Rediscovering the Region: The West German Daily Press in the 1970s

After Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, West Germans began to accept the more permanent division of the country and rediscovered the regional fundaments of their federal political system. A catalyst for this process was provided by a massive regionalization of the daily press in the aftermath of the recession in 1973. That regionalization entailed the delineation of new regional distribution and advertising areas, the launch of new editions, the growth of regularly and irregularly published alternative papers and a stronger emphasis on regional news. In the 1970s regionalization cut across all segments of the market and across party affiliations and affected established papers, the irregular alternative press and even television and broadcasting. It propelled the West German daily press to its height point in German history, with more than 25 million copies per day in 1982. The new regional focus of the daily press increased public awareness of regional protests, regional identity politics and regional scandals during the chancellorship of Helmut Schmidt (1974–82) to such an extent that the article concludes that the 1970s were not only a ‘global’ decade, but also a regional decade. The history of the regional press that is presented in the article for the first time facilitates a new view of regional changes in economic prosperity, criticism of the federal state and the emergence of regional consumer markets between 1974 and 1982. The analysis provides a cornerstone for a more detailed media history of the Bonn Republic and a new understanding of the 1970s.


I. Introduction
On 19 May 1975, the newspaper Die Welt moved its headquarter from Hamburg to the West German capital Bonn. The relocation was announced with much fanfare and adverts promised new international stories from the 'European power centre' Bonn. However, the then editorin-chief, Herbert Kremp, was not convinced that global news that had played a significant role between the second Berlin Crisis in 1958/61 and Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik would revive Die Welt that had slid into economic problems after the recession in 1973. Kremp, thus, urged his staff to strengthen the paper's focus on the Rhine-Ruhr region ('sich in der regionalen Grassohle festbeißen'). 2 The new regional focus of Die Welt in 1975 was part of a fundamental restructuring of the West German daily press after its re-establishment under Allied tutelage, the 'press miracle' 3 of the 1950s and the internationalisation and concentration of the 1960s. It regionalised between 1974 and 1982. The local and regional subscription dailies with a combined circulation of more than 13 million copies per day replaced world and national news on the title pages with stories about West German regional politics and sport. 4 West Germany's and Europe's largest tabloid Bild developed more than 14 new regional editions. Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other supra-regional subscription papers established new regional editions, too. The years between 1974 and 1982 were not the low point of West German press history, as has been argued so far, but the opposite. 5 The daily press reached an all-time high in German history. Its circulation numbers peaked in 1982 with more than 25.1 million copies per day driven by regionalisation. 6 Scholars of the dominant economic approach to press history have analysed regionalisation in a limited manner so far, namely that it was a side effect of the economic concentra-  (Konstanz, 2007). 6 See IVW, 4 (1982). The Informationsgemeinschaft zur Feststellung der Verbreitung von Werbeträgern (hereafter IVW) has published quarterly lists since 1954 that provide the circulation figures of most West German press products. They are quoted as IVW No. (Year). tion among local and regional subscription papers before 1976. 7 However, it was more than a side effect in the 1970s. It entailed the delineation of new regional distribution and advertising areas, the launching of new editions, the growth of regular and irregular alternative papers and a stronger emphasis on regional news that was of interest to an increasingly regionally mobile population. Regionalisation cut across all segments of the market and party affiliations and affected established papers, irregular alternative papers and even television and broadcasting in the 1970s. The new regional focus of the daily press increased the public attention to regional protests, regional identity politics and regional sleaze scandals during the chancellorship of the 'global chancellor ' Helmut Schmidt (1974-1982 to such an extent that it is questionable to what extent the years between 1974 and 1982 can be labelled a 'global decade'. 8 In the eyes of the readers of the press and many journalists, the years between 1974 and 1982 were also a regional decade. The main cause of the regionalisation of the daily press was the regional relocation of the population in the 'years after the boom'. 9 The ongoing modernisation of agrarian businesses since the 1950s and the 1960s and the onset of de-industrialisation accelerated migration from agrarian and declining industrial regions, such as the Saar and the Ruhr, 10 towards larger cities and the metropolitan regions around Hamburg, Frankfurt, Hanover, Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart and other cities. However, these cities did not profit from migration as strongly as they had used to. Suburbanisation, new greenfield industries, new trends of 'counter-urbanisation' and new regional centres pulled the population into the surrounding region. 11 Urbanization gave way to regionalisation. Munich's and Nuremberg's number of inhabitants, 7 H. Pürer and J. Raabe, Presse in Deutschland. 8 On this interpretation, see A. Rödder, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1969-1990(München, 2004. 