Blick celebrates 60-year anniversary with issue for 20 centimes
The Swiss tabloid *Blick* celebrated its 60th anniversary on Monday with a special edition sold at its original price of 20 rappen instead of today's 2.50 francs. The paper included nine extra pages and anecdotes from readers.
In the latest 28-page issue, 60 celebrities have their say. They include former SVP Federal Councilor Adolf Ogi ("Switzerland owes a great deal to the View a lot!") or cyclist Fabian Cancellara ("How excited I got sometimes!"). In addition, readers recall their first encounter with the Zurich daily newspaper in short anecdotes. The special edition also features the very first front page ("The servant is not the murderer").
Six pages at the start
The View appeared for the first time on October 14, 1959, and comprised just six pages. In 60 years, the title has worked its way up from the despised "Revolverblatt" to one of the biggest Swiss daily newspapers.
With the launch of Switzerland's first tabloid newspaper, the Ringier publishing house responded to the social changes of the 1950s - the keywords being prosperity, consumer society, and electronic mass media. The model was the German "Bild" newspaper, founded in 1952.
Once the most read newspaper
The paper focused on misfortunes, crime, sports, entertainment - and sex. For the first time in Switzerland, it transferred the visual language of the new medium of television to print. For this View ostracized in political circles and in the traditional press, boycotted, occasionally even publicly burned (as with the premature news of the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963) - but read by more and more people.
With no competition in the tabloid sector, the View to Switzerland's most widely read newspaper with a circulation of 380,000 copies in the mid-1980s. The change in the media landscape in the 1990s, with Internet and free newspapers, is also increasingly causing problems for what was once Switzerland's strongest daily newspaper. Its circulation has been falling continuously ever since. At the end of March this year, the circulation was still around 107,000 copies, according to Wemf.
View TV before the start
In 1969 the SonntagsBlick was launched. Regional editions in Zurich and Basel, on the other hand, failed. In the Internet age, Blick.ch was added as an online portal, and starting next year, the publisher also plans to offer Blick TV, a digital TV channel. (SDA)
