About Die Presse

Die Presse

Die Presse is Austria's classical-liberal broadsheet newspaper of record, published in German in Vienna and famous across the German-speaking world for its feuilleton, its cultural and intellectual pages. Its slogan, Free since 1848, reaches back to its founding in the revolutionary year of 1848 by the entrepreneur August Zang, making it one of the oldest surviving newspaper brands in Europe. Refounded after the Second World War by Ernst Molden, it speaks today for the centre-right, pro-business, market-liberal tradition in Austrian public life, in daily argument with the social-liberal Der Standard and under the ownership of the Styria Media Group.

Its modern scale is that of a quality daily. The ÖAK 2025 figures cited in Austrian newspaper listings give Die Presse a print run of about 46,415 copies with a national reach of 3.5 percent. International guides summarising Reuters Institute research describe it as one of Austria's oldest newspapers, with a right-centre position, highly factual reporting and the trust of about 56 percent of the population in cited 2024 figures. Circulation history includes 121,000 copies recorded for 1998, a reminder that even Austria's papers of record once sold at two to three times their present print level.

The Revolutionary Founding of 1848

Die Presse was first printed on 3 July 1848, in the middle of the revolutions of 1848, after censorship in Austria was abolished on 15 March that year and hundreds of new periodicals appeared in Vienna alone. Its founder, August Zang, together with Leopold Landsteiner in the standard Austrian accounts, modelled the paper on Parisian newspapers such as La Presse and gave it a liberal, bourgeois character. Austria-Forum records that the paper played a decisive role in the journalistic and technological modernisation of the Austrian press, setting standards for the modern daily in the Habsburg lands.

The founding generation did not stay united. In 1864 the paper's leading editors, Max Friedländer, Michael Etienne and Adolf Werthner, split from Zang and founded the Neue Freie Presse, which became the great liberal newspaper of Austria-Hungary, while the old Presse declined, passed to an Aktiengesellschaft from 1867, became a semi-official government voice and was discontinued on 31 October 1896. The modern Die Presse deliberately claims the inheritance of both papers: the 1848 Presse and the Neue Freie Presse, whose vice-editor-in-chief Ernst Molden had been before its end.

Ernst Molden and the Refounding of 1946-1948

After the Second World War, Ernst Molden, a resistance fighter who had been vice-editor-in-chief of the Neue Freie Presse from 1921 until 1939, re-established the newspaper under the Die Presse name. It was published weekly from 26 January 1946 and became a daily again on 19 October 1948. That second date is one of the elegant coincidences of Austrian press history: exactly forty years later, on 19 October 1988, Oscar Bronner would launch Der Standard as Die Presse's liberal rival.

On Molden's death in 1953 his son Fritz Molden succeeded him, and the paper was later led by editors including Otto Schulmeister, whose long tenure defined its post-war voice, and by Thomas Chorherr and Julius Kainz from 1995 in the Austria-Forum account. The Presse struggled financially for a long time, until during the 1960s the Austrian Chamber of Commerce became its main shareholder, an arrangement that kept an independent business paper alive through the decades of Austria's grand-coalition corporatism, which the paper itself editorially opposed.

Styria Ownership Since 1999

Since 1999 Die Presse has been owned by the Styria Media Group, Styria Medien AG, the Graz-based group founded in the Catholic publishing tradition in 1869, which also publishes the Kleine Zeitung and the weekly Die Furche. Its publisher is Die Presse Verlag GmbH in Vienna. Styria ownership ended the paper's long financial fragility and placed it inside Austria's second great newspaper group, with the printing, technology and digital resources of a company reporting 411 million euros of revenue and about 3,000 employees in 2022.

Group ownership has not merged the paper into its Graz stablemate. Die Presse remains a Vienna newspaper with its own newsroom, its own liberal line distinct from the Kleine Zeitung's regional centre-right character, and its own Sunday edition, Die Presse am Sonntag, launched in March 2009. Competition authorities and media commentators watch the combination of Austria's largest regional daily and one of its quality nationals under one owner, but editorially the two papers continue to address different publics from different cities, the normal Styria model of strong individual titles within a shared industrial group.

Classical Liberalism: Free Markets, Small Government

The political position of Die Presse is described as classical liberal, with a strong emphasis on the free-market economy and small government, traditionally opposing Austria's grand coalition and its neocorporatist tendencies, the system of social partnership between government, business chambers and unions that structured post-war Austria. The paper's slogan, Free since 1848, presents that liberalism as a direct inheritance from the revolution in which it was founded. Listings classify it as centre-right and liberal-conservative, and it stands in conscious contrast to Der Standard's social liberalism and to the former Wiener Zeitung's more conservative official character.

A celebrated historical footnote captures the breadth of the nineteenth-century paper: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a series of articles on the American Civil War for Die Presse in the early 1860s, later collected in the book The Civil War in the United States. That the founders of Marxism published in Vienna's liberal bourgeois daily is a reminder that the Presse of Zang's era was a European forum of the first rank, read and written for far beyond Austria. The modern paper invokes that heritage in its self-understanding as a paper of ideas as much as of news.

The Feuilleton Tradition

Die Presse is famous, in the words of its standard descriptions, for its feuilleton tradition. The feuilleton, the cultural section of essays, criticism, literature and reflective journalism that sits below the line in German-language papers, reached its highest form in Vienna, in the Neue Freie Presse of Theodor Herzl, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Felix Salten and Stefan Zweig's generation. The modern Die Presse, claiming that paper's succession through Ernst Molden, maintains the feuilleton as a centrepiece rather than an ornament: theatre, opera, books, film, ideas and the essay form occupy a place in the daily that has no real equivalent in Anglo-American newspapers.