9 Recent research on deindustrialisation and the 1970s has singled out regional economic and social changes as a key element in the wider transformations in the 'years after the boom.' However, this perspective has not been fully followed up yet. See  for example, peaked in 1973 and went into a long-time decline thereafter. In the expanding metropolitan regions, young families continued to settle in suburbs, villages and small towns but did not cut their ties with the larger cities in which they had studied and in which they often continued to work. They were the key readers for the expanding regional press. This regional transformation of West Germany tied in with a much larger rediscovery of the regions in politics, film and exhibitions between 1974 and 1982. Edgar Reitz' documentary (1980/81) and TV-series 'Heimat' about the history of the Hunsrück-region was widely discussed; 12 and exhibitions on the Staufer (Stuttgart, 1977) and Wittelsbach and Bavaria (Munich, 1980) appealed to an unprecedented number of visitors. 13 These identity debates in the 1970s were further fuelled by political considerations. Leading Marxists felt that 'late capitalism' and the end of the Fordist age gave way to more decentralized forms of economic organization. 14 Equally on the right, the criticism of the nation state as an organizational unit was in full swing in the 1970s. 15 Alternative regional protest movements and the nascent Greens declared that they were 'not right, nor left, but at the forefront' of regional politics. 16 These debates formed the intellectual background to the increasing fascination of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung, as well as of the new alternative papers with the region and the local. For some, the region was a motor for renewed capitalist profit outside of state regulation, for others, it seemed to offer some historical identity against an overpowering state and a beacon for the reconstruction of 'Gemeinschaft'.
Regionalisation entailed a fundamental revaluation of political identification points that reshaped the relationship between readers and the press. The Bild, for example, is often taken as a case study to highlight the alleged continuation of polarized political debates from the 1960s into the 1970s. 17  new regional editions after 1972 helped Bild in fact to move away from the polarised political debates that had negatively affected its circulation numbers after 1968. Regionalisation and the appeal to much broader audiences boosted Bild's circulation numbers from 3.7 million copies in 1973 to 5.4 million copies in 1982. This was an increase of more than 45%. 19 The analysis of the regionalisation of all segments of the daily press in the 1970s that is presented in this article for the first time contributes to a more encompassing press history of the Federal Republic. While most historians agree that the twentieth century was the century of the 'mass media', research on the West German daily press is still in its infancy. 20 There are several studies on the press during the post-war years, the 1950s and the chancellorship of Willy Brandt. 21 Further, the contributions by leading journalists of the daily press, such as Karl Korn, and editors, such as Axel Springer, have been researched. 22 In addition, scholars have analysed different regional markets, such as the Saarland, 23 North-Rhine Westphalia, 24 Hamburg 25 and other regions. Finally, a number of historians, such as Schildt, Haase, Hodenberg, Führer, Frei and Bösch, have advanced new approaches to the press history of the Federal Republic. 26 However, an integrated perspective on all segments of the daily press is still missing, but is crucial for a wider understanding of the 1970s. 27 The article builds on the research by Haase on West German and British press history in the 19 th and 20 th century, a first exploration into a new periodisation of West German press history in the project on Die Zeit by Haase and Schildt and a dissertation by Kraiker on the press in the 1970s that was supervised by Haase. 28 It draws on a wide range of primary sources from the archive of the tageszeitung (taz), 29  The article presents the empirical findings on the regionalisation of the press in the first section. The second section discusses the regional differentiation of the market. The third section shows the impact of press regionalisation on the wider media system. The last section looks at the wider impact of the regionalisation of the press on political developments in the 1970s.  31 The Springer archive, Berlin, has provided a list of Bild's regional editions. See Table 3 in the Appendix. 32 The Marion Dönhoff papers in the archive of the Marion Dönhoff Foundation, Hamburg, have provided good insight into and a broader understanding of the developments and changes in the West German media and press sector in the 1970s. 33 We are thankful that Helmut Schmidt granted Christian Haase a longer personal interview and Christian Kraiker access to his private papers in Hamburg for his PhD. 34 The Tätigkeitsberichte of the Federal Cartel Office are published online. See http://www.bundeskartellamt.de/DE/UeberUns/Publikationen/Taetigkeitsberichte/taetigkeitsberichte_node.html They provide an excellent and detailed insight into the changes of regional newspaper markets after 1976 and the market interventions of the Federal Cartel Office. 35 See footnote 6. 36  II. The regionalisation of the daily press: empirical findings The regional transformation of reader-markets in the 1970s changed the basis of the West German daily press. Between 1954 and the early 1970s, local and regional subscription papers, such as Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung or Wilstersche Zeitung, supra-regional subscription papers, such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and tabloids, such as Bild, had catered for different reader-, news-and advertising-markets. The supra-regional subscription and tabloid press published supra-regional and city editions, while the majority of the more than 1200 editions of the local and regional subscription papers were published on countylevel. The spatial distinction between reader-, news-, and advertising markets gave way to a more comprehensively regionalised press market in the 1970s.
