About ZackZack

ZackZack

ZackZack is an online-only news medium based in Vienna, Austria, that describes itself as a daily newspaper with attitude, committed to the facts. Founded in 2019 on the initiative of former politician Peter Pilz, it occupies a distinctive place in Austria's digital media landscape as a publication born directly out of a political scandal and a parliamentary project, yet continuing after that parliamentary project itself had left the National Council. Its reporting investigates Austrian domestic politics, the media and the business elite, and it addresses readers who, in its own description, are interested in critical and investigative reporting on politics, media and the economic elite of the country.

The name itself carries that origin story. It echoes a phrase from the secretly recorded Ibiza video that triggered the Ibiza affair, in which then Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache was recorded using the words zack zack zack while talking about removing unwelcome journalists. Pilz presented the founding of ZackZack itself as a reaction to that affair, with the remark that Ibiza is in the middle of Austria. From the start, therefore, the title signalled both a subject and a stance: scrutiny of power, and a refusal to treat the affair as a closed episode.

Founding and the Liste JETZT connection

ZackZack was founded in 2019 on the initiative of Peter Pilz, initially financed by the Bildungsverein Offene Gesellschaft, the party academy of Liste JETZT, with funds from the party's parliamentary club. Liste JETZT, previously known as Liste Pilz, was the party Pilz had founded after splitting from the Greens, and it had entered parliament in 2017 before failing to return at the election on 29 September 2019. The online medium was created in the summer of 2019, while that parliamentary presence still existed, and Pilz has served as its publisher since the end of 2019.

That founding structure matters for understanding the publication. It was not launched as a commercial start-up seeking advertising scale, nor as the digital edition of an existing newspaper. It began as a project supported through a party academy structure, the Bildungsverein Offene Gesellschaft, whose stated purpose includes civic and cultural education and social knowledge. Board member Gabriela Moser, a long-time Green colleague of Pilz, was involved in that association until her unexpected death in 2019. The academy link explains both the initial funding and the editorial mission, which was investigative from the outset rather than general news aggregation.

Peter Pilz as publisher and editor

Peter Pilz serves as unpaid publisher and editor of ZackZack. Pilz, born on 22 January 1954 in Kapfenberg, Styria, is a former member of the National Council who sat in parliament from 1986 to 1991 and again from 1999 to November 2017 for the Greens, and from June 2018 to October 2019 for his own list. He studied economics and political science at the University of Vienna and completed a doctorate in 1983. His long parliamentary career was closely associated with investigative committees and scrutiny of defence, interior and corruption questions, and that reputation carried directly into the editorial identity of ZackZack.

Because the publisher is also a working editor, the boundary between the founder's political biography and the publication's agenda is unusually visible, and the publication does not pretend otherwise. Its self-description as a newspaper with attitude makes the standpoint explicit. Readers are not asked to treat ZackZack as a neutral wire service. They are offered reporting that declares its commitment to facts while also declaring that it has a position, a combination that defines much of Austria's newer digital party-adjacent and movement-adjacent press, from Kontrast on the Social Democratic side to Zur Sache on the People's Party side.

Editorial focus on politics, media and elites

The editorial focus of ZackZack is domestic politics, media and the business elite. In practice that means investigations and background reporting on how political decisions are made, how economic interests intersect with government, and how media ownership and media politics shape public debate in Austria. The Ibiza affair is the archetypal subject: a story that was simultaneously about a governing party, media influence, and wealthy donors. The publication was founded in reaction to that affair, and its continuing coverage follows the same triangle of politics, money and media power.

This focus distinguishes ZackZack from generalist online newspapers that must cover sport, weather, service journalism and entertainment to sustain reach. ZackZack is narrower and deeper by design. Its value to its readers lies not in comprehensiveness but in attention to files, committees, networks and interests that receive less sustained attention elsewhere. That narrowness is also a vulnerability, because a small investigative title depends on a loyal paying audience that specifically wants that scrutiny, rather than on mass reach sold to advertisers.

The newsroom and the spring 2023 cutback

For its first years ZackZack maintained a newsroom capable of daily publication, with Benjamin Weiser serving as editor-in-chief until spring 2023. In spring 2023 the newsroom was cut back sharply for economic reasons, and Weiser's tenure as editor-in-chief ended in that period. The cutback is a documented turning point in the publication's history: a title that had launched with parliamentary-club-backed funding and a budget reported at about one million euros in 2021 had to operate thereafter on a much smaller base.

The reduction should be understood in context rather than as closure. ZackZack did not cease publication. It continued as a smaller operation centred on its publisher and a reduced editorial team, funded by its members. Many small investigative outlets across Europe went through a similar contraction after initial launch funding ended, and ZackZack's survival after 2023, on a budget a quarter of its earlier size, is itself part of its record. The publication reported that it was debt-free in 2024, a detail that underlines the scale at which it had learned to operate.

