Last issues of two regional Sunday newspapers delivered

Among other things, the sheets each said goodbye with special editorials. In the Central Switzerland on Sunday explained CH-Media's journalistic director, Pascal Hollenstein, the attitude had little to do with readership or newspaper makers.

"Dramatic, however, was the development in the advertising market." The Central Switzerland on Sunday had become a victim of the relentless economic logic in the Internet age, where the newspaper industry was losing out to Google, Facebook & Co. by double-digit percentages.

The editor-in-chief of the St. Galler Tagblatt Stefan Schmid retrospectively compared the end of the Ostschweiz am Sonntag after a good six years with a death in installments. Since November 2017, the newspaper has only been published digitally. The hope behind this move was to encourage as many readers as possible to switch to the e-paper. However, from then on, the readership had to rely on reading the digital Ostschweiz am Sonntag waived.

However, both editorials point out that the readership of the St. Galler Tagblatt and Switzerland at the weekend in the future about a more extensive offer from all departments and from the region on Saturday.

The Central Switzerland on Sunday paid tribute to the good stories of the past, citing as a recent example the investigation by the Swiss Federal Audit Office (SFAO) into the Ruag armaments group, which the newspaper had initiated. The research into the National Bank's share investments in armaments companies and the uncovering of irregularities in the army were also highlighted.

The four-flush sheet Central Switzerland on Sunday last had a circulation of 89,089 copies and reached around 178,000 readers in German-speaking Switzerland. The publisher CH Media had announced in March that it would no longer print the newspaper for financial reasons.

From the setting of the Ostschweiz am Sonntag around ten full-time positions are affected in the editorial offices in eastern and central Switzerland. There is also less work in newspaper delivery. According to the Syndicom trade union, around 400 people were threatened with redundancy at the Swiss Post subsidiary Presto Presse-Vertriebs AG as a result of the closure of the Central Switzerland Sunday newspaper.

The Central Switzerland on Sunday was launched in September 2008 because, as was said at the time, Sunday was increasingly becoming a reading day. The paper started out with the claim of being a regional newspaper alongside the nationally oriented Sunday titles. The publisher at the time, LZ Medien, had entered into a cooperation for the advertisements with the former newspaper Sunday of the Mittelland newspapers.

In 2018, the NZZ Media Group merged Tagblatt Medien in St. Gallen and LZ Medien from Lucerne under the umbrella of regional media. As a result, in 2016 there was a change in the Central Switzerland on Sunday to a new layout.

The title was launched by Thomas Bornhauser, and from 2012 it was the responsibility of Dominik Buholzer, who announced his retirement last year. His successor was filled internally by Sasa Rasic.

With the setting of the Central Switzerland on Sunday and the e-paper Ostschweiz am Sonntag the Sunday market is thinning out. A few years ago, the seventh day of the week was considered a growth area for regional media companies. In the future, German-speaking Switzerland will still publish the SonntagsZeitung, the NZZ on Sunday and the SonntagsBlick. (SDA)