Nothing works without Fridolin

However, Fridolin Managing Director Maya Ziegler does not like the term "free newspaper". Unfortunately, she regrets, it has a negative, almost cheap connotation: if it's free, it can't be good. Yet Fridolin has a lot of heart and soul. The people of Glarus know and feel this and affectionately call their newspaper "Fridli". Week after week, every Thursday, 29,707 copies of Fridolin land in every letterbox in the canton of Glarus, as well as in postboxes in the upper part of the canton of Schwyz and in the Linth region. Recruits from Glarus can have Fridolin sent to their RS free of charge, and some homesick Glarus residents have even ordered their Fridli to Phuket and the Vatican. However, you have to take out a subscription for this.

The perceived household coverage of Fridolin is far higher than the actual coverage, which is already 100 percent. The paper achieves this in the canton of Glarus because Fridolin contains the Glarus official gazette, which was approved by the cantonal assembly. This means that Fridolin can also be placed in letterboxes that would otherwise reject stray advertising with stop stickers. And even there he seems to be welcome.

The high reach of the paper is a good argument for advertising customers from the region to have relied on the publication for almost 50 years. They have also supported the paper through the 2009 crisis. As a result, Fridolin is able to secure the operation of the associated offset and digital printing plant in difficult times. And that's not all: the crisis year 2009, which shook up many medium-sized companies, was actually the best in the past eight years for Fridolin Druck und Medien, and without any redundancies or early retirements. "We simply all pulled together," says Maya Ziegler with pride.

All for one

Since October last year, Fridolin has had an editorial director who is responsible for the content of the magazine. He is also called Fridolin, or Jakober. Ziegler assures us with a wink that the first name was not a selection criterion, but pure coincidence. In addition to the editorial director, two permanent freelance journalists and a columnist, the now 80-year-old life partner of Fridolin founder Walter Feldmann, work on the newspaper every week. A number of the almost 40,000 inhabitants of Glarus, Glarus North and Glarus South as well as citizens from the neighboring cantons also write for Fridolin. Around 60 percent of the articles are written by the readers themselves. "Every association, every club, every citizen of the canton of Glarus and the neighboring cantons has the right to place a text with a photo in Fridolin," emphasizes Ziegler. Every week, the editorial team and publishing house management have to choose from 90 to 120 submitted texts which will be published. A difficult task, because every article is equally important to the editorial team. Ziegler: "We don't evaluate or weight the submitted articles, we just proofread them. Our aim is to depict the canton with all the opinions to be found there and to encourage people to think and participate. But of course we have to base the size of each issue on the number of advertisements sold. That is why we cannot publish all the articles submitted. The size of Fridolin varies between 32 and 64 pages."

Special knitting pattern

The intensive involvement of the Glarus population is not the only specialty of Fridolin. If you turn to the front page, you first stumble across the obituaries on pages 2 and 3. Maya Ziegler explains: "The deceased have a place of honor with us and don't end up somewhere in the back pages. This is a sign of our appreciation for them and their relatives. We know that this attracts attention and we often get a shake of the head with this approach. But we will keep it that way." Fridolin also doesn't have a summer slump or a summer break: "There is always a reason for advertising and there are always topics that need to be reported on," says Ziegler, "especially in summer. Of course, we have to give our advertising customers new ideas from time to time. But as we are in close and direct contact with them and know their business well, that's not a problem. It's still going on here."

History and stories

October 29 is Fridolin's birthday. On this day in 1965, the successor to the Anzeiger vom Gross- und Kleintal, founded in 1928, appeared on the scene for the first time - and with 15,003 "officially certified copies", it was the newspaper with the highest circulation in the Glarus economic area, financed by advertising and free of charge for all Glarus residents. The idea of publishing Fridolin came from Walter Feldmann the Younger, born in 1930, who managed the operations of Fridolin Druck und Medien until 2009. Feldmann's father, Walter Feldmann Senior, born in 1888, a book printer and typesetter, had founded the Schwanden book printing company in 1924 and launched the Anzeiger four years later. In 1959, at the age of 29, Walter Feldmann Junior took over the printing company at his father's request, added editorial pages to the Anzeiger and christened it Fridolin.

Strictly speaking, Fridolin is a waste product. Feldmann Junior's aim in printing the magazine was actually to recycle surplus paper. Simply throwing it away went against the grain for the trained typesetter and qualified businessman - so he looked for content with which he could fill the paper. Fridolin was born. Although it was written and typeset in Schwanden for many years, it was printed in St. Gallen at the St. Galler Anzeiger printing works, Nuber. The typeset pages had to be in the print shop by 4 p.m., because the Anzeiger ran through the press there immediately after Fridolin. "With larger volumes, it sometimes happened that not all Fridolin pages were ready by 3 p.m.," recalls 81-year-old Walter Feldmann. "That's why a delivery van driver drove the first eight to ten pages to St. Gallen in advance, and I then brought the two to six pages that were late in my Opel Rekord myself." Loading the Opel with the remaining printing plates was a very hectic process. The lead pages brought in by the typesetters weighed around 25 kilograms each and had to be stowed in the back seat and trunk of the Opel. "Once I put one of the plates on the roof of the car," says Feldmann. "I wanted to put it in the trunk, but I forgot it there and drove off. Shortly before Glarus, I remembered the side. I was terrified - but the heavy lead plate was still where I had put it." Fridolin was printed on time, "a minor miracle" for Feldmann. Otherwise, this would probably have been the first and only time that Fridolin would not have reached its readers on time.

