The Brienz-based company publishes the Jungfrau Zeitung newspaper twice a week, targeting an area of some 45,000 inhabitants. Its content is entirely focused on local issues, and 95% of sales come from subscribers who pay CHF165 (£118) a year.

Chief executive Urs Gossweiler explained the firm's strategy at Pira's Global Print Markets conference earlier this month: "If you say you are targeting 0.3% of the population every publisher will leave the room, saying 'I want millions in my audience, not thousands'. But big newspapers get bigger and bigger and leave their local areas. Exclusive content is the only possibility for the future, and the big potential is in local content," he stated.

"Barack Obama has never been in our paper and I think we are the only newspaper in the world never to have run a picture of the twin towers on 9/11," Gossweiler added.

Jungfrau Zeitung has an accompanying website and iPad app, and Gossweiler said the company played to the strengths of different media channels. "The image of our website would go down if we didn't print. People have more trust in printed content than virtual content. If you have content that is very close to the customer, at the end they want that on paper. People pay for a physical product."

Gossweiler plans to replicate the model in other areas of Switzerland through a licensing model, and is also planning to expand into Germany.

He added: "Ads in broadsheet format are really powerful, even today, and this is a big advantage. But print alone doesn't function either."

The company used to have its own printing facilities, but sold its presses in 1994 and now contract prints. "I hope you [printers] can find enough customers like us so you can buy the next generation of machines, because we need your machines. We need to physicalise our virtual model."