About Falter

Falter

Overview

Falter is a German-language weekly newspaper and news magazine published in Vienna, Austria. It appears weekly on Wednesdays and reports from a broadly left-liberal perspective on politics, media, culture and life in Vienna. It has no formal political affiliation, and its publisher is Falter Verlagsgesellschaft, with its headquarters and editorial base in Vienna, in the state and capital city of the same name. Its official website is falter.at.

The title occupies a distinctive place in Austrian journalism. It began as a product of the alternative, countercultural Vienna of the 1970s, built around an events calendar and reporting on everyday city life, and it grew into a professionally run weekly known across Austria for solidly researched investigative journalism. That combination — detailed Vienna listings and cultural coverage on one side, and political investigation and media criticism on the other — still defines how the paper is described and how readers use it.

Origins in the Arena movement

Falter emerged from the movement around the 1976 occupation of the former foreign slaughterhouse at St. Marx in Vienna, an episode associated with the Arena cultural centre. The first issue appeared on 25 May 1977, with founder Walter Martin Kienreich responsible for both its content and its business side. Kienreich was the first publisher, and Christian Martin Fuchs was the first editor-in-chief.

In its first years the editorial team understood itself as a collective. Its core included visual artists and students from the Institute of Theatre Studies at the University of Vienna, among them Hans Hurch and Eberhard Forcher. The collective described its aim in terms of a counter-public: reporting on everyday life and everyday racism, criticising the established media, and offering as complete an events calendar for Vienna as possible. Kienreich himself left as early as 1977, and Fuchs left in 1979, so the founding generation quickly gave way to the colleagues who would professionalise the paper.

From collective biweekly to weekly newspaper

Falter was originally produced every two weeks. Until 1980 it was sold purely by hand, and only then, at a circulation of around 10,000 copies, was distribution organised professionally. In 1981 the newsroom moved from Esslinggasse to Zelinkagasse, both in Vienna's first district, the Innere Stadt, and the paper was henceforth published by Falter Verlags GmbH. In 1980 the book publishing arm had already issued its first publication, the Merkheft Wien.

The first comprehensive redesign came in 1983, when the format was brought into line with other Austrian newspapers and the conceptual artist Ecke Bonk was largely responsible for the graphic design, including the logo. In 1986 the newsroom moved again, to Marc-Aurel-Strasse, also in the first district, where it remains. Since 1987 Falter has appeared weekly, always on Wednesdays, in a redesign by Rainer Dempf. The switch to weekly publication was later explained in deliberately simple business terms: double the sales revenue at half the production cost. A further relaunch followed in 1991, financed by investor Günter Kerbler, with design by Dirk Linke and a change to a half-Nordic format.

Leadership: Thurnher and Klenk

For decades the paper was led by Armin Thurnher, who had been a member of the editorial collective from 1977. Thurnher, born in Bregenz in 1949, became both publisher and, from June 2012, editor-in-chief alongside Florian Klenk, and he was also a co-owner of the publishing house. His weekly editorials became one of the paper's signatures, not least because from 1994 to 2014 he closed them with a fixed final sentence, modelled on Cato, declaring that the Mediaprint, later the Mediamil, complex had to be smashed — a sustained attack on the concentration of Austrian media ownership that he criticised throughout his career.

Florian Klenk, born in 1973 and holder of a doctorate in law, returned to Falter in 2007 from the German weekly Die Zeit and was appointed editor-in-chief alongside Thurnher in 2012. With Klenk, the paper became more political and more visible in public debate, a shift reflected in its subsequent reach figures. On 1 March 2025 Thurnher gave up the editor-in-chief role after four decades, leaving Klenk as sole editor-in-chief, while Thurnher remained publisher. Any current description of the paper's leadership should therefore name Klenk as editor-in-chief and Thurnher as publisher, rather than presenting the long-standing joint editorship as unchanged.

Editorial profile and Vienna coverage

Falter reports from a left-liberal perspective on politics, media, culture and city life in Vienna and Graz, and it is commonly treated as an example of the professionalised alternative press of the late 1970s. Unlike Switzerland's WOZ or Berlin's Die Tageszeitung, it was not secured by a cooperative structure; its publishing house is financed by the magazine itself and by corporate publishing. That commercial footing has coexisted with an editorial identity built on independence from political parties.

Vienna remains the centre of gravity. The original core of the paper was an extensive calendar of theatre, cinema, parties and events of every kind, and historians have valued the early Falter as a source for the everyday history of Vienna and for alternative movements outside the pop-cultural mainstream from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. A relaunch with issue 38 of 2008, dated 17 September 2008, widened the opinion section, expanded the events programme into a pull-out paper-within-the-paper titled Falter:Woche, opened the paper more strongly to European and worldwide subjects, and yet deliberately preserved its urban Viennese orientation.

Investigative journalism and media criticism

Beyond its original role as a magazine of the arts and social life, Falter developed a reputation for investigative journalism, and in 2016 it was a founding member of the European Investigative Collaboration, a cross-border investigative network. Klenk's own reporting, in particular, has repeatedly uncovered problems in the police, the judiciary and other institutions, and in 2002 it was established that he had been wiretapped while speaking to a renegade secret service official.

