About Addendum

Addendum

Addendum was an Austrian investigative research platform that published in German from 25 September 2017 until September 2020. Its full presentation included the tagline das, was fehlt, meaning that which is missing, a phrase drawn from the Latin meaning of its name, that which must be added. The platform was based at Halleiner Landesstrasse 24 in Elsbethen-Glasenbach, in the state of Salzburg, and it was owned through the Quo Vadis Veritas structure funded by Dietrich Mateschitz, the co-founder of Red Bull. Unlike a conventional online newspaper, Addendum did not chase a daily news cycle. It chose a small number of subjects, spent weeks working on each one, and then published the finished research free of charge together with the underlying data on which the reporting rested. That slow, dossier-based model, backed by unusually generous private funding and a staff that grew to 57 people, made Addendum one of the most closely watched media experiments in Austria during its short life. Its closure was announced in August 2020, after its backers concluded that the aims of the foundation behind it had not been met to a sufficient degree.

Origins and the Quo Vadis Veritas foundation

The project became public in the spring of 2017. On 8 April 2017 it was reported that Dietrich Mateschitz had established the Quo Vadis Veritas Privatstiftung, a private foundation whose Latin name asks whither goest thou, truth, in order to finance a new research platform. An operating company, the Quo Vadis Veritas Redaktions GmbH, was created to run the editorial work. According to the German-language record, the foundation was started with one million euros, with Mateschitz as founder for 99 percent and Servus Medien GmbH, a company within the Red Bull Media House group, for the remaining one percent, and its stated beneficiary under its statutes was the general public. The foundation was non-profit in orientation, and Addendum itself carried no paywall, which immediately set it apart from subscription newspapers that were trying to make readers pay for in-depth reporting online.

Recruitment during 2017 underlined the scale of the ambition. Journalists and media specialists joined from across the Austrian market, including Anna Schneider, Judith Denkmayr, Rainer Fleckl, Alexander Millecker, Andreas Wetz, Christine Grabner, Georg Renner and Moritz Moser, whose previous employers were reported as including Vice, Die Presse, the ORF and NZZ.at. In July 2017 around 40 staff moved into editorial rooms in Vienna-Neubau while building the platform, even though the formal headquarters recorded for Addendum was the Salzburg address in Elsbethen-Glasenbach. In August 2017 the project opened a digital mailbox through which whistleblowers and informants could transmit confidential documents and information anonymously, a tool that signalled from the outset that leaked and confidential material was expected to form part of its work.

Launch and leadership

The name Addendum was presented on 8 September 2017, and the first research findings were released on 25 September 2017. Michael Fleischhacker served as publisher and as editor-in-chief, and he shared the managing directorship with Niko Alm, a former NEOS politician. Within that division of labour Fleischhacker carried the editorial responsibility and Alm the commercial responsibility. Editors associated with the platform in reference listings included Stefan Kaltenbrunner, Stephan Frank and Lucia Marjanovic. Kaltenbrunner joined the editorial leadership of the operating company in September 2018 but left in the summer of 2019 for the television channel Puls 4, one of several notable departures in a project that saw significant staff turnover in its first year, including the departure of Alexander Millecker and other former ATV staff, while Martin Thur remained until moving to the ORF in 2019.

Fleischhacker shaped the public identity of Addendum throughout its existence. He presented it in its own description as an exercise in reconstructive journalism intended to restore a shared basis of facts for a qualified political debate. Mateschitz, for his part, positioned the outlet openly as a counterweight to what he described to the Kleine Zeitung as a dictatorship of opinion by the politically correct. Those two framings, one methodological and one combative, travelled together for the whole life of the platform and explain much of the sharply divided reception it received from other Austrian and German-language commentators.

A working method built around dossiers

The defining feature of Addendum was time. Where a daily newsroom has hours, an Addendum team was described as spending six weeks, with as many as ten people, working through a single subject in greater depth than the daily press could manage. The written dossiers were accompanied online and by weekly television reports of around 45 minutes on ServusTV under the title Im Kontext, linking the foundation's publishing to the Red Bull media ecosystem without turning the website itself into a television spin-off. Publishing the underlying data alongside the articles was a deliberate transparency device: readers were invited not only to accept the conclusions but to inspect the material from which those conclusions had been drawn.

That method required money and patience, and for a time Addendum had both. A staff of 57 was large by Austrian standards, and devoting most of it to a handful of stories at a time was a deliberate rejection of the volume-driven model of most online news. The trade-off was visibility. Because the platform published completed dossiers rather than a continuous stream of news, it generated fewer everyday touchpoints with readers than a conventional portal, a structural fact that later featured in assessments of why its audience remained modest relative to its cost and staffing.