The first wave of regionalisation affected the segment of the local and regional subscription press. There is no standard definition of local and regional in German press history, but most often those papers are considered local that appear within one county (Landkreis), municipality (kreisfreie Stadt) or larger city (Großstadt) and report about local boroughs (Gemeinden). Regional papers on the contrary usually cover news from more than one county and often share news, adverts and full parts of the paper in a regional newspaper-group. Counties, municipalities and larger cities are the smallest regional units.
The origins of the local and regional subscription press date back to the reestablishment of the West German press market under Allied tutelage. 37 The Western Allies, especially the British, allocated large quantities of printing paper and regional distribution areas to newly licensed papers in order to give them a head start before the Altverleger, these are publishers that had already been active during the Nazi-years, were allowed to re-enter the market. Between 1954 and the late 1960, the unbalanced market structure between local and regional papers fuelled the process of concentration. Table 1 in the Appendix shows that large regional dailies with a circulation above 150,000 increased their market-share between 1954 and 1967 from 31.8% in 1954 to 49.7% in 1967 at the expense of smaller, often local papers with a circulation below 40,000. This process of concentration slowed down in the early 1970s. Table 4 shows that the number of 'publicistic units' did not change significantly between 1971 and 1973 anymore.
Several economic and political developments coincided that ended the process of concentration among local and regional subscription papers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many regional press centres were upgraded to the status of university towns, such as Braun- This helped the regional economy, including the press, to improve the quality of the workforce. Further, many small and mid-sized publishing houses received special loans from the government after 1967. 38 'The majority of credits were issued to papers with a circulation up to 20,000 (64.6%) and 40,000 (17.9%) and thus were targeted at smaller companies.' 39 Most of the ERP credits were used to finance the transition from mechanical printing to electronic photo-type printing. Finally, boundary reforms were enacted all across West Germany that reduced the number of local boroughs drastically from 24,278 to 8,514. The number of urban municipalities fell from 135 in 1968 to 88 in 1978 and the number of counties was cut down from 425 to 235. 40 This enabled many papers to rationalize their production.
Despite the relatively strong position of the local and regional subscription press in the early 1970s, the recession in 1973 came as a shock. In the months following the oil price shock advertising revenues were falling across all media sectors. In late 1973 and early 1974, negative expectations about the future of the market gained the upper hand. Some smaller publishers voluntarily merged with larger publishers, because they feared that they could not shoulder the rising costs during the recession. 41 Several regional groups of papers formed in 1974 and 1975 that enabled a stronger pooling of resources. 42 In the Ruhr, for example, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Verlag merged with the publishing companies of Westfälische Rundschau, Neue-Ruhr-Zeitung and Westfalenpost in 1975. They formed the largest regional newspaper group in the country, which sold more than one million copies per day in 1976. 43 In 1974, the Stuttgarter Zeitung formed a group with the Stuttgarter Nachrichten and Südwestpresse Ulm that offered a total circulation of more than 477,000 (Stuttgart) and 319,000 (Ulm). 44 Similar regional newspaper groups formed in Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein, in Munster, Bielefeld, Cologne, Kassel, Oldenburg, Munich and Aachen. 45 In some regions, newspapers perished as a consequence of mergers, but this remained the exception.
Due to the concentration among regional publishing houses in 1974/75, advertising departments merged and developed new larger regional advertising campaigns across regional 38  groups of papers. The IVW captured this trend for the first time in 1974. In 1974, the IVW introduced a new overview (B-list) into its quarterly reports, 46 which offered companies a way to book adverts in groups of papers. Table 2 lists the 43 new press regions of the local and regional subscription press. 47 The regional expansion of the advertising campaigns of the local and regional subscription press was not only driven by concentration among publishing houses, but also by the emergence of newly expanded regional reader markets. These new regional reader and consumer markets exerted an enormous attraction on various papers. In 1979, the Nielsen mediaplanning agency labelled these new densely populated reader and advertising markets Niel and Berlin-West. The company analysed that each of the agglomerations exhibited three characteristics, namely, a total population of at least one million inhabitants, a high density of more than 1,500 inhabitants per square kilometre in the centre and a lower density in the surrounding counties. The boundaries of these new agglomerations were defined by the distribution areas of various regional subscription papers. Nielsen offered companies the possibility to place advertisements across several regional newspaper-groups at the same time. Among those larger agglomerations, the Rhine-Ruhr was the largest and most complex. It consisted of several smaller regions with very different traditions, sport clubs and newspapers.
