliner Woche (circulation: 1,532,000 copies, PL 27 from 2014 ) its own local editorial office. It is by far one of the strongest free German weekly newspapers. The delivery takes place via the BZV, the delivery organization of the Berlin newspaper publishers. The brothers Rainer and Olaf Lezinsky oversee the sales of advertisements and supplements for the title. The almost complete volumes of the newspaper, including the Spandauer Anzeiger, can be viewed in the city history archive in the Spandau Citadel .
Web links
literature
- Silke Haffner: The Spandauer Volksblatt. Investigation of the political orientation of a Berlin daily newspaper. LMU Munich (MA thesis), Munich 1989.
Individual evidence
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↑ Axel Springer Verlag: Berliner Woche , Price List No. 24a, ( Memento of the original from March 1, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (valid from February 1, 2011). Berlin 2011. Note: The number of copies distributed is the number of copies distributed. H. if a pack of 20 newspapers is deposited in a house entrance, then these 20 copies count as distributed, even if only a few copies are taken and the rest goes straight into the paper container.
- ^ German Bundestag: Report of the Federal Cartel Office on its activities in the years 1989/1990, page 104, fourth paragraph. (PDF; 4.5 MB)
- ↑ Monopolies Commission: Main report, page B12, point 14. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 188 kB)
