About Report24

Report24

Report24, at report24.news, is a controversial right-wing alternative news site based in Linz, Upper Austria, run by editor-in-chief and publisher Florian Machl and presented as an independent authors' collective. The SPÖ-affiliated magazine Kontrast describes it as the successor to the closed Wochenblick title, the Upper Austrian right-wing weekly whose online edition became one of Austria's best-known alternative-media brands before it ceased operations in December 2022. A response to a parliamentary inquiry in April 2023 cited roughly 3 million page accesses per month for Report24, while SimilarWeb figures cited by Kontrast put its monthly visitors at about 500,000 in June 2025. Both figures are attributed in this profile to their sources, because they measure different things and come from interested or commercial estimators rather than from an audited public ranking.

Report24 belongs to the generation of Austrian alternative media that followed Unzensuriert, founded in 2009, and Wochenblick, founded in 2016. Where Unzensuriert grew from an FPÖ parliamentary milieu in Vienna, Report24 presents itself differently: as a collective of independent authors under a single publisher-editor in Linz. Its critics treat that presentation sceptically, and its own self-description insists on independence. This profile records the documented facts — base, publisher, claimed form, attributed reach figures, the Kontrast successor description, and the content characterisations in research reporting — and attributes contested judgements to the sources that made them.

Linz base and Upper Austrian roots

Report24 is based in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. That location connects it geographically to Wochenblick, which also began in Upper Austria as a regional weekly distributed free in Linz and Wels before its online edition gained a national and German readership. Upper Austria has a strong Freedom Party tradition and was the home region of several Austrian alternative-media projects, and a Linz base places Report24 outside the Vienna media establishment it criticises, a distance its provincial critics-of-the-capital presentation can use.

The site publishes online in German at report24.news. It has no print edition documented in the sources for this profile and no broadcast arm. Its form is that of a news website with frequent daily items, commentary and campaigning coverage, rather than a weekly magazine translated to the web. The choice of a .news domain rather than an Austrian .at address is a small but visible sign of the sector's habits: alternative titles often choose generic domains that travel across the German-language web, where much of their potential audience, in Germany itself, also lives.

Florian Machl: editor-in-chief and publisher

Report24 is run by Florian Machl, who holds the combined roles of editor-in-chief and publisher. That combination concentrates responsibility in one person to a degree unusual in legacy media, where publisher and editor are typically separate, but common among alternative-media founders. Machl is the public face of the title, the person named in reference descriptions and in critical coverage alike, and the site is presented as an independent authors' collective under his leadership — meaning a group of contributing authors gathered around the publisher rather than a conventionally staffed newsroom with departmental editors.

The authors' collective presentation matters for how the site should be described. It claims breadth — multiple independent voices — without claiming the institutional structure of a newspaper. This profile does not invent a staff list or newsroom size for Report24, because no verified list was established in research. What is documented is the leadership fact itself, the collective self-presentation, and the Linz base. Readers evaluating the site should know that its editorial direction and its publishing responsibility meet in the same person, Florian Machl.

The Wochenblick successor description

The SPÖ-affiliated magazine Kontrast describes Report24 as the successor to Wochenblick. That description needs context to be used responsibly. Wochenblick was founded on 1 March 2016, published by Medien24 GmbH, initially distributed free in Linz and Wels, closely aligned with the FPÖ according to multiple sources, and frequently accused of repeating right-wing populist messages and spreading COVID-19 misinformation. In December 2022 Wochenblick announced it would cease operations for financial reasons. A successor description, in that setting, means that Report24 is seen by Kontrast as carrying forward Wochenblick's audience, function and place in the Upper Austrian alternative-media scene after its closure.

It does not, on the evidence available here, mean a documented corporate succession: no source established for this profile shows Report24 buying Wochenblick, taking over its publisher, or being founded by its company. The description comes from Kontrast, a partisan source — the magazine of the SPÖ parliamentary club — writing about a right-wing rival, and the directory seed itself flags the Kontrast media survey as a partisan source whose figures must be attributed. This profile therefore reports the successor label as Kontrast's characterisation, plausible in terms of audience and region, rather than as a legal or corporate fact.

Reach: the parliamentary inquiry and SimilarWeb figures

Two reach figures for Report24 appear in the documented record, and they must not be merged. A response to a parliamentary inquiry in April 2023, hosted at parlament.gv.at, cited roughly 3 million page accesses per month. Page accesses, or page impressions in the broad sense, count every page loaded, so a single visitor reading ten pages contributes ten accesses. Separately, SimilarWeb figures cited by Kontrast put Report24's monthly visitors at about 500,000 in June 2025. Visitors in SimilarWeb's estimation are people or visits estimated by a commercial web-measurement panel, a different unit from page accesses, measured more than two years later.

Presented together with their units, dates and sources, the figures support a modest conclusion: Report24 reached a substantial alternative-media audience in the hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, generating millions of page accesses, in the period 2023 to 2025. Presented without attribution, either figure alone would mislead — the 3 million as if they were people, or the 500,000 as if it were an audited count. Report24 does not appear in this profile with an ÖWA ranking, because no such ranking was established in research; ÖWA is the audited Austrian web measurement in which larger commercial portals are ranked, and its absence is noted rather than filled with estimates.