Subsequently, all dailies and newspaper groups competed for the new lucrative markets in the metropolitan regions and wider regional markets that cut across counties and municipalities. Before the 1970s, the leading quality dailies, such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Frankfurter Rundschau, were mostly based in different larger cities outside of the capital Bonn, such as Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg, where they sold a large part of their circulation. In the 1970s, the supra-regional subscription press regionalised its reader base. It expanded into the suburbs and wider areas of the metropolitan regions. In 1972, the Frankfurter Rundschau established a new edition for the Höchst-Taunus district. In 1976, the existing regional and local issues were further diversified into eastern and southern versions. 48 The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung strengthened its regional sec-46 IVW, 1 (1974). 47 The geographical scope of the region is delineated by the largest regional paper or newspaper group of the region. 48  Finally, the Welt moved to Bonn in 1975 as part of Springer's overall regionalisation strategy in the Rhine-Ruhr region. The changes after 1973 reshaped the West German press market and gave it its unique profile in Europe until the re-unification of the country in 1990. In contrast to more centralised countries, such as the UK and France, the West German daily press lacked a dense 'national' press with a basis in the capital Bonn and was located in several metropolitan press centres that underlined the more decentralised character of the country.
Press regionalisation also engulfed the so-called alternative press that rose, peaked and withered away between 1974 and 1982. Up to now, historians have largely treated the alternative press as a separate segment of the newspaper market. Its irregular publication intervals, small circulation figures and diversely specialized topics suggest that it was more a means to improve the communication of the alternative milieu 51 than part of the development of the wider press market. However, alternative media were strongly embedded in the regionalisation of the press market. They often exploited the increasing uneasiness that the boundary reforms and the enlargement of regional press districts among the regional and local subscription press had created. Bremer Blatt, for example, stressed that it was founded in 1976 after Weser Kurier had absorbed other Bremen papers and declared its role to report on 'events and problems in Bremen which do not get adequate room in the large media.' 52 Even in the agrarian counties, which experienced a low point in press density, regional and local groups tried to establish new 'Initiativzeitungen' and 'Volksblätter.' 53 The breakthrough of the new regional and local alternative press was mainly driven by political factors. The rise of the alternative press to supra-regional importance occurred during the autumn of 1977 when the government of Helmut Schmidt was embroiled in a conflict with the left-wing terrorist organization RAF that led to the so-called 'news blackout,' a suppression of news reporting for security reasons that seemed to confirm the negative alternative 49 This information has been provided by the Media Service of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 50  view of the federal state. Current research on the West German press has highlighted the supra-regional effect of the terrorism crisis and has looked at its effects on supra-regional papers and journals, such as Spiegel. 54 However, the crisis had a significant regional press angle, too, which became particularly visible in the establishment of the taz, 55 which claimed to offer 'truthful' and 'authentic' news from the regions. Once the professionalization of the alternative press set in, also the taz could not escape the pull of densely populated reader markets.
After the taz's foundation in 1979, several local offices were established in regional centres of  Table 3).
In sum, it can be said that regional changes in reader markets affected all segments of the daily press in the 1970s. This was the root cause of the new regionalisation of the daily press in the 1970s. In the segment of the local and regional subscription press, concentration among publishing houses provided an additional boost to the regional expansion of advertising markets. In the segment of the tabloid press, the appeal of newly expanded regional consumer markets accelerated regionalisation. In the segment of the supra-regional subscription press, the relocation of many families into suburbs was an additional factor. For the alternative press, finally, political factors, such as a belief in the 'authenticity' of regional news, played an additional role. 54 See H. Balz, Von Terroristen, Sympathisanten und dem starken Staat (Frankfurt a.M., 2007). 55 Despite its undisputed significance, the history of the taz has not been fully researched yet. An analysis of the newly available sources from the archive of the taz and papers on the alternative press from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research shows that the paper was shaped by its regional foundation and retained a strong regional basis. See  The regionalized daily press that emerged in the 1970s defies a simple political categorization. The West Germans traditionally preferred their papers to be above party politics.
This trend gained renewed momentum through regionalisation. All dailies that belonged to the SPD, for example, were sliding into crisis in the early 1970s. 58 59 The economic pressure on dailies was high. They needed to appeal to broad regional audiences across counties and city districts with different political preferences.
