About DOSSIER

DOSSIER

DOSSIER is an investigative newsroom in Vienna, founded in October 2012 by Florian Skrabal. The Global Investigative Journalism Network calls it Austria's first nonprofit newsroom for investigative and data journalism. It carries no advertising and is financed mainly by memberships and donations, on the model of the American nonprofit ProPublica. Its reporting concentrates on corruption, exploitation and abuses of power, published on dossier.at and, since 2019, in a print magazine — an unusual trajectory for a digital newsroom, and one that has made DOSSIER a reference point for member-funded journalism in Europe.

Founding in October 2012

DOSSIER was founded in October 2012 in Vienna by journalist Florian Skrabal. It was created as a newsroom devoted exclusively to investigative and data journalism at a time when Austria had no nonprofit investigative organisation of this kind; the Global Investigative Journalism Network's description of DOSSIER as Austria's first nonprofit newsroom for investigative and data journalism records that pioneering status.

The founding model was explicitly international: DOSSIER was modelled on ProPublica, the American nonprofit newsroom that had demonstrated that donor- and member-funded investigative reporting could win the profession's highest honours without advertising or a proprietor. Transplanting that model to a small German-language market was the venture's founding wager.

The nonprofit, advertising-free model

DOSSIER carries no advertising. It is financed mainly by memberships — from 65 euros per year, according to its disclosure information — and by donations. That model is a deliberate editorial safeguard: a newsroom that investigates corruption and abuses of power removes, by refusing advertising, the most common channel through which investigated companies can exert economic pressure on media.

The model also creates its characteristic vulnerability, documented in the newsroom's own history: investigative journalism is slow and legally risky, and a membership base must be persuaded repeatedly that the work is worth paying for. DOSSIER's growth episodes, described below, show the model working as intended — readers converting directly into funders after appeals that explained what was at stake.

Editorial focus: corruption, exploitation, power

Its reporting focuses on corruption, exploitation and abuses of power. DOSSIER's investigations examine how Austrian institutions, companies and office-holders exercise power: public money, political influence, working conditions and the treatment of people with little power of their own. Data journalism is part of the method, reflected in the newsroom's self-description as a centre for investigative and data journalism.

An early documented example of its working territory came in Burgenland, where DOSSIER reporters investigated conditions in privately owned asylum-seeker accommodation. The reporting led to a court case in which a district court fined the platform 2,000 euros for trespassing in 2015, on the basis that reporters had entered without the state agency's prior permission; the newsroom defended the reporting as public-interest journalism based on permission from the interviewees themselves, and a regional court upheld the ruling. The episode, recorded in international press-freedom reporting, illustrates both the newsroom's subject matter and the legal friction its methods can generate.

Membership growth: the April 2021 appeal

After a funding appeal in April 2021, DOSSIER's membership grew from about 2,000 to 5,000 within days. That single documented episode is the clearest available measure of the model's dynamics: an appeal explaining the newsroom's financial needs converted thousands of readers into paying members almost immediately, more than doubling the base on which the newsroom plans its work.

Membership at that scale also changes the newsroom's politics of accountability. Its funders are its readers, organised as members of a nonprofit rather than as subscribers to a commercial product — a relationship that European journalism funders and researchers cite when presenting DOSSIER as a case study in community-financed investigation.

Lawsuits and financial pressure

Investigative reporting on powerful companies brings litigation, and DOSSIER's record includes it. International reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project described how, in early 2022, DOSSIER faced serious financial challenges while battling a lawsuit by OMV, Austria's largest oil and gas company, following its reporting on a controversial billion-dollar deal with a major shareholder. The same reporting credited the membership programme with offsetting the financial challenges experienced by many Austrian media outlets and with helping the newsroom withstand a series of lawsuits characterised as vexatious.

That account — retaining independence and fighting lawsuits with a membership model — has become the standard international summary of DOSSIER's economics. It also explains why the newsroom publicises its funding model so openly: transparency about who pays is part of its defence of its independence.

International networks: GIJN and OCCRP

DOSSIER is a member centre of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and part of the Global Investigative Journalism Network's community. Those memberships connect the small Vienna newsroom to cross-border investigative collaborations and to the international professional infrastructure of nonprofit journalism — training, legal and security knowledge, and partner newsrooms for stories that exceed one country's borders.

GIJN's own coverage of DOSSIER extends to its experiments in carrying journalism beyond the page, including collaborating with Vienna's Volkstheater to bring its reporting to the stage in a fact-checked theatre format. Such projects reflect a newsroom that treats the public presentation of investigation as part of its mission, not merely its marketing.

From website to print magazine

Articles appear on dossier.at and, since 2019, in a print magazine. A digital-native nonprofit launching a print product reverses the industry's usual direction of travel, and it underlines the magazine's role as a collected, durable form for long investigations whose natural life online is brief. The print magazine also gives members a tangible object for their support, a pattern familiar from member-funded media in other countries.

The combination — continuous online publication at dossier.at, periodic print magazine, stage collaborations — makes DOSSIER a multi-format newsroom despite its small scale. Its output is measured in depth of investigation rather than in volume of daily news, the opposite rhythm to the boulevard and portal media elsewhere in this directory.

Position in Austrian journalism

Austria's investigative tradition has historically lived inside its quality newspapers and magazines — Der Standard, Falter, profil and the Salzburger Nachrichten among them — and inside ORF's documentary output. DOSSIER added a new institutional form: the standalone nonprofit investigative newsroom, owing nothing to a proprietor, a party or an advertiser. Its founding in 2012 is now routinely cited as a turning point in accounts of Austrian media innovation.

For journalism funders, DOSSIER is Austria's demonstration that the ProPublica model can be adapted to a market of Austria's size and language. Its membership figures — thousands, not hundreds of thousands — also honestly mark the model's scale in such a market: enough to sustain a focused newsroom, not enough to replace the investigative capacity of large media houses.

Transparency and disclosure

DOSSIER publishes disclosure information about its financing, from which the membership entry price and the advertising-free principle are drawn. That disclosure practice is itself part of the nonprofit model's credibility: readers who fund investigations are told how the organisation is financed, in contrast to the opaque ownership and state-advertising relationships that DOSSIER's reporting on Austrian media and politics frequently criticises in others.

Independent detail about the newsroom's internal size and budgets over time is limited in the sources available to this profile, and no staffing or revenue figures beyond the documented membership numbers are asserted here. The verified record — founding, founder, model, membership growth, litigation history and network memberships — is sufficient to define the organisation without them.

Outlook

More than a decade after its founding, DOSSIER remains what it was designed to be in October 2012: Austria's first nonprofit newsroom for investigative and data journalism, based in Vienna, founded by Florian Skrabal, financed by members from 65 euros a year and by donations, publishing investigations into corruption, exploitation and abuses of power online and in print. Its documented history — rapid membership growth when it asked, resilience under lawsuit pressure, and a settled place in the GIJN and OCCRP networks — makes it the Austrian benchmark for reader-funded investigative journalism.