Subjects, investigations and public impact

The opening subjects set the tone. Early dossiers addressed asylum, under the question of whether asylum was a concept from yesterday, and Islam and schools, under a dossier about Islamic influence in the classroom. Other work ranged across democratic practice itself, including the Politometer project undertaken with Neuwal, which set out to record the voting behaviour and the presence or absence of all 183 members of the National Council photographically and statistically, and an inquiry asking whether democracy was really a good idea. That breadth, from migration to the mechanics of parliament, was characteristic: Addendum preferred contested structural questions over party-political day-to-day coverage.

Its most consequential single investigation came in January 2019, when Addendum reported that Oesterreichische Post, in its activity as an address publisher, stored the presumed party affinities of 2.2 million Austrians and sold that information for election advertising. After the disclosure the Austrian data protection authority opened an examination procedure against the Post, the Post announced that it would delete all party-affinity information from its datasets, and in October 2019 the authority issued a first-instance, not yet legally final administrative penalty of 18 million euros against the company. Whatever view readers took of Addendum's editorial line, that sequence demonstrated that its research could move regulators and change corporate practice, and it remains the clearest documented example of the platform's public impact.

Books, print and television offshoots

The foundation experimented beyond the website. From 2018, books appeared under the label Edition QVV, beginning with Kulturkampf im Klassenzimmer by Susanne Wiesinger, published on 10 September 2018, with a rhythm of roughly one book per quarter described at the time and a further title, Machtkampf im Ministerium, following in January 2020. In December 2018 the launch of a print product, an Addendum newspaper, was announced. Television expansion proved shorter lived: a weekly magazine called Faktum began in February 2019, but its discontinuation was already announced in June of that year, with Fleischhacker conceding that the project had been too optimistic. The pattern of launches and retreats showed an organisation still searching for the right formats around its core dossier work even in its second year.

Reception and controversy

Critical reception was polarised from the first week. Writing in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Peter Munch placed Addendum in a right-populist spectrum and compared it with the American outlet Breitbart, a comparison that followed the platform for years. Ralf Leonhard in the taz called that accusation ridiculous in 2017, while describing the outlet then as neither left nor clearly right and neither tabloid nor made for intellectuals; revisiting the question after the closure in 2020, he judged its orientation to have been politically rather to the right of centre. Jens Jessen in Die Zeit described Addendum as the illusion of objective reporting. By contrast, Rainer Stadler praised it in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, arguing that its first dossier had pointed to a paradoxical European practice on asylum and that it practised weighing dialectics rather than campaigning journalism. This profile records those assessments as attributed opinion rather than settled fact, because the sources themselves disagreed fundamentally about what Addendum was.

Audience figures were a recurring vulnerability. Reporting a year after launch cited around 110,000 monthly visitors, set against a comparison figure of 20 million reach for the Kronen Zeitung, and concluded that the project remained far behind expectations. That gap between an expensive, well-staffed newsroom and a relatively small regular audience formed part of the background when the end came, although the foundation's own stated reason was broader, concerning the fulfilment of its aims as a whole.

Awards and recognition

Despite the controversy, the work itself won professional recognition. In 2018 Addendum received the Praelat-Leopold-Ungar Journalist Prize in the online category for the project Wie weit reicht der Arm des Gluecksspiels, credited to Rainer Fleckl, Maria Kern, Christoph Hanslik, Johannes Kaiser and Christine Grabner. In the same year it received the Austrian Integration Fund's Journalism Prize for Integration in the online category for the Brennpunkt Schule project. Those awards matter to the record because they show that juries evaluating the journalism on its craft rewarded the dossier method even while commentators debated the platform's politics, funding and purpose.

Closure in 2020 and the end of the website

On 4 August 2020 the foundation announced, without prior notice, that Addendum would be discontinued. The announcement described a mutual decision by Mateschitz and Fleischhacker to wind up both the foundation and the platform, stating that despite considerable financial investment and a number of successful and relevant research projects, the foundation's aims had not been met to a sufficient degree, and that Mateschitz wished to move toward solution-oriented projects away from everyday political argument. All 57 employees were registered for dismissal with the Austrian employment service. Operations ran until the end of September 2020, with reference listings recording the cessation date as 15 September 2020, and the website itself was finally taken offline on 14 September 2023, three years after editorial work ended.

Place in Austrian media history

Addendum lasted only three years, but it occupies a distinctive place in Austrian online news history. It tested whether a single wealthy patron, funding journalism as a non-profit public good through a foundation, could sustain a large investigative newsroom that published slowly, freely and with its data exposed. Its record contains verified achievements, notably the postal data investigation and its 2018 prizes, alongside verified weaknesses, notably staff turnover, short-lived format experiments and an audience that reporting described as far below expectations. Readers should note the limits of the surviving record: because the site was taken offline in 2023 and the English-language reference entry is brief, some operational detail is preserved mainly in German-language sources, and later audience or financial figures beyond those cited in contemporary reporting cannot be stated reliably here. What can be stated is the arc itself: launched with exceptional resources on 25 September 2017, closed by its own backers' decision in 2020, and remembered as Austria's most prominent experiment in patron-funded investigative publishing.