III. The regional differentiation of the market The emergence of new metropolitan press regions split the overall West German market into very dense newspaper areas and weaker regions. 60 As a consequence of the new appeal of metropolitan regions, concentration among newspapers in larger cities stopped in 1973. 61 This was largely due to regional expansion and new inner city reader groups, which revitalized the market. The effect is visible in Map 1. 'One-paper-counties' are indicators of the concentration among local and regional subscription dailies but also reveal the overall density of the newspaper market. The map highlights that the densely populated metropolitan regions sustained a higher density of newspapers than other regions. Most areas of metropolitan regions remained white, which indicates a higher density. In Hamburg, for example, the Hamburger Abendblatt expanded into the neighbouring counties of Stormarn (1974), Norderstedt (1974) and Pinneberg (1974). Due to continuing suburbanization, Hamburg and the neighbouring counties were able to sustain two regional papers with local news, namely Hamburger Abendblatt and the small regional daily Bergedorfer Zeitung. 62 The changes also affected the press in the surrounding counties. The naturally also affected the inner city quarters. Many quarters were increasingly depopulated in the 1970s and offered cheap accommodation that was attractive for young students and foreign migrant workers. The new heterogeneity of inner city audiences resulted in a differentiation of newspapers markets within cities. The German edition of the Turkish Hürriyet was, for example, established in Frankfurt/Main in 1979.
However, more than half of the 61 million West Germans still lived outside of these metropolitan regions in the 1970s. 63 These people were often served by the standard editions of supra-regional papers and a thin layer of local and regional papers, such as the Frankenpost However, also the regions outside of the metropolitan regions were hardly homogenous. The overall newspaper market was beginning to split into more densely and more sparsely populated as well as economically stronger and weaker regions in the 1970s. West Germany's Eastern borders with East Germany and Czechoslovakia as well as the coastal areas in Northern Germany, for example, were characterized by population emigration and missing economic cross-border activities that affected the sustainability of different papers in these regions. Weak regions, such as Upper Franconia around Hof or the county Lauenburg near the German-German border, could hardly sustain a mid-sized regional paper or even various smaller local papers. They were not attractive for advertisers. They, therefore, became more reliant on larger metropolitan press regions. In sum, it can be said that the regional differentiation of newspaper markets was driven by wider social, demographic and economic developments that led to growing regional disparities between 1974 and 1982. 63 The exact number depends on the definition employed and can vary widely between 25 and more than 30 million. On

IV. The emergence of the press as the new regionally leading medium
The regionalisation of the press went hand in hand with a new regional thematic focus. The supra-regional daily subscription press added regional editions with four to eight pages. The Bild devoted an additional two pages per regional edition to regional political news and several further pages to regionalised Bundesliga news. The new focus on regional news across all segments of the daily press contributed to the fact that the press emerged as the regionally leading medium in the 1970s. Television and radio could not match the local and regional depth of press reporting in the 1970s.
Scholars of media studies have described the increasing domination of the West German market by regional dailies with their aggregated sections of local news as a 'threat' to local news. 65 While this held true for the 1960s when many local papers perished, the 1970s were more strongly characterized by an overall regionalisation of local news in the remaining papers. In the small-sized regional Bergedorfer Zeitung, for example, there were still three different pages dedicated to local news from Hamburg-Vierlanden, Bergedorf-Vierlanden and Bergedorf-Lohbrügge in 1965. The title page covered West German and international news.
Regionalisation forced the Bergedorfer Zeitung to reposition itself. The Bergedorfer Zeitung regionalised its local news sections and highlighted regional news on its front page more strongly.
The unprecedented level of regional agenda setting and intra-media competition for new topics propelled the press into a lead role in reporting on regional politics. This affected, for example, the reporting on regional protests against Brokdorf near Hamburg, the Startbahn West in Frankfurt and the rocket-stationing site in Mutlangen near Stuttgart that shaped the political protest culture of the 1970s and 1980s. In Brokdorf near Itzehoe in Steinburg county, the local press, including Norddeutsche Rundschau and Wilstersche Zeitung, for example, reported widely on the protests against the planned nuclear power station on 18 December 1976. Both papers voiced the views of local fishermen who feared that the river Elbe would be polluted. The newspapers reported on the day before and the day after, too. This amplified the regional attention to the topic that was taken up in the regional section of the Welt on 18 December 1976 and in the federal edition of the paper on 20 December 1976. 66 The reporting in the press was the key to the wider mediatization of these events.
