Newspapers continue to die in Germany
More bad news from the newspaper world. Following the Financial Times Deutschland and the Frankfurter Rundschau, it is now the turn of the staff at the Westfälische Rundschau—a newspaper owned by the WAZ Group.
The Waz media group is closing the editorial office of the loss-making Westfälische Rundschau with 120 jobs, but wants to preserve the title through cooperation with competitors. This was announced by the Waz Group on Tuesday. "We will do everything we can to make these job cuts as socially responsible as possible," explained Waz Managing Director Christian Nienhaus in a statement. Those affected were informed at a staff meeting. A redundancy plan provides for severance payments based on age and length of service.
Loss of millions
With a paid circulation of 115,000, the Westfälische Rundschau (WR) is one of the four titles of the Waz Group in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia and, according to the publisher, has made a loss of 50 million euros in recent years. The other three Waz titles in North Rhine-Westphalia, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Waz, the Neue Ruhr/Neue Rhein Zeitung NRZ and the Westfalenpost, on the other hand, are in the black. All four newspapers together sell 700,000 copies a day.
Cooperation with competitors
From February, local content will come from the Waz-owned Westfalenpost and the Ruhr Nachrichten from the Dortmund media house Lensing, the Hellweger Anzeiger in Unna and the Märkischer Zeitungsverlag in Lüdenscheid, which belongs to the Ippen publishing group.
A year ago, Petra Grotkamp, a daughter of co-founder Jakob Funke, acquired a majority stake in the Waz Group, which is also active in Thuringia and Lower Saxony as well as in Austria and Eastern Europe. The publishing house is managed by three managing directors - Christian Nienhaus, Manfred Braun and Thomas Ziegler. All three publicly backed the decision to close the WR editorial office on Tuesday. (SDA)