Funding, membership and the City of Vienna subsidy

After its initial party-academy financing, ZackZack moved towards reader funding. In 2024 it reported a budget of about 250,000 euros from roughly 1,500 paying members. That figure, reported in reference material drawing on the publication's own disclosures, gives a clear sense of scale: this is a membership-funded micro-newsroom, not an advertising business. Each member therefore carries unusual weight in the budget, and retention of that community is existential rather than supplementary.

Separately, ZackZack received a 100,000 euro subsidy from the City of Vienna in each of 2020 and 2021. Those city subsidies are a matter of public record and form part of Vienna's support for media projects in the capital. Together with the earlier parliamentary-club funds channelled through the Bildungsverein Offene Gesellschaft, they show a funding history that mixes public support, party-academy origins and, increasingly, direct reader payments. The publication has been transparent that its later model rests on paying members, and the shift from institutional launch funding to membership income mirrors the path of other Austrian digital titles launched in the same period.

Position in Austria's digital party press debate

Researchers and journalism observers regularly cite ZackZack alongside Kontrast and Zur Sache when discussing the return of a digital party press in Austria. The Reuters Institute's reporting on Austria described this new landscape in the early 2020s, noting outlets that look like traditional news sites but are funded and run by or close to political parties. ZackZack differs from the two parliamentary-club magazines in one important respect: the party that gave it birth, Liste JETZT, left parliament in 2019 and later disappeared, while the SPÖ and ÖVP clubs behind Kontrast and Zur Sache remain parliamentary institutions. ZackZack therefore became, in effect, a publication that outlived its founding party.

That afterlife is analytically interesting. It tests whether a politically born investigative title can sustain itself as a reader-funded publication once the institutional funding and parliamentary platform are gone. The membership figures reported for 2024 suggest a modest but real answer: a core audience of about fifteen hundred paying supporters willing to fund continued scrutiny of Austrian politics. Whether that base can grow remains an open question, and the publication's own reporting of its finances suggests it does not hide the tightness of the model.

Vienna base and online-only form

ZackZack is based in Vienna and publishes online only, at zackzack.at. It has no print edition, no regional editions and no broadcast arm. Its Vienna base places it physically close to the institutions it covers: parliament, ministries, party headquarters, courts and the headquarters of major companies and media houses are all in the capital. For an investigative title focused on national politics, that proximity matters for hearings, press conferences, committee work and informal political life, even in an era when documents and communication move online.

The online-only form also shapes the writing. Articles can be updated, documents can be discussed at length, and background explainers can sit alongside news-driven investigations without the space constraints of print. At the same time, the absence of a print product means the title has none of the subscription and retail infrastructure of Austria's legacy newspapers. Its entire relationship with readers is digital, from discovery through social media and search to payment through membership.

What is not known and the limits of the record

The public record on ZackZack is unusually specific about some financial points, such as the 2020 and 2021 city subsidies and the 2024 budget and membership figures, and unusually thin about others, such as current daily reach, current full-time staffing after the 2023 cutback, and a complete year-by-year revenue history. This profile therefore does not invent circulation, traffic or staffing numbers beyond those documented figures. Where the record ends, the honest statement is that the detail is not publicly established.

That restraint is appropriate for a title whose own promise is commitment to facts. ZackZack's significance does not depend on inflated scale. It is a small, Vienna-based, online-only investigative publication founded in 2019 by Peter Pilz in the aftermath of the Ibiza affair, initially financed through the Bildungsverein Offene Gesellschaft with Liste JETZT parliamentary-club funds, later supported by City of Vienna subsidies and then by about 1,500 paying members on a budget of about 250,000 euros in 2024. Within Austria's crowded and highly politicised media debate, that small, explicit and persistent presence is the verified story.

Why ZackZack matters

ZackZack matters because it embodies a question that runs through contemporary Austrian journalism: who pays for scrutiny of power when the classic advertising and print subscription models weaken and when parties themselves become publishers. Its answer, after an institutional start, has been a paying readership for a declared standpoint. Its critics and its supporters can both point to that model, one side seeing proximity to politics as a problem, the other seeing declared attitude plus factual commitment as more honest than undeclared alignment.

For a directory of world news media, ZackZack is therefore catalogued not as a general newspaper but as a digital-native political investigative medium from Vienna. Its history, funding, editorial focus and contraction in 2023 are all documented, and its continuing publication under Peter Pilz as unpaid publisher and editor is the present-tense fact with which any profile must end. It remains what it called itself at the start: a daily newspaper with attitude, published only online, aimed at readers who want critical reporting on Austrian politics, media and the business elite.