The press also took on a lead role in reporting on regionalised sports events, such as regionally popular Bundesliga games. Historians have considered the relationship between 65  football and West German television as the hallmark of the 1970s and 1980s. 67 However, it was not only television but, above all, the regionalized press that was closely associated with the reporting on the regionally popular Bundesliga between 1974 and 1982. While the ARD and ZDF reported on Saturday afternoon (Sportschau) and Saturday evening (Aktuelles Sportstudio), Bild and the regional papers reported every morning between Monday and Saturday about the Bundesliga and thus kept the interest in regional events high throughout the week. Bild did not only profit from the rise of visitor numbers, but also actively encouraged readers to attend the games. 68 The high interest in regional sports news added an additional boost to the spread of regional political news that were often presented next to Bundesliga news on the title page.
The reporting on regional topics was the domain of the press in the 1970s. Public broadcasting was organised on the level of the Länder (ARD) and the Federal State (ZDF) and could initially not provide such regional and local depth. Although the public broadcasters had already introduced regional programs in the late 1950s as part of the new local UKWbroadcasting, they had largely encouraged their journalists to report most stories from the perspective of the Bundesländer. 69

This had been meant to solidify the new West German
Bundesländer after the war. However, also public broadcasting could not escape the wider transformation of the market in the 1970s. Television and radio journalists who routinely read the press in the morning were well aware of the wider changes in the press sector. 70

V. Impact: Press and politics in the 1970s
The regionalisation of the press affected the relationship between press and politics between 1974 and 1982. Intense competition between all segments of the daily press in regional markets boosted the public attention to new regional topics, such as regional ecological problems and the boundary reforms. Further, the regionalized press became itself the subject of an intense debate that pitted the proponents of state-intervention into the press sector against those who opposed it. Finally, the regional press scandalized a number of sleaze scandals on regional level such as the Hessische Landesbank (Helaba)-scandal in Frankfurt/Main in 1976 and the Garski-scandal in Berlin-West in 1981 that presented significant challenges for the federal government. The groundswell of regional grassroots unhappiness with 'national planning' found widespread and sympathetic views in the daily press. Subsequently, 760,000 people signed a petition in North-Rhine Westfalia in 1974 for an anti-reform referendum. In Uelzen, 12,000 protesters shouted 'down with the district reform,' in Hanover 25,000 people protested against the reforms. In Ermershausen, Bavaria, a small army of several hundred police officers had to storm to the local town hall in order to merge the village with the new larger district of Maroldsweisach. The villagers who blocked the doors called the regional press for help in order to report about the alleged injustice done to them by the government. 73 The regionalization of the press was part of a much wider regionalization of the political culture after 1974.
The stronger emphasis on regional news catalysed the attention to further new political regional topics. The alternative press and regional political protest groups often detected such topics, but lacked the potential to boost them to wider attention. One cannot fully understand the high media attention to regionalised political protests after 1974 without an understanding of the regionalisation of the press and protest strategies of many social movements. 74 In the Rhine valley near Freiburg, for example, where the planning of a new atomic power plant at Wyhl caused concern in 1974, alternative demonstrators played up the regional significance of the local atomic power station. The portrayal of the conflict as a regional protest drew in the Badische Zeitung. It reported widely on Whyl which in turn boosted the attention of radio and television stations. 75 A similar effect can be observed with regard to the Thallium-scandal that received wide spread attention in Steinbrück county near Munster in 1976. The thallium was emitted by a cement plant in Lengerich near Munster. Despite the regional fallout, the local papers considered this a 'local' problem of Lengerich. After agitation by a regional initiative, the regional subscription press in the Munster-area and the Spiegel drove the issue to regional and national attention. 76 The regionalized press did not only boost the attention to several regional conflicts, but also became itself the subject of a huge political debate in the run-up to the 1976 election.
Key for an understanding of the debate were the young SPD party members who were concerned about the increasing dominance of large press corporations in regional markets, particularly since the collapse of the SPD's own regional papers seemed to have contributed to this trend. Between 1964 and 1973, more than 700,000 people had joined the Social Democratic Party. More than 75% of the new entrants were younger than 40. 77 They were often influenced by the anti-Springer protests in the late 1960s and the discussions about the increasing concentration of the press at the time. They were receptive to pessimistic analyses that predicted a further slide of the market towards regional 'opinion monopolies' and pinned their hopes on the progressive influences of the state. A key role in these debates assumed Peter Glotz  und Wolfgang R. Langenbucher (*1938), two young media scholars. They published the then seminal book Der mißachtete Leser. 78 Glotz envisaged that one should reform and supervise the regional press along the lines of public broadcasting councils, which were orga-nized on the federal (ZDF) and Bundesländer level (ARD). He embraced the state and press councils as the ultimate protectors of pluralism and freedom.
