Short answers, pulled from the story.
Bauer Media Group was founded in 1875 by Johann Andreas Ludolph Bauer, a German lithographer born in 1852. He opened a printing shop in Hamburg at the age of 23, initially focusing on the production of business cards.
Bauer Media Group owns more than 600 magazines, over 400 digital products, and 50 radio and TV stations. The company operates across 17 countries with a workforce of approximately 11,000 people.
In 2017, Rebel Wilson won a defamation case against Bauer Media Group in the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. She was awarded A$4,567,472, comprising $650,000 in general damages and $3,917,472 in special damages, which her lawyer Richard Leder described as roughly four times the highest previous defamation verdict in Australia. The award was later reduced on appeal.
CEO Alfred Bauer joined the Nazi Party in 1939, and the company's journals gained success through ingratiation with the Nazi regime. One publication, Funk-Wacht, carried content with a proximity to Nazi ideology, as identified in 2020 research by the Norddeutscher Rundfunk media magazine Zapp and Der Spiegel. In 2024, the company commissioned a historical study from the Historiker-Genossenschaft eG examining its corporate history during the Nazi era and published the results.
On the 2nd of April 2020, Bauer announced it would wind up its New Zealand magazine titles in direct response to New Zealand's Level 4 COVID-19 restrictions, which had stopped magazines from being published. The closures affected titles including Woman's Day, the New Zealand Listener, North and South, and Air New Zealand's inflight magazine Kia Ora, leaving about 200 employees without work.
Bauer Media Group entered the UK market in 1987 with the launch of Bella magazine. The company expanded by purchasing Emap Consumer Media and Emap Radio in 2008, which brought brands including heat, Grazia, KISS FM UK, and Magic under its ownership. Under the name H Bauer Publishing, the group became Britain's third largest publisher.