About eXXpress

eXXpress

eXXpress is a digital-native Austrian news portal launched in Vienna in 2021 by journalist Richard Schmitt and businesswoman Eva Schütz-Hieblinger. It positions itself as a bourgeois-liberal, upmarket boulevard title covering politics, business and society, and it is majority-owned — 77 percent — by Vius SE, the company of German media investor Frank Gotthardt, who also owns Germany's Nius portal. From its launch the portal has been one of Austria's most debated new media ventures: commercially visible, politically polarising, and repeatedly criticised, including in Wikipedia's documentation, for publishing false reports.

Founding in 2021 — and a note on the launch date

eXXpress was created in 2021 by Richard Schmitt, a former editor of the Kronen Zeitung, Austria's largest tabloid, together with Eva Schütz-Hieblinger. Reference material for this profile records the launch as March 2021; the English Wikipedia entry on the portal gives its launch as July 2021. The two dates cannot both describe the same event, and they may reflect a distinction between the project's announcement or soft start and its full public launch. This profile flags the discrepancy openly rather than silently choosing one date: the founding year 2021 and the founders are consistently documented, the exact launch month is not.

The founding was financially backed, according to Wikipedia, by the circle around Eva Schütz and her husband, the investor Alexander Schütz. The portal began in Vienna as an online-only venture with no print edition and no legacy readership — a start-up boulevard medium launched into a market already served by two powerful free and tabloid brands, Heute and oe24, and by the dominant Kronen Zeitung.

Founders: Richard Schmitt and Eva Schütz-Hieblinger

Richard Schmitt brought tabloid experience to the venture as a former editor of the Kronen Zeitung, and he became the portal's public journalistic face. Eva Schütz-Hieblinger, documented in reference material as the portal's co-founder and chief executive, brought the business and investor side. The pairing — a tabloid journalist and a businesswoman from an investor family — shaped a portal that was conceived simultaneously as an editorial product and as a commercial media business seeking rapid scale.

Biographical detail beyond those documented roles is limited in reliable sources, and this profile does not expand it. What matters for the portal's history is the documented trajectory: founded by Schmitt and Schütz-Hieblinger in 2021 with backing from the Schütz circle, and subsequently majority-owned by Frank Gotthardt's Vius SE.

Ownership: Vius SE and Frank Gotthardt

eXXpress is 77 percent owned by Vius SE, the company of German tech entrepreneur and media investor Frank Gotthardt. Gotthardt also owns Nius, the German news portal that is eXXpress's sister medium in the neighbouring market. Wikipedia lists Gotthardt as the portal's owner and Vius SE's stake at 77 percent, making eXXpress part of a small cross-border group of right-leaning digital boulevard media in Austria and Germany.

That ownership connects the Austrian portal to a larger German debate about investor-funded opinion and news media. For the Austrian market, the practical significance is that eXXpress's majority financing comes from outside Austria's traditional publishing families and outside its press-subsidy structures, from a German investor pursuing a recognisable editorial model in both countries.

Editorial positioning: upmarket boulevard

The portal positions itself as a bourgeois-liberal upmarket boulevard title — in its own framing, a more elevated form of tabloid journalism aimed at middle-class readers, covering politics, business and society. External classifications differ sharply from that self-description. Wikipedia characterises eXXpress as a new-right boulevard online platform, and media observers classify it as a right-wing tabloid or troublemaker medium, with a heavy focus on migration, crime and criticism of left-wing and Green politicians.

Both descriptions belong in an honest profile. The self-positioning explains the portal's intended market: readers who want tabloid pace and topics with a more polished presentation. The external classification explains its reception: from launch it was read by critics as part of the new right-wing digital media ecosystem in the German-speaking countries, a reading reinforced by its ownership link to Nius.

Content and coverage

eXXpress covers Austrian politics, business and society in boulevard form: short, pointed news items, commentary and campaigning coverage, with emphasis on the topics documented by its critics — migration, crime and criticism of left and Green politicians. As a digital-native portal it publishes continuously online, without the constraints of a print cycle, and it was built for social media distribution and rapid reaction to the political news agenda.