This view was increasingly criticized by alternative and conservative journalists and politicians in the 1970s. In the heated atmosphere of the mid-1970s, Glotz even accused the regional alternative media like the Pflasterstrand, Info-BUG and zitty but also the Frankfurter Rundschau of providing an 'information system' that made the members of a so-called 'second culture' allegedly 'hostile' towards representatives of the federal state. 79 The debate on the press was high on the agenda in the 1960s and took off again after 1973 when the CDU published their new media policy guidelines. These were predominantly focused on a free market approach 80 and promoted private broadcasting as a form of breaking away from the seemingly overpowering and 'ungovernable' state.  80 However, the CDU also called for stronger financial aid for smaller publishers. The party did not want to antagonize smaller conservative political strongholds that often relied on the support of the local paper. 81 (Table 4) The law was meant to reassure smaller publishing houses, rally the party and slow down the concentration among regional publishing houses.
Despite the constructive, but rather symbolic press policy of the federal Schmidt government, regional criticism did not wither away. In the 1976 and 1980 elections, the conservatives made full use of the regional press and regional identity politics for their agitation against the government. The conservatives were headed by Helmut Kohl of the Rhineland Palatinate and the Bavarian CSU was represented in federal affairs by Franz-Josef Strauss.
Both politicians emphasized market freedom from state intervention and promised a liberalisation of broadcasting that was attractive to the owners of large regional press publishing houses who were keen to invest into new private broadcasting stations. Further, both politicians played up their regional identities in the run-up to the 1976 and 1980 elections. Strauss spoke with a Bavarian accent, while Kohl publicly celebrated the consumption of regional dishes like sow's stomach. Both politicians were supported by the regional press. Kohl's views were amplified by regional papers in the Rhine-Neckar agglomeration such as the Rheinpfalz. Strauss had the backing of the CSU's weekly Bayernkurier, which increased its circulation between 1971 and 1975 from 123,213 copies to 179,797 copies per week, an increase of more than 40%. 84 The social democratic state-centred reform impulse began to buckle under the onslaught of these new regionalised political attacks. The conservative mix of regional identity and freedom rhetoric proved more successful in the 1976 federal elections than the Social Democrats' internationalist and state-centric program. The SPD received 42.6% of the votes, while the CDU/CSU under Helmut Kohl came close to an absolute majority with 48.6%. However, the FDP under Genscher received 7.9% and decided to keep Schmidt in power, based on a shared approach to foreign policy and economic policies. Thus, Schmidt won the election because he had campaigned on a coalition-ticket. However, the relative strength of regionalised attacks was laid bare. The SPD reacted in 1977/78 and established the so-called Kommunalakademie that was meant to rally the local and regional associations of the party and give elected politicians on the local level a greater say in the party. Despite these efforts, the 1980s elections brought a similar result. The CDU/CDU under Strauß received 44,5% of the vote, while the SPD remained at 42.9%. Strauß' result was largely based on his regional appeal in Bavaria, where he was able win an extremely high share of 57.6 % of the vote. The FDP decided to keep Schmidt in power again. 83 Schütz, 'Tagespresse.' 84 See IVW (1971-75). In the federal system of Germany, power rests not only with the federal government, but also with the individual states, the Länder. Some of the press regions cut across the administrative boundaries of the Länder, such as the metropolitan regions of Hamburg and Bremen.
Other regions were noticeably smaller. Despite this complex topography of press and political regions, the new press regions influenced politics in the individual states of West Germany.
This was in particular the case in Hesse and Berlin-West, where a number of sleaze scandals were unearthed that damaged the social-liberal federal government further. The uncovering of these scandals has to be seen against the concentration of newspapers and highly qualified journalists in the metropolitan press regions. They modelled their regional approach to critical reporting often on the Watergate scandal in 1972/74 and received the backing of their newspapers to engage in critical and expensive investigative journalism.
