Free of advertising, not profit-oriented: New online medium planned for Basel

The Foundation for Media Diversity will support the project over the next three years with an annual cost ceiling of one million Swiss francs, as Andreas Miescher from the Foundation told the Keystone-SDA news agency when asked.

The advertising-free platform wants to network strongly with other online media and develop a regional public service for the digital age, the foundation announced on Monday evening. The Medienzukunft Basel association bears the publishing and entrepreneurial responsibility. The Foundation for Media Diversity is not involved.

Three project groups had applied to the foundation with different plans. After a "thorough examination", it was decided to support the project under the concept management of Matthias Zehnder and Hansi Voigt. The plan is to create an online medium with a Basel focus on politics and business, society and science, sport and, last but not least, a daily Basel cultural agenda.

The Basel media landscape is undergoing radical change: in October, the Basel Newspaper (BaZ) was integrated into the Tamedia Group. Since mid-August, the portal Prime News of the former local head of the BaZChristian Keller, online. In November, the media project DailyWeek was discontinued after seven years and 18 full-time positions were lost.

All regional providers, including the newspapers and Telebasel, which is strongly promoting its internet channel, are using multimedia. The online portal was the last to go online in 2015 Barfi.ch of former Radio Basilisk co-founder Christian Heeb. Due to a lack of advertising revenue Barfi.ch is now in debt-restructuring moratorium and is looking for partners.

Since 1998, Peter Knechtli's OnlineReports News and stories free of charge on the Internet, according to its own figures in the black. (SDA)