The days of picking up copy of 20 Minutes (20 Minuten), a free Swiss print newspaper, from one of the many blue bins are numbered. Switzerland’s largest print newspaper will cease its physical edition and go online-only from the end of 2025 The move is less about failure than adaptation: far from being unprofitable, the paper boasts the highest margins of any daily in the TX Group’s portfolio. The problem is the rising cost of printing and distributing it.
Unlike traditional dailies, 20 Minutes was always an outlier. Being free, it never relied on subscriptions. Instead, it aimed for reach—distributing nearly 300,000 free copies each morning via its own network of boxes in commuter hotspots. The model worked, so long as advertising revenue growth kept pace with the costs. Advertisers increasingly prefer more targeted and measurable advertising.
Though its digital platform, 20minutes.ch, the publication draws a healthy audience. While the print edition has faced falling circulation and rising production costs. The TX Group has therefore concluded that the business case for print no longer holds.
Around 80 full-time positions across the publishing and editorial departments will be cut. Regional offices will close, reducing geographic and thematic diversity. The move will put further pressure on printers, a number of which have already shut down.
The union Syndicom has voiced dismay at the move, pointing to the profitability of the newspaper. However, given the worsening economics and advertising disadvantages of print, redeploying people to work elsewhere in the economy probably makes sense over the long run.
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TX Group press release (in French) – Take a 5 minute French test now
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