For readers and for Austria's cultural institutions, that matters practically. Reviews and essays in Die Presse shape reputations in Viennese theatre, music and publishing, and the paper's cultural authority is one reason it is quoted internationally on Austrian affairs. Alongside the feuilleton, the paper is noted for publishing half a page of science news each day, a commitment it shares with the Salzburger Nachrichten among Austrian quality titles and one that suits its educated readership.

Contents, Sunday Edition and Daily Sections

Die Presse covers general news, Austrian and international politics, business and economics as its home ground, culture and science, and sport, in broadsheet format from Vienna. It is frequently quoted in international media concerning news from Austria, a standard marker of a newspaper of record. Since March 2009 it has also published a weekly Sunday newspaper, Die Presse am Sonntag, giving it a presence in the lucrative Austrian Sunday market long dominated by the Kronen Zeitung's Sunday edition and the Kurier.

The paper's business and economics coverage deserves particular note, because it is the editorial expression of its classical-liberal line. Markets, companies, economic policy, personal finance and the European Union's economic governance are covered for a readership of business owners, managers, professionals and officials, the same public that the paper's editorials address when they argue for smaller government and freer markets. In the Austrian debate, an editorial line in Die Presse is the closest equivalent to a position paper from the country's market-liberal camp.

Circulation, Trust and Market Position

Die Presse recorded a circulation of 121,000 copies in 1998, at the end of the era when quality papers still sold in six figures in Austria. Readership research for 2017 placed its daily reach at 4.1 percent, behind Der Standard at 6.0 percent among the quality titles, and the 2025 audited listing gives a print run of about 46,415 copies with 3.5 percent reach. Guides based on Reuters Institute data describe the paper as known for highly factual reporting and trusted by roughly 56 percent of the population, second among Austrian titles in those summaries only to Der Standard.

Those figures describe the quality market's settlement: small in copies, large in influence, and increasingly digital in revenue. Die Presse's website, diepresse.com, carries its journalism to a national and German-language audience far beyond its print run, and its digital subscriptions are sold on the same proposition as the print paper for 175 years: independent liberal analysis, cultural depth and business authority from Vienna. The 175th anniversary of the first issue was marked in July 2023, including with an Austrian Post commemorative stamp issue, a public recognition of the brand's place in national life.

The 1848 Inheritance and the Neue Freie Presse

Any profile of Die Presse must explain its double inheritance, because Austrians themselves argue about it. The paper founded by Zang in 1848 was discontinued in 1896. The Neue Freie Presse founded by his departing editors in 1864 became the world-renowned liberal Weltblatt, was aryanised after the Anschluss in 1938 and effectively closed in 1939. Ernst Molden, the Neue Freie Presse's former vice-editor-in-chief, founded the post-war paper in 1946 under the older, shorter name. The modern Die Presse therefore stands in the tradition of both nineteenth-century papers, as its own reference entries state, and dates itself from 1848.

Critics occasionally treat that dating as branding, and the documentary record is fully open about the interruptions: Austria-Forum and Wikipedia both state the 1896 closure and the 1946 refounding plainly. The honest summary is that Die Presse is a 1946 newspaper carrying an 1848 name, a 1848 liberal programme and the personnel succession of the Neue Freie Presse. In Austrian terms that is not a weakness of the claim but the normal way the country's institutions survived the twentieth century: through refounding by the people who had embodied them before.

Place in Austrian Public Life

Die Presse is one of the small group of Austrian papers that other media, foreign correspondents and historians treat as sources for the country itself. Together with Der Standard and the Salzburger Nachrichten it forms the surviving quality triangle after the Wiener Zeitung's print closure in 2023, arguing Austrian politics from market-liberal, social-liberal and Christian-liberal positions respectively. Against the mass reach of the Kronen Zeitung, Heute and Österreich, the quality papers' combined print runs look small; against any measure of elite influence, citation and agenda-setting, they remain central.

For business and professional Austria, Die Presse is the house paper: read in boardrooms, ministries, law firms and universities, and hosting through its feuilleton the cultural conversation of the capital. Its opposition to grand-coalition corporatism gave it a clear role during the decades when that system governed Austria, and its market liberalism continues to give it a clear role now, as the Austrian state, the European Union and the climate transition raise exactly the questions of state size and market freedom on which the paper was founded to argue.

Essential Facts

Die Presse was first issued in Vienna on 3 July 1848 by August Zang, discontinued in 1896, and refounded by Ernst Molden, appearing weekly from January 1946 and daily from 19 October 1948. It is a German-language broadsheet owned since 1999 by the Styria Media Group and published in Vienna by Die Presse Verlag GmbH, with a classical-liberal, centre-right, pro-business line, a celebrated feuilleton, daily science coverage and a Sunday edition since 2009. Its ÖAK 2025 print run was about 46,415 copies with 3.5 percent national reach.

Free since 1848 is more than a slogan on the evidence: through monarchy, republic, dictatorship, occupation and European integration, in original and refounded form, Die Presse has carried the argument for a liberal, market-ordered, culturally serious Austria longer than any other surviving Austrian newspaper. That is its claim on the first rank of any directory of the Austrian press.