Stuttgart newspapers want to promote digital offers.
Stuttgarter Nachrichten (StN) and Stuttgarter Zeitung (StZ) want to cut about 50 jobs in their editorial department and boost their digital offerings. In place of the previous sections, subject teams are planned, which should also gain new readers with their reports. “We are not withdrawing from the local or sub-local,” StN Editor-in-Chief Christoph Reisinger emphasized Wednesday in Stuttgart. However, in the future, there will be only four books instead of five in the print edition. So far, the fifth book contained reports from the provinces.
Job cuts affect about 20 percent of the editorial team. It will be implemented by the end of the year without any redundancies. “All floodplain sites will be preserved,” Reisinger said. The editors were informed at a business meeting on Wednesday.
These plans, which have already cost jobs in the past, have been criticized by Verdi’s union under the rubric of the “Regional Media House Strategy”. According to the announcement, Martin Gross, Verdi’s regional director, said: “For years, there has been a clear cut after another, always according to the same principle: fewer resources for high-quality journalism, more for the Internet. The result: fewer paying readers and less income. It’s time to change course” .
Sister newspapers StN and StZ belong to the Sdwestdeutsche Medienhold and supply headlines for other newspapers in the country. In the third quarter of 2021, StN and StZ together had a paid-out distribution of approximately 170,500 copies.
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