The paper's confrontations with authority are part of its history. In 1988 an issue of Falter was confiscated at the request of Federal President Kurt Waldheim because a criminal complaint against him had been published in it; the media coverage of that episode made the paper known far beyond its previous readership. In the 1990s Falter was one of the first Austrian media outlets to cover media policy continuously. The reaction from those it criticised could be severe: in 1995 the Kronen Zeitung hit Falter with lawsuits in the millions over a prize competition, litigation that nearly brought about the paper's financial end. Decades later, in 2018, Falter was one of three outlets — alongside Der Standard and Kurier — named in an Interior Ministry email that appeared to instruct police press offices to limit communication with them to the legal minimum, after Falter had carried out several investigations into the ministry's inner workings.

Sections, supplements and contributors

A long-standing feature is Heureka, the paper's science supplement, supported by the Austrian Ministry of Education and Science. Heureka carries critical analyses of scientific activity, science policy, relations between science and society, and university-based science, with each issue focusing on a scientific topic such as genetics or science and politics. It is distributed not only to Falter readers but also to university departments, the relevant ministries and other related institutions.

The bylines associated with the paper reflect its range across politics, culture and city life. Contributors have included Isolde Charim, Matthias Dusini, Andrea Maria Dusl, Melisa Erkurt, Anna Goldenberg, Nina Horaczek, Doris Knecht, Peter Michael Lingens, Raimund Löw, Klaus Nüchtern, Tessa Szyszkowitz and Barbara Tóth, as well as restaurant critic Florian Holzer, with Heribert Corn as long-time staff photographer. Historically its writers ranged still wider, from Ingrid Brodnig and Hermes Phettberg to Thomas Rottenberg and Werner Vogt. Restaurant criticism has been a particularly visible part of its Vienna coverage, where a positive review could be expected to fill a restaurant the following day.

Circulation, reach and audience

Circulation figures for Falter have to be read with their dates attached, because print markets in Austria have changed radically over the paper's lifetime. Its circulation was reported at 63,000 copies in 2007 and 48,000 copies in 2010. The figures cited in its German-language reference entry, drawn from 2021 data, give a print run of 53,000 copies and a reach of 271,000 readers in the Media-Analyse for 2021. Reach had already been rising in percentage terms in the years after 2012, from 1.4 percent in 2015 to 2.6 percent in 2018 and 3.2 percent in 2020.

More recent reporting is less precise. The exact circulation of Falter is no longer reported to the Austrian circulation audit, the Auflagenkontrolle, for reasons reference sources describe as unexplained, while competitors were reported in 2023 as speaking of about 40,000 subscribers. That uncertainty is itself a fact about the modern Austrian market: for a subscription-driven weekly of this size, subscriber loyalty and reach now matter more than a single audited newsstand figure, and older high circulation numbers should not be presented as if they were current.

Publisher, ownership and the Styria edition

The publisher is Falter Verlagsgesellschaft. In the detailed ownership structure given in German reference sources, the media owner of the weekly is Falter Zeitschriften GmbH, while Falter Verlags GmbH is the media owner of the falter.at website, and both companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of ST Verlagsbeteiligungen GmbH. Its owners are listed as the Ateleia Privatstiftung of Siegmar Schlager with 37.49 percent, the Andante Privatstiftung of Armin Thurnher with 27.49 percent, Hannes Pflaum and Hans-Michael Piech with 12.51 percent each, and editor-in-chief Florian Klenk with 10 percent. Earlier, after investor Günter Kerbler withdrew in 1999, Schlager and Thurnher together took 74.1 percent of the company.

From spring 2005 Falter also published a local edition for Styria, Austria's south-eastern state centred on Graz. The Styria edition ran from 2005 to 2008. It was then discontinued as a separate edition for financial reasons, and Styrian pages were integrated into the main edition; in the 2008 relaunch the Styria section was taken directly into Falter as a department of its own. The episode shows both the paper's ambition to extend its city-magazine model beyond Vienna and the economic limits on doing so as a separate product.

Digital development and place in Austrian media life

Compared with other publishers, Falter came late to the internet, initially keeping online content behind a paywall and concentrating on print — a conscious early decision that its editors later said had protected it from some of the structural problems that hit other titles. Its digital turn gathered pace in the late 2010s. In 2017 the columnist and former ORF journalist Raimund Löw started the FALTER Radio podcast, which became one of Austria's most successful podcasts. In 2019 Florian Jungnikl-Gossy was recruited from Der Standard as digital chief to develop digital products across the publishing group, with a focus on journalism and on services such as local guides and event and cinema databases.

In February 2021 Falter launched FALTER.morgen, an editorially produced daily newsletter intended to create a daily medium focused especially on urban topics; after one month it already had more than 30,000 subscribers. Formal recognition during the paper's history has included the Dr Karl Renner journalism prize's newcomer award for the editorial team in 1979, the first Prof. Claus Gatterer Prize for socially engaged journalism in 1985, a Concordia Prize in 2005, and European Newspaper Awards in 2008, 2009 and 2016. Taken together, that record explains Falter's standing: a Vienna weekly founded by amateurs in 1977 that professionalised without abandoning its founding brief — to report on everyday city life, to list what the city offers, and to investigate the institutions that run it.