| CH Media Holding AG | |
| Founded: | October 1, 2018 |
| Hq Location City: | Aarau (Aargau) |
| Hq Location Country: | Switzerland |
| Revenue: | CHF 500 million |
| Owner: | Peter Wanner |
| Num Employees: | 2000 |
CH Media is a Swiss media company which was founded in 2018 as a joint venture of the AZ Medien and the NZZ Media Group. It has about 2000 employees and generates sales of almost CHF 500 million.[1]
On December 7, 2017, AZ Medien and the NZZ Media Group announced the formation of the joint venture, which is owned equally by both groups. The two media companies contributed their regional newspapers and associated online portals as well as their radio and television stations to the new CH Media company. AZ Medien's magazines were also added to the network. The NZZ Media Group contributed its entire regional media business. Printing plants such as Mittelland Zeitungsdruck, NZZ Media Services and Vogt-Schild[2] as well as all employees and managers in the above-mentioned areas of both media groups were also transferred to the new company. The NZZ Media and Business Media divisions of the NZZ Media Group, including the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and NZZ am Sonntag, are not part of the merger.
The joint venture reaches about 2 million people with all its media.[3]
CH Media publishes six regional newspapers from AZ Medien and two from NZZ Media Group. Including their head pages, these are around 20 paid newspapers in 15 German-speaking cantons with a paid circulation of almost 370,000 copies and a reach of around 1 million readers:
Together with the cooperation partner Zofinger Tagblatt, these newspapers and regional editions form az Nordwestschweiz and are published as printed daily newspapers and online.
On July 1, 2018, AZ Medien and the NZZ Media Group returned the licences of their four radio stations Radio Argovia and Radio 24 (AZ Medien) as well as Radio FM1 and Radio Pilatus (NZZ Media Group), which enabled their transfer to CH Media.[5]
All online portals of the newspapers concerned were also integrated into the new company. One exception is the online newspaper Watson, which still needs entrepreneurial freedom as a start-up company, but could be integrated later.
Peter Wanner is President of the board of directors of CH Media (Vice chairman Jörg Schnyder, chief financial officer of the NZZ Media Group), Axel Wüstmann is CEO of AZ Medien (deputy chairman Jürg Weber, Head of the NZZ Regional Media), and journalistic director is the former journalistic director of the NZZ regional media, Pascal Hollenstein.
In March 2023, the hack of NZZ by the cybercriminal group Play led to the penetration of CH Media's systems, which enabled hackers to extract and publish address data of over 400,000 Swiss expatriates subscribing to the official newspaper , one of the company's IT clients. According to Swissinfo, this data, which was handled by the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, was considered so sensitive that the newspaper's distributor wasn't given access to it.[6] [7]
It is controversially judged whether the merger would lead to a strengthening of the alleged "unity circle" in the Swiss media[8] or, thanks to a powerful editorial staff that has the time and the financial means to be able to research precisely the opposite (Pascal Hollenstein at the media conference).[9] Mergers actually strengthened critical journalism (Kurt W. Zimmermann).[10]
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