About Die Tagespresse

Die Tagespresse

Die Tagespresse is an Austrian satirical website based in Vienna that publishes invented stories written in the style of newspaper articles, dealing primarily with Austrian politics and society. It is not a factual news outlet, and any profile of it has to start with that distinction. Its articles are deliberately fabricated, presented in a deadpan news format and labelled as satire, in the tradition of the American website The Onion and the German-language website Der Postillon, which its founder took as models. The seed record for this profile describes it in exactly those terms, and German-language reference sources confirm the description. In its early years the site ironically called itself Austria's most serious online newspaper, a slogan that captures its method: the closer a story looks to real reporting, the sharper the joke is meant to be.

Majority owner, publisher and managing director is Friedrich Jergitsch, known as Fritz Jergitsch, who also serves as editor-in-chief. The operating company is Die Tagespresse Medienproduktion GmbH, founded in December 2016, several years after the website itself had begun. The site is marketed within the austria.com/plus advertising portfolio and its reach has been measured by the Austrian web analysis body OeWA. That combination of a small independent satirical newsroom, a formal commercial company and measured national online reach is part of what sets Die Tagespresse apart from an anonymous humour blog. It operates as a recognisable media brand in Austria, with books, stage shows and a television format alongside the website, while remaining editorially centred on one product: short, topical, invented news stories about real Austrian public life.

Founding in Vienna in May 2013

Die Tagespresse was founded in Vienna in May 2013 by Fritz Jergitsch, who was born in Vienna in 1991. Reference sources give the first edition as 28 May 2013 in summary data, while the narrative account dates the first published article to 29 May 2013. Both dates fall in the same launch week, and the profile record itself states only May 2013, which is the safest summary. The first article carried the headline about a bored EU commissioner wanting to regulate cell division. According to the documented account of the founding, the immediate trigger was a European Union proposal on seed regulation, which prompted Jergitsch to write satirical texts criticising what he saw as excessive EU regulation. Those texts first appeared in a blog and were then moved to a dedicated website.

Jergitsch's background before the launch is also documented. He completed his school-leaving examination at the Meidlinger Gymnasium Rosasgasse in Vienna and finished a bachelor's degree at University College Utrecht in 2013, specialising in economics and politics, with a bachelor's thesis on alternatives to the patent system. He had also completed internships with the Federation of Austrian Industries and with a public relations agency. That mix of politics, economics and communications is visible in the site's long-running preoccupations, which return repeatedly to Austrian party politics, bureaucracy, media behaviour and the gap between official language and everyday reality.

How the satire works

The core format has remained consistent. Die Tagespresse writes fictional quotes, fictional decisions and fictional events involving real politicians, parties, institutions and public figures, and presents them as if they were straight news reports. The reporting style is intentionally sober, which is why stories have repeatedly been mistaken for genuine news, as documented separately below. The site itself insists that its articles are freely invented, a point founder Fritz Jergitsch has also stressed in interviews about fake news, where he distinguished clearly labelled satire from deceptive false reporting intended to mislead without disclosure. A publisher description of its early book collections put the same idea differently, noting that although all articles were invented, they were meant to contain a grain of truth about politics, business, sport and culture.

Topics are primarily Austrian. Party politics in Vienna, federal government figures, state politics, football, popular culture and media stories all recur, because the humour depends on readers recognising the real person or institution behind the invention. When the former Green Party leader Eva Glawischnig moved to the gambling group Novomatic in March 2018, Die Tagespresse simply took over the corresponding Austria Presse Agentur agency report as what it called real satire, an episode that illustrates the editorial judgement involved: sometimes, in the site's view, reality needed no embellishment. That approach also explains why the boundary between satire and news has been tested so often in its history.

Early growth through social media

The site spread rapidly through social media, above all Facebook. Jergitsch linked that early success to a democratisation of the media landscape, arguing that a small new title could achieve large reach quickly without a printing press or a broadcasting licence. He later became more critical of the dependence on Facebook that this model created, a concern that formed part of the background to the later move away from advertising towards subscriptions. The reach was measurable early on. From summer 2014 the website was recorded by the Austrian Web Analysis, OeWA, for the first time and ranked 25th by visitor numbers among listed Austrian websites. In July 2015 OeWA recorded 1.3 million visits to the site.

Individual stories could travel far beyond the site's regular readership. An article from November 2014 about an art university acceptance confirmation allegedly delivered decades late to Adolf Hitler because a letter had lain in a post office for years reached 1.2 million accesses and was among the site's most successful pieces. Another widely shared story, about the armed forces dropping pornographic magazines and beer on the Islamic State in revenge, was shared and liked almost 150,000 times on Facebook. Those figures, drawn from reference accounts of the site's early years, show a publication whose distribution was built for sharing rather than for habitual daily newspaper reading.

