Zurich, April 7, 2024 (KAP/KATH.CH) Christian Maurer (61) will be the new director and editor-in-chief of the Swiss portal kath.ch. The journalist, previously among other things head of the Zurich editorial team of the SDA news agency and editor of the “Tages-Anzeiger”, will take up his position from mid-April, initially part-time and from August on a full-time basis, kath.ch announced on Sunday. Maurer will give the Catholic media center’s journalistic and entrepreneurial program “new and promising impulses in challenging times,” it said. The board of the media center is pleased to welcome Maurer, an experienced journalist, as director and editor-in-chief to kath.ch, said the president of the kath.ch sponsoring association, Adrian Müller.
Maurer succeeds Charles Martig (58), theologian and journalist, who ended his long-term involvement in the Swiss Catholic Media Center. Martig was most recently director and editor-in-chief of the German-speaking Swiss portal kath.ch and moved to the regional church of the canton of Bern on April 1st.
Originally, the journalist and historian Annalena Müller (41) was supposed to take over the management of kath.ch according to the wishes of the management. But the responsible Swiss bishops refused to approve the appointment due to differences in content, as the Swiss “Sonntagsblick” first reported. Since December 1st, she has temporarily headed the editorial team of kath.ch together with Jacqueline Straub. On March 19th, the portal announced that Müller was leaving the editorial team and would become editor-in-chief of the “pfarrblatt” Bern from July 1st.
Maurer, a journalist for over 30 years, studied French language and literature as well as medieval literature in Zurich and Paris. After entering local journalism, he headed the multilingual SDA office in Zurich. He was also one of the founding teams of the commuter newspapers “Metropol” and “News”. Further positions included the “Sonntags Zeitung” as deputy news director, the “Tages-Anzeiger” as a newspaper editor and the “Blick Group”, where Maurer worked as an author and provisional co-editor-in-chief of “Sonntagsblick”. Most recently, he was responsible for the business travel specialist magazine “Business Traveltip” and was deputy editor-in-chief of the tourism trade newspaper “Travel Inside”.
Conflict with bishops
Maurer’s predecessor, Martig, had been building kath.ch’s newsroom in Zurich since 2015. The aim was to achieve better public visibility for the Catholic Church. After the departure of kath.ch editorial director Raphael Rauch in March 2023, Martig also took over the editor-in-chief as director of the media center.
kath.ch relies on critical and loyal cooperation with the clients, the Swiss Bishops’ Conference and the Roman Catholic Central Conference of Switzerland. However, in the background there is a conflict with the bishops about the content of kath.ch.
In June last year, the bishops threatened that they would review the framework statute for church media work and also reconsider whether kath.ch would be allowed or withdrawn from kath.ch’s episcopal mandate. The bishops have long been “concerned about some articles published on kath.ch,” it said.
Martig has been committed to Catholic media work in German-speaking Switzerland for 30 years: as a Catholic film commissioner (1994-2001), as managing director of the Catholic Media Service in Zurich (2002-2014), who set up the web platform kath.ch and the collaboration with Schweizer Radio and Television, and finally as director of kath.ch, where Martig set up the newsroom in Zurich from 2015. The number of users on kath.ch has multiplied since 2015. “From 2020 to 2023 alone, unique users tripled,” says Martig. The trend continues to rise.
2024-04-07 17:05:29
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