Newspaper group

A newspaper group is a more or less close cooperation between newspaper publishers , for practical reasons mostly sheets that appear in a uniform region. Often several small newspapers are grouped around a large company.

The individual publishers belonging to a cooperation can be legally independent of one another, but are not infrequently interwoven through participations.

The cooperation can in principle extend to various parts of the business activity, e.g. B. joint advertising, joint advertising acquisition ( newspaper combination ), jointly published advertising papers , joint printing works, joint administration, joint purchasing of consumer goods, joint sales, joint technical service providers and / or joint editorial content (often a joint cover section , as small newspapers do not exist can provide their own main editorial office with a national network of correspondents). An example of an advertising network is the Nielsen conurbation newspaper .

There are many reasons for the formation of newspaper groups that has been observed in Germany since the 1960s / 1970s. Important factors are e.g. B. the increasing costs z. B. for technical equipment and services, the increasing competition from other media on the advertising market and the competitiveness against international newspaper groups.

Since newspaper publishers are increasingly becoming cross-media companies ("media group"), which however often do not (yet) see their core competency in the new media offerings, they often enter into collaborations in such areas, such as marketing advertising on radio stations and on online portals. One example of this is the participation of many regional German newspaper houses in the online advertising marketer Online Marketing Service .

Sometimes newspaper groups also cooperate with each other or are interlinked through investments. So cooperates z. B. the advertising association of the newspaper group Rhein-Neckar (ZRN) around the Mannheimer Morgen and the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung on the one hand with the Rheinpfalz (main shareholder Medien Union ) on the other hand and thus forms the so-called newspaper combination Rhein-Neckar-Pfalz . In northern Germany, the newspaper group around the Wilhelmshavener Zeitung gets the cover pages from the Nordwest-Zeitung , which in turn is involved in the Ostfriesland newspaper group.

The concentration of the German press and media landscape is reflected in the increasing cooperation. It is criticized by antitrust authorities and various social groups because on the one hand increasing possibilities of abuse of market power and on the other hand a related loss of diversity of opinion are feared.

A newspaper group offers advertisers the advantage that more readers can be reached with less effort (one advertisement). If, through cooperation agreements, the same newspaper messengers can deliver both the local daily newspaper and national papers in one tour, this is more convenient and faster for subscribers than delivery by post and costs are saved in sales.