Type Daily local newspaper Founded 1889 | Editor Ilse Stein Circulation 33.283 | |
Owner(s) Madsack Publishing Group Political alignment Right of Center / Petty Bourgeois | ||
The Göttinger Tageblatt is the single printed local daily newspaper to circulate in Göttingen in the south of the state of Lower Saxony in Germany. The coverage area of the paper includes the city of Göttingen and surrounding towns and villages.
Contents
Background
It was founded in 1889. Since World War I it has become increasingly nationalist and it supported the Nazi movement even before it came to power in 1933. Since 1973 it is part of the Madsack publishing group from the capital city of the state of Lower Saxony, Hanover. National and statewide issues are taken from Madsack's Hanover daily Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung with its right of center alignment since then, while the editorial department of the Göttinger Tageblatt confines itself on local affairs only.
Controversy
A part of the significant educated and progressive community around the famous local university criticizes the crucial contributions of the editors of the paper towards the establishment of Göttingen as an early and lasting Hitler stronghold and a purported concealment of this past by current editors. The current coverage of local affairs is sometimes said to be onesidedly loyal towards the interests of local business, especially the retail sector that submits a crucial part of the paper's turnover by buying advertisement spaces. The quality of the editorial contents is usually estimated as being that of a "local rack".
Alternatives
The current main sources of local news for the people of Göttingen are provided by the local Stadtradio Göttingen, the regional HNA newspaper and the regional newscasts of the radio stations NDR 1, Hitradio Antenne Niedersachsen and FFN radio:
There have also been efforts towards establishing local periodicals as alternative local news sources in the past years, but until now they all failed because of lacks of revenue and because of onesided left wing and alternative editorial alignments so that these papers haven't been able to reach sufficient acceptancies and therefore circulations.
The local radio station, Stadradio Göttingen, has been established in 1997. It is indirectly founded by the state of Lower Saxony. It broadcasts local news bulletins several times a day but its audience is quite low due to a considerable lack of professionalism.