Editorial character and content themes

Report24 is characterised in the seed record as a controversial right-wing alternative news site. Research reporting on Austrian websites that repackage foreign war narratives as alternative news described Report24.news as a more overtly conspiratorial outlet, blending war narratives with broader themes about a US deep state, EU warmongers and an arms mafia, depicting Russia as reactive rather than aggressive in its war against Ukraine, and arguing that European insistence on Ukrainian victory serves the self-preservation of the European bureaucracy. Those are attributed characterisations of its coverage of one subject, from one research report, and they are recorded here as such.

More generally, Austrian alternative media of Report24's type concentrate on migration, Islam, criticism of the federal government and the European Union, scepticism towards mainstream media, and — during and after the pandemic years in which Wochenblick became notorious — criticism of COVID-19 measures and vaccination policy. Wochenblick was criticised by the Austrian Press Council for multiple ethics violations in its COVID-19 reporting, including an article arguing that the immune systems of billions were at risk from vaccines, as the Reuters Institute's 2023 Austria report noted. Whether every such theme applies to a specific Report24 article is a question for that article; the directory-level fact is the sector and standpoint into which the title is consistently placed by Austrian observers.

Place among Austrian alternative media

Austria's right-wing alternative online media developed in stages: Unzensuriert from 2009 as the starting point, in the DÖW-based assessment; Wochenblick from 2016 as the Upper Austrian weekly-turned-online brand with a large German readership; and a later wave, including Report24, that inherited the audience habits those titles had built — social-media distribution, distrust of ORF and the legacy press, and campaigning coverage of migration and cultural conflict. The International Press Institute's work on Austria's fake-news debate described how such platforms gained popularity during the 2015 refugee crisis by exploiting the view among some readers that mainstream media had reported uncritically on open borders. Report24 operates in the readership that history created.

Its Linz base and Machl's authors' collective distinguish it organisationally from Unzensuriert's Vienna party-milieu origins. Where Unzensuriert's publisher management connects to the FPÖ parliamentary club, no equivalent documented party connection for Report24 was established in the sources for this profile, and none is claimed. Its classification as right-wing rests on its content and standpoint as characterised by observers, and on the successor role Kontrast assigns it in the Wochenblick lineage, not on a documented party ownership. That distinction should be preserved: alternative media in Austria range from party-adjacent to formally independent, and collapsing them into one category would be inaccurate.

Criticism, controversy and the partisan-source problem

Report24 is described in its own directory seed as controversial, and the critical sources about it illustrate a methodological problem that this profile makes explicit. Much of the accessible survey material about Report24 comes from Kontrast, the SPÖ parliamentary club's magazine — a political opponent. Kontrast's survey figures are used here because they were also the seed's source, attributed and dated, but a reader should know the direction of the source's interest. Equally, Report24's own presentation of itself as an independent authors' collective is an interested source in the other direction. Between those poles, the firmer ground consists of the parliamentary inquiry response figure, the site's own imprint facts as summarised in reference descriptions — Linz, Florian Machl as editor-in-chief and publisher — and research reporting that names its content themes.

That three-way caution is the honest way to profile any alternative medium in a polarised landscape. It does not require neutrality between documented fact and invention: Wochenblick's closure in December 2022 is a fact, Report24's continued publication is a fact, and the attributed reach figures are facts about what those sources said. Judgements about quality, bias and influence are attributed to the named critics and researchers who made them, in line with this directory's standard for contested outlets across the political spectrum.

What is not documented

No verified founding date for Report24 was established in the sources used for this profile, and none is stated. Its seed record gives no founding year, and research did not produce a reliable one; inventing a launch year to complete a template would be exactly the kind of padding this directory forbids. Similarly undocumented here are a current staff list beyond Florian Machl, a legal publisher company name comparable to Unzensuriert's 1848 Medienvielfalt Verlags GmbH, an audited reach series, and any formal relationship — corporate, financial or personnel — between Report24 and the closed Wochenblick beyond Kontrast's successor characterisation.

Those gaps are flagged openly, as the standards for this batch require when an outlet is thin in the record. Report24 is thinner in independent reference coverage than Unzensuriert, which has been studied since the mid-2010s, or Wochenblick, which has a full reference history. Its profile is correspondingly built from the seed record, the parliamentary source, the Kontrast survey as an attributed partisan source, and sector-level research, without borrowing facts from Wochenblick's biography that do not belong to it.

Why Report24 is included

Report24 is included in a directory of Austrian online news because, on the attributed figures, it sustains one of the larger audiences in Austria's alternative-media sector — roughly 3 million page accesses a month in the April 2023 parliamentary answer, and about 500,000 monthly visitors in SimilarWeb's June 2025 estimate as cited by Kontrast — and because it represents the post-Wochenblick phase of that sector in Upper Austria. A directory that listed only legacy and public media would miss where a significant minority of Austrian news readers actually spend their attention.

The verified summary is compact: Report24 is a German-language, right-wing alternative news website based in Linz, led by editor-in-chief and publisher Florian Machl, presented as an independent authors' collective, described by the SPÖ's Kontrast magazine as the successor to Wochenblick after that title closed in December 2022, and credited by attributed sources with a monthly audience in the hundreds of thousands. Read with those attributions in mind, its place in Austria's polarised online news landscape is clear.