| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Berliner |
| Owner | NZZ-Gruppe (NZZ Group) |
| Editor | Markus Spillmann |
| Founded | January 12 1780 as Zürcher Zeitung 1821 as Neue Zürcher Zeitung |
| Political alignment | Classical liberalism |
| Language | German |
| Headquarters | Zurich, Switzerland |
| ISSN | 0376-6829 |
| Official website | www.nzz.ch, www.nzzglobal.ch |
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) is a major German language Swiss daily newspaper based in Zurich.
One of the oldest newspapers still published, it originally appeared as Zürcher Zeitung, edited by Salomon Gessner, from January 12, 1780, and was renamed to Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1821. The newspaper is well known for its detailed reports on international affairs, stock exchange, and the intellectual, in-depth style of its articles. Politically, it is positioned close to the liberal Free Democratic Party of Switzerland.
It has a reputation as a quality newspaper and as the Swiss newspaper of record, with a small but influential circulation of 330,000. As its average reader is now over 50, its circulation is slowly declining. Aside from the switch from its Blackletter typeface in 1946, the newspaper has changed little since the 1930s. The newspaper has, for example, only in the last 3 years or so added color pictures, much later than most mainstream papers. The emphasis is on international news, business, finance, and high culture. Features and lifestyle stories are kept to a minimum.
In 2002, a weekend edition called NZZ am Sonntag (NZZ on Sunday) was launched. The NZZ am Sonntag has its own editorial staff and contains more soft news and lifestyle issues than its weekday counterpart, as do most Swiss weekend newspapers.
In 2005, the complete run of the first 225 years of the newspaper was scanned from microfilm, a total of 2 million images comprising 70 terabytes, and its blackletter type was OCR'ed at a total cost of 600,000€ (or 0.30€ per image). The result is a searchable digital archive, only publicly accessible on site. The digitization was carried out by the Fraunhofer Institut für Medienkommunikation (IMK, since renamed IAIS) in Sankt Augustin.