Success Story | Magazine

Prestige assignment with great renown and a tight deadline

The SPIEGEL Group is a media company based in Hamburg. Its products are distinguished by high journalistic quality and independent reporting. The flagship publication DER SPIEGEL was founded in 1947 and stands for critical and investigative journalism. Today, the SPIEGEL brand reaches many millions of people every week across all channels. The renowned weekly magazine has been printed at Mohn Media in Gütersloh for more than ten years.

Customer: mirror
Customer since: 2015
Lorem ipsum: Pain itself

"Monday is SPIEGEL day" – this slogan was valid for almost 60 years, until January 2015. At that time, the SPIEGEL publishing house decided to move the publication date of the news magazine from Monday to Saturday and simultaneously changed the printing process. With the switch from gravure printing to the faster and more flexible offset printing, and by splitting the print run between two printing partners in the north and south of the country, the production management pursued the goal of shortening production and delivery times and making the magazine even more up to date.

“It is impressive that the team at Mohn Media has been proving week after week for more than ten years that it is capable of mastering even greater challenges and meeting our requirements in terms of quality, flexibility, and timing at all times.”

Silke Kassuba, Head of Production at SPIEGEL Publishing.

Speed isn’t magic, it’s smart conceptual work.

The biggest challenge from the very first SPIEGEL production in Gütersloh was the tight time window of clearly less than 24 hours in total. And that has not changed to this day. In the initial offset concept in 2015, there were just under seven hours between the delivery of the final print data and the dispatch of the first copies. An ambitious race that Mohn Media has successfully completed week after week for more than ten years now. According to Market Division Manager Stefan Fiedler, the fact that this is possible is the result of a great team effort: “Every department involved has been doing an excellent job for years – the employees in prepress and printing, who always respond flexibly and professionally even to the many short-notice adjustments, the team in the bindery, which has continuously worked to systematically expand our performance in saddle stitching and to automate large parts of the finishing process, but also the team in our Magazines market division, which, with consistent customer focus, has ensured that the customer has always been satisfied.”

This reliability paid off at the end of 2024, because at that point the publisher decided to extend its collaboration with Mohn Media on a long-term basis and to expand it significantly. Issue 03/2025 was then the first to be produced entirely at Mohn Media – with an even faster concept and increased challenges in terms of complexity. Since then, on the one hand, a significantly larger number of magazines has had to be printed and stitched within the same time frame, and on the other hand, transport times have increased again, as recipients in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland still expect to be served on time. The fact that Mohn Media has mastered these challenges – there are now no longer six hours between the final print data and the first delivery – to the customer’s complete satisfaction demonstrates the very high level of expertise it has built up over the years in the production of weekly magazines.