In Frankfurt/Main, the regional press criticized the so-called Helaba-scandal in the runup to the 1976 election. The then acting social democratic prime minister of Hesse, Albert Osswald, had been involved in a decision of the bank of the state Hesse, the Hessische Landesbank (Helaba), to provide credit for unsound building projects. The regionalised press in the metropolitan press region Frankfurt/Main, such as Frankfurter Neue Presse, zoomed in on the topic and Osswald had to step down on the day of the national election. The CDU in Hesse was able to capitalise on the scandal and gained a remarkable strong share of the votes in the national election in Hesse in 1976. In the municipal elections in 1977, it nearly wiped out the Social Democrats in those areas that felt that their local or regional identity had been endangered by 'state-led' building projects and boundary reforms. In the artificially created new town Lahn, for example, the CDU increased their share of the votes by 30% in the communal elections. 85 The dynamic of regional agenda setting and regional criticism of social-liberal policies In 1982, a combination of the economic and security problems, internal problems of the SPD, regional scandals, the re-orientation of the FDP and further factors led to Schmidt's downfall. 87 Among all of those causes, the tidal wave of regional and local protests in the 1970s was crucial. Schmidt's political power as a global manager had been challenged throughout the 1970s through regionalised attacks that were widely reported in the press. After the vote of no-confidence against him on 1 October 1982, the press in Hamburg and Schimdt's regional appeal helped to reverse the fortunes of the SPD in Hamburg. The SPD region, namely the Zeit in Hamburg, which underlines the high prestige that press journalism enjoyed in the 1970s and the close relationship between politics and the metropolitan press regions in the 1970s.
The height point of the period of press regionalization and regional press power was reached in 1983. The FDP, which had supported most of the protective measures of the press 86  between 1976 and 1982, reoriented itself towards the CDU/CSU. Both parties subsequently won the election in 1983 and the Green Party made its breakthrough into the West German parliament. Subsequently, the Kohl government liberalized West Germany's broadcasting laws in January 1984 and a new era of private radio and television broadcasting began. The specific dynamic of press regionalisation ended. Regional publishing houses began to invest more strongly into regional radio markets from 1984 onwards. The regional paper groups that had been newly set up in the 1970s were not 'news' anymore.

VII. Conclusion
This article has challenged the key arguments of the dominant economic approach to press history. Economic scholars, such as Schütz, Pürer and Raabe, have argued that the daily press to 1255 in 1983 and the overall circulation of the press increased to unprecedented heights in 1982 with more than 25.1 million copies per day according to the IVW. The emergence of several new regional metropolitan press clusters became a distinctive characteristic of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s and 1980s that contrasted with the more centralised press markets of the UK and France.
The findings also challenge the research on the wider media system of the Federal Republic. It is often argued that radio in the 1950s and television in the 1960s and 1970s emerged as the new 'lead mediums.' However, the regionalized daily press enjoyed a uniquely high prestige in these years and formed the centre of the regional media markets. In 1975, regional subscription papers and regional groups of papers accounted for more than half of all daily subscription papers with an overall circulation of approx. 13 million copies per day. 91 89 See footnote 5. 90 The number of publicistic units decreased from 122 in 1974 to 121 in 1976. See Table 4 in the Appendix. 91 Deutscher Bundestag, Medienbericht (Bonn, 1978), pp. 8-9.
They raked in the largest share of the overall media advertising budget 92 and reached more than 74.2% of all adults in the Federal Republic. 93 The regionalized daily press was the regionally leading medium in West Germany between 1974 and 1982.
Finally, it has been shown that the government of Helmut Schmidt encountered significant challenges on the regional level from its inception in 1974 to its end in 1982 that were accelerated by the regionalisation of the press. This adds an important regional perspective to the wider understanding of the 1970s that have so far been considered as a 'global', 'social democratic' or 'conservative' decade. 94 Regionalized press reporting and regionalized media events cut across the political divide and provided the glue for the conservative and alternative opposition movements in the 1970s, despite their very different political leanings. 95 Several studies, such as Schregel's book on the peace movement, have highlighted in recent years that the spatial dimension is key to understanding political developments in the 1970s. 96 Mende has concluded in her study on the Green Party that regional demonstrations played a key role in giving the disparate groups the feeling to be a 'movement'. 97 One of the key attractions of these demonstrations was the noticeable regionalized press coverage.
The much wider politicisation of the region was embedded into a wider discourse on regional identities in film, radio, television, exhibitions and politics between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s. The West Germans rediscovered old regional and local identities, rejected newly invented ones, such as Lahn or Maintal, and appreciated other ones, such as those of the metropolitan regions. In sum, it can be said that the West Germans began to accept the division of the country after Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik and rediscovered the new and old regional fundaments of the West German federal political system after 1973. This process played a crucial role for the acceptance of the Federal Republic as a more permanent home by its population 98 Table 2. IVW-press regions: regional newspaper groups and regional newspapers with several editions with a circulation of more than 80,000 copies, 1975 (IVW-B-List)