NZZ Media Group expands its publishing activities

The measures are related to the strategic realignment of the company, which was initiated by the Board of Directors and company management in summer 2013.

Expansion of online and mobile

The focus of this realignment is on expanding the product range, particularly in the online and mobile areas, examining geographic expansion in the various language regions and expanding the journalism-related service business in the areas of conferences, business information, personal finance and health. Investments will focus on expanding product responsibility and strengthening digital skills in the editorial department of Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which already works convergently for online and print, redesigning the newsroom, introducing a new content management system, expanding management capacities in the development of technical products and in sales and marketing, and setting up a data analysis department. The investments will have a considerable impact on the company's operating result over the next two years.

"We will systematically strengthen our core business with these measures", says Veit Dengler, CEO of the NZZ Media Group, in a press release. "Our aim is to secure and expand our leading position in quality journalism in Switzerland and the German-speaking world, thereby placing ourselves on a successful long-term entrepreneurial footing. In doing so, we trust in our journalistic skills and in the fact that customers are prepared to pay for journalistic quality." Similar to the recently announced takeover of Moneyhouse, Dengler does not rule out further acquisitions, but only if they serve to expand the core business. The company is not considering broad diversification.

NZZ suffers from media change - reaction necessary

The NZZ Media Group is suffering from the fundamental change in the media landscape with falling circulations and declining advertising income, primarily in the print sector, despite an attractive earnings performance and the build-up of a solid financial cushion in recent years. Customer needs are increasingly shifting from traditional newspaper reading to the use of online and mobile media. The range of traditional media is also being increasingly supplemented by social media interaction. New, publisher-independent competitors are competing with the established providers of media services. At the same time, the consolidation of traditional publishing and media companies is continuing.

The NZZ Media Group is responding to these developments by accelerating the expansion of its digital offerings. The aim of these measures is to provide customers with the NZZ Media Group's high-quality journalistic offerings in the most diverse and beneficial way possible. In future, the unbundling of journalistic content in terms of time, location and content will be examined more than ever before.

Quality journalism geared towards the digital world

The NZZ editorial team is being restructured so that it can react more adaptively and quickly to changing market requirements than before. The aim is to offer customers high-quality journalism that is consistently geared to the requirements of the digital world. In order to preserve the expertise of the NZZ editorial team, an organizational separation between content production, editing and production will be implemented. The print edition of the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" will remain a mainstay of the journalistic offering. "We want to strengthen the role of the printed edition by making it a document of classification, evaluation and background information more resolutely than before," explains Markus Spillmann, Editor-in-Chief of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Head of Journalism at the NZZ.

According to the press release, the NZZ Media Group is continuing to focus on its regional media in order to achieve economies of scale. The company is currently examining the extent to which business and journalistic processes can be harmonized and coordinated in order to exploit synergy potential.