Team, company and regional editions

For a satirical website, Die Tagespresse developed a comparatively formal structure. In 2015 it employed a team of four authors, including the scriptwriter and gag writer for the ORF satire programme Willkommen Oesterreich, Juergen Marschal, who is also a minority owner of Die Tagespresse. In 2016 the site additionally employed one member of staff each in Salzburg and Tyrol for regional editions, extending the joke beyond Vienna to state-level politics and local public life. The formal company, Die Tagespresse Medienproduktion GmbH, was founded in December 2016. By 2017, alongside a three-person author team, the site worked with nine freelance contributors.

The editorial team listed at the end of 2023 gives a sense of its later scale. It named Alexander Lueger, Eva Sager, Fritz Jergitsch as majority owner, Juan Marhl, Juergen Marschal as a minority owner, Marc Carnal, Philipp Kernstock, Sarah Kleiner, Sebastian Huber as a further minority owner, Sonja Pikart and Tereza Hossa. Jergitsch himself has also written for other comedy projects besides his own site, including the ORF programme Eckel mit Kanten with Klaus Eckel and the satire strand of the private broadcaster Puls 4. Public descriptions differ in one detail of ownership language, with one international case summary describing Jergitsch as sole shareholder while Austrian reference and company sources describe him as majority owner alongside minority owners. This profile follows the Austrian sources and the seed record, which describe majority ownership.

From advertising to a subscription paywall

The original business model was advertising. Alongside classic banner advertising, the site used editorial-style advertising, for example writing a dedicated satirical article for a beer brand. That model changed fundamentally in June 2018, when financing switched from advertising to a subscription paywall. Initially five articles in thirty days remained freely accessible, and that allowance was later reduced to three articles. Access remained free for recipients of minimum income support and for people under 21 years of age, an exception documented in accounts of the change and in the site's terms.

The subscription figures that followed are among the clearest measures of the site's loyal audience. In November 2018 the site recorded around 2,900 subscribers, including about 1,800 paying subscribers. By September 2021 it had 9,000 paying subscribers, and in January 2022 it reached 10,000 paying subscribers. Jergitsch observed in this period that the site sold more subscriptions when a great deal was happening politically, which fits the product: political turbulence supplies both material and a reason to pay for a satirical interpretation of it. The move also reduced the dependence on social media algorithms and advertisers that the founder had criticised, replacing volatile reach with direct reader revenue as the central pillar.

Books, stage shows and television

Die Tagespresse has never been only a website. Since 2013 a selection of its articles has been published annually in book form. The first collection appeared in 2013 as a nonsense review of the year, and a long series of best-of volumes followed with Residenz Verlag, with titles taken from representative invented headlines about the Vatican, Facebook terms, Ramadan, the Ibiza video affair and the coronavirus traffic-light system, among others. In 2021 Jergitsch also published a book of his own about social media and freedom, and in 2023 a ten-year anniversary volume marked a decade of the Tagespresse. The books serve as an archive of Austrian political life as the satirists saw it, year by year, in headline form.

On stage, Die Tagespresse Show premiered on 20 September 2016 at Vienna's Rabenhof Theater, presented by Paul Kraker with Peter Klien as foreign correspondent. A second stage programme followed in 2019, and a third programme, a history show about Austrian identity, premiered at the Rabenhof in February 2023. On television, the format Tagespresse aktuell ran on ORF from 19 September 2017, following the late-night show Willkommen Oesterreich, with twelve episodes of twenty to twenty-five minutes each. Cabaret artist Joachim Brandl hosted in the role of anchorman Joachim Fuchs, alongside magazine-style segments from other performers. The first episode averaged 297,000 viewers with a twenty percent market share, and the first ten programmes averaged 246,000 viewers per episode. In January 2018 Jergitsch announced there would be no second season for the time being, because the team wanted to concentrate again on the online presence. The site also appeared live in other settings, including a satire programme on the LOL Stage at the Frequency music festival in August 2017.

When satire was mistaken for real news

A recurring chapter in the site's history is the list of invented stories that were taken seriously. In June 2013, only weeks after launch, an article about the alleged arrival of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden at Vienna-Schwechat Airport caused such a stir that the Austrian Foreign Ministry felt obliged to deny the report. After a story about a kangaroo supposedly sent by the Catholic Church into schools to teach sexual abstinence, the Archdiocese of Vienna received angry calls and Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn had to deny the story on his own page. In 2017 the British newspaper The Guardian temporarily cited a Tagespresse article from May 2014 claiming that Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz was asserting a right to be forgotten in order to remove an election video from Google search results.

