Contemplative boulevard

Ckdt has redesigned the Basel parish bulletin into Church TodayThe parish bulletins, the Catholic counterparts to the Kirchenboten, are also in a phase of renewal. However, they are still thinking on a smaller scale. There are still several parish bulletins from individual parishes, in some cases even where the majority of the local bulletins have merged to form cantonal or regional parish bulletins. There is no intra- or even inter-cantonal cooperation on a larger scale. In terms of layout, however, new paths are being ventured here and there, such as with the Basel parish paper, which, with 65,000 weekly copies, covers Basel, the Basel region, parts of the Fricktal and a corner of Solothurn. In 2002, the paper was renamed Kirche heute (Church Today) and given a new look. Editor Josef Bieger-Hänggi speaks of a "gentle tabloidization": the tabloid format remains, but the previous desert of letters is abandoned, larger titles are now used, shorter texts are written and color pictures can now be shown. If it had been up to him, the layout, which was designed by the Ckdt agency, could have been even bolder.
Starting in spring, the annual budget of 1.7 million Swiss francs of Kirche heute will be supplemented with advertising revenues: According to Bieger, in addition to the ecclesiastical job advertisements, a further advertisement page is to be leased - with a criteria catalog, of course. The Berner Pfarrblatt already earns 34,000 francs per year in this way.
Advertisements are also an issue on a larger scale, since the parish magazines in German-speaking Switzerland have a total circulation of 765,000 copies. "We have been aware for two years that an advertising pool would have power, but the time is not yet ripe," says Bieger-Hänggi. This is because some parish papers would not yet accept advertisements. Commercial opportunities are more likely to be offered by sporadically published dossiers that are enclosed with the parish bulletins. Markus Knöpfli