The portal's Vienna base places it at the centre of Austrian federal politics. Its coverage operates in the same attention market as oe24, Heute and krone.at, but with an explicitly ideological profile that those broader boulevard brands do not claim in the same way. That explicitness is central to both its appeal to its audience and the criticism it attracts.

Criticism and documented false reports

Wikipedia documents that eXXpress has repeatedly been criticised for publishing false reports, and that due to false reporting, relationships with far-right activists and other scandals, the portal itself is repeatedly the subject of reporting by other media. Criticism cited in reference material includes sensationalised headlines, one-sided reporting and false reports that later had to be corrected. The portal has been involved in legal disputes on several occasions and has been ordered to pay damages for certain reports.

One documented case concerns false accusations against the Tagesspiegel journalist Sebastian Leber, whom the portal wrongly labelled a human trafficker in connection with his reporting on refugees; the medium lost the resulting court case about that false report. Cases of this kind are part of the portal's verified public record and are the factual basis on which Austrian media criticism of eXXpress largely rests.

Place in Austria's new digital right media

eXXpress arrived in a period when Austria's media system was adding a layer of explicitly partisan digital outlets: party-affiliated magazines such as the SPÖ's Kontrast and the ÖVP's Zur Sache, the FPÖ-circle portal Unzensuriert, and independent right-wing sites. Among them, eXXpress is distinctive for its commercial boulevard form and its German investor ownership rather than direct party affiliation.

Media researchers treat such outlets as a structural change in the Austrian system: digital-native media that combine news presentation with a consistent political line, financed outside the traditional publisher and subsidy landscape. eXXpress, with its Nius sister portal, is the Austrian example most often cited in that cross-border context.

Business model

As a free digital portal, eXXpress operates in the advertising and reach economy of Austrian online boulevard media, while its majority ownership by an investor company distinguishes its financing from both family publishers and party media. Detailed audience figures from ÖWA's top twenty for 2025 do not include eXXpress, and the portal's own commercial figures are not published in independent sources; this profile therefore makes no claim about its precise reach ranking or revenue.

That absence is itself informative. eXXpress's public significance in Austria has never rested primarily on measured mass reach of the kind documented for the top twenty portals. It rests on political visibility: agenda-setting interventions, social media circulation of its stories, and the recurring coverage of the portal itself by other media.

Reception and debate

Few Austrian media launches of the 2020s have been debated as continuously as eXXpress. Supporters of the venture present it as a needed bourgeois-conservative voice in a media landscape they regard as left-leaning. Critics present it as a right-wing troublemaker whose record of corrected false reports and court defeats disqualifies its journalistic claims. Austrian quality media have covered both the portal's content and its ownership and legal record extensively.

An accurate directory profile cannot resolve that debate, but it must record its documented elements: the founders and their backgrounds, the 77 percent Vius SE ownership, the self-description as upmarket boulevard, the external classification as a new-right boulevard platform, and the documented criticism and legal outcomes concerning false reporting. Those are the verified coordinates within which any reader can place the portal.

Limits of the record and outlook

The publicly verifiable record on eXXpress is rich on controversy and ownership but thin on operational detail: no independently verified staff numbers, audited reach series or financial results are available, and even the launch month is inconsistently documented, as flagged above. Claims about the portal that cannot be tied to a reliable source have been left out of this profile.

What is firm is the outline: launched in Vienna in 2021 by Richard Schmitt and Eva Schütz-Hieblinger, initially backed by the Schütz circle, majority-owned by Frank Gotthardt's Vius SE alongside Germany's Nius, positioned as a bourgeois-liberal upmarket boulevard title, classified by observers as a new-right boulevard platform, and repeatedly criticised — with court-documented cases — for false reporting. eXXpress remains one of the most contested digital-native news brands in Austria, and its history is inseparable from the wider argument about investor-funded partisan media in the German-speaking countries.