The most consequential recent case came in September 2021, when the Austria Presse Agentur issued a report about an alleged candidacy by Frank Stronach in the 2022 presidential election, which was also taken up by ORF online. The imprint of the associated website pointed to the satire magazine Die Tagespresse. APA editor-in-chief Johannes Bruckenberger described the episode as a wake-up call, saying media needed to question and sharpen their standards in the face of rampant disinformation. For Die Tagespresse these episodes are double-edged. They prove the format works, because the invented story was plausible enough to pass as news, but they also fuel the wider debate about how clearly satire must be labelled online, a debate Jergitsch himself has engaged with as a speaker on fake news.

Satirical actions, disputes and the courts

Beyond articles, Die Tagespresse has repeatedly staged satirical actions in the real world. In summer 2021 it sued politician Andreas Hanger at the Vienna Commercial Court for unfair competition and withdrew the action in October 2021. In November 2021 it launched a cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain as a satirical project. From November 2022 it collected declarations of support for a deliberately pointless referendum intended to criticise the pointlessness of referendums, which was registered with the Federal Ministry of the Interior on 15 November 2022. In November 2023 it released a free computer game about Sebastian Kurz in response to three films about the former chancellor released that autumn.

The best documented legal dispute followed the so-called tavern premium affair. In April 2023, after the formation of the Lower Austrian state government under an agreement between the People's Party and the Freedom Party, Die Tagespresse claimed responsibility for fake letters sent to five hundred restaurant owners in Lower Austria in the name of the Freedom Party of Lower Austria, promoting an invented department and criteria for patriotic catering. The party sued at the Vienna Commercial Court in May 2023. An initiative by cultural figures gathered one hundred and eighty signatories from literature, music, film and cabaret calling for the suit to be withdrawn. The Commercial Court ruled in March 2024 that the action was permissible satire, and the Vienna Higher Regional Court dismissed the party's appeal in September 2024. In February 2025, however, the Supreme Court ruled for the Freedom Party, finding that the party's right to its name had been violated because an average recipient could have assumed the letter genuinely came from the party. The site was ordered to bear the party's legal costs and barred from distributing false writings in the party's name in future. The case is now a reference point in Austrian discussion of where satire ends and deception begins.

Other disputes were settled more lightly. In February 2024 the publisher of the free newspaper Heute demanded removal of a portrait photograph used in a satirical article. Die Tagespresse complied and replaced the portrait with one of Barbra Streisand, invoking the Streisand effect, then found its own images used on the newspaper's website and demanded redress in return. The parties eventually agreed to drop their claims mutually and each donate to a social cause. For the twentieth anniversary of Heute in September 2024, Die Tagespresse published an eight-page satirical parody of the paper and distributed it in Vienna in a five-figure print run. Criticism has come from other directions too. In May 2025 a researcher for the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance criticised a satirical contribution about Israel and Gaza, a reminder that satire about war and antisemitism attracts scrutiny of a different order from jokes about domestic party politics.

Awards and recognition

Die Tagespresse and its founder have received sustained recognition from the Austrian media and cabaret worlds. Jergitsch was voted Onliner of the Year in the newcomer category in 2013 and received a special prize for satire at the Journalist of the Year awards in 2014. The project received a special prize at the Austrian Cabaret Prize in 2015, and again in 2023. In 2017 Jergitsch was named Journalist of the Year in the entertainment category. In 2018 the magazine Forbes listed him in its 30 Under 30 Europe list in the media and marketing category. Further honours followed, including a Digital Superhero award in the media category, repeated Journalist of the Year entertainment awards in 2021, 2023 and 2025, the Walther Rode Prize in 2024 and a civil courage prize from the human rights organisation SOS Mitmensch in 2025.

That award record matters for understanding the outlet's position. Die Tagespresse is treated in Austria not as a prank website but as an established satirical institution whose founder is invited to comment on media freedom and disinformation. At the same time, the Supreme Court judgement in the tavern premium case shows the legal limits of its methods when satire leaves the website and enters the physical world under someone else's name. Holding both facts together is essential to a fair profile.

Present position and limits of this profile

Die Tagespresse remains an active Vienna-based satirical publication, funded mainly through subscriptions after its 2018 change of model, with books, live programmes and anniversary projects extending the brand beyond the daily website. In September 2026 the portal announced the launch of a monthly print edition from October 2026, a notable step for a title born as a digital-only satire site, and its own October 2026 reporting already referred to a first print edition. Full verification of the print edition's circulation, price and long-term schedule was not available from the sources consulted for this profile, so those details are deliberately not stated here.

Readers should also note what this outlet is not. It does not employ foreign correspondents reporting real events, it does not publish verified breaking news, and its headlines must never be cited as evidence that something happened. Its value lies in commentary through invention: by exaggerating Austrian politics until it becomes absurd, it offers a critical mirror that many readers and juries have found telling. Directory users looking for factual Austrian news should treat Die Tagespresse as satire and entertainment with a political edge, filed under online media because of its format and reach, not because of any news-gathering function.