Even today, Fridolin is not printed in Schwanden, as the print shop does not have a web offset press. For 23 years, the newspaper was printed at DZO Druck Oetwil am See, but since its closure, NZZ Print in Schlieren has been printing Fridolin. However, the newspaper is still produced entirely in Schwanden, even though the print data is no longer transmitted to the print shop by Opel Rekord, but now digitally.

Fridolin, the ladies' favorite

Producing a newspaper is one thing. But who distributes it? Feldmann the Younger asked the Schwander Post. In 1965, however, the post office demanded a price for the distribution of Fridolin that was higher than the costs of production, personnel and paper combined. So without further ado, Feldmann founded his own distribution company, the Glarnerland printed matter distribution organization. At the heart of the organization were around ten housewives distributed throughout the canton of Glarus, who earned a few extra francs once a week by delivering letterboxes. They started distributing on Wednesdays at 4 pm and the last Fridolin was in the letterbox on Thursday at 11 am. The deliverers were not paid by the hour, but by the weight of each Fridolin issue: the larger the volume, the higher the wage. Otherwise, the up- and downhill deliverer from Braunwald would have received a significantly higher wage than her colleague from Schwand. Feldmann Junior wanted to prevent this injustice.
As Fridolin has grown over the past 50 years, so has the distribution organization. Today, the distribution company is called Swiss-Mail and employs more than 60 deliverers who not only feed the letterboxes with Fridolin, but also with election propaganda, flyers and advertising leaflets. The remuneration system based on weight has not changed to this day.

Focus on advertisers and readers

To understand Fridolin and why it has worked so well for almost five decades and against the resistance of established daily media - above all the Glarner Nachrichten - you have to immerse yourself a little in the world of the canton of Glarus. The people of Glarus see themselves as one big family; people still say hello to each other on the street. Everyone knows everyone, and if you don't know anyone, you don't really belong here. The social network is well established, every Glarner is involved in several organizations, and it doesn't matter whether your neighbor is also a member. In such an environment, a newspaper that gives everyone the chance to express themselves about everything is tantamount to a piece of home, a piece of family. For the people of Glarus, Fridolin is their newspaper. It is no coincidence that the paper is no longer called "Anzeiger vom Gross- und Kleintal" like its predecessor, but Fridolin - after the cantonal saint Fridolin von Säckingen, who also adorns the canton's coat of arms. The personification is the program. The renaming of Buchdruckerei Schwanden to Fridolin Druck und Medien in 2000 also emphasizes the company's roots in the region.

Fridolin has been the most widely read newspaper in the canton of Glarus since its first publication. It is one of the few free newspapers that is still WEMF-certified. "Even if the accreditation costs money, we will stick to it," says Maya Ziegler. "Because that way we can guarantee our advertising customers that their message will reach where they want it to." In future, Ziegler wants to make Fridolin even more interesting and varied in terms of content and give more weight to the articles produced by the editorial team: "There is a need among our readership for cross-cantonal topics and articles written by trained journalists, be it in politics or sport. We want to upgrade Fridolin in this direction. This is very important to me personally, and we want to have achieved this goal by our anniversary in 2015."

Fridolin is also available online, but only as a downloadable PDF of the print version. Publishing director Ziegler admits that this is a weak point in the overall appearance of the free newspaper. But despite Fridolin Druck und Medien's pronounced innovative spirit, online and multimedia are not among the company's core competencies. It is clear that a printing company relies on paper first and foremost. In addition, Fridolin is predominantly read by an older audience aged 45 and over. An independent online presence has therefore not been particularly missed to date. Nevertheless, the future is sure to come. And Ziegler is currently looking for a competent partner to bring Fridolin into the world of zeros and ones.

Anne-Friederike Heinrich

IN BRIEF

Fridolin Druck und Medien, Walter Feldmann AG is founded in 1924 as the Schwanden book printing company. The first print shop is located in a small terraced house in the center of Schwanden. In 1928, founder Walter Feldmann Senior, born in 1888, buys a high-speed press and prints the first Anzeiger vom Gross- und Kleintal with a print run of 5000 copies. In 1958, Feldmann Senior hands over the print shop to his son, who starts publishing Fridolin in 1965. In 1971, the print shop moves to its current premises at Hauptstrasse 2 at the entrance to Schwanden, and in 1973 Feldmann transforms the company into a public limited company. The typesetting department has been working with typesetting since 1982. Between 2002 and 2008, a multimedia department was set up, although this no longer exists today, and in 2009 the prepress department switched to CTP. From 1994 to 2002, the third Walter Feldmann is on board as Managing Director, then his brother Jürg Martin Feldmann takes over the helm until the end of 2008. In 2009, Walter Feldmann the elder retires from the business and Maya Ziegler joins as Publishing Director. In July 2011, she took over responsibility for the print shop and publishing house, while the youngest Walter Feldmann became co-owner of the company and delegate of the Board of Directors. The company employs 45 full and part-time staff.
www.fridolin.ch