About Format

Format

Format was a weekly finance and business magazine published in Austria and headquartered in Vienna, which existed from 1998 until its last issue on 21 December 2015. Published by the Verlagsgruppe NEWS, with Gruner und Jahr holding a stake, it appeared weekly on Fridays in German and covered business, politics, culture and lifestyles, featuring the views of bankers, trade experts and financiers. It was founded within the Fellner brothers' News group to challenge profil, the established news weekly, and after an early life as a general-interest news magazine it was repositioned, from 2003, as a magazine for economy and money. Its circulation traced the rise and long decline of Austrian print: 68,000 copies in 2003, 50,000 in 2007, a sold circulation of 47,155 in 2009, 61,000 in 2010, 31,021 in 2012, a recovery to 39,296 in the first half of 2013 and 50,000 reported in 2014. At the end of 2015 it was merged with its sister publication trend, and the combined title continued as trend alone. Format is therefore written about here entirely in the past tense, as a closed magazine whose seventeen years form a complete and instructive chapter in Austrian media history.

Founding in 1998: a challenger to profil

Format was established in 1998, within the News group built by Wolfgang Fellner and his brother Helmuth Fellner. Scholarly accounts of the Austrian business press record its founding purpose plainly: Format was founded in order to challenge profil, then still a subsidiary of Kurier, and in its first phase it achieved respectable results as the group's general-interest weekly. The context was the Austrian magazine boom of the nineteen-nineties, in which the Fellner group had already created News in 1992 and was systematically occupying magazine categories with heavily promoted new titles. A second news weekly alongside News itself only made sense as a weapon against the incumbent profil, Austria's leading investigative news magazine. Format's headquarters were in Vienna, its publisher was the Verlagsgruppe NEWS, and the German group Gruner und Jahr held a stake in the magazine, a typical construction of the period, in which Austrian magazine expansion was part-financed by German publishing capital. One of its editors-in-chief was Peter Pelinka, a prominent Austrian journalist whose name is recorded in European media manuals of the period among the magazine's defining editorial figures.

The 2001 relaunch and the turn to business

The decisive turn in Format's life came as the group reorganised its portfolio at the start of the two-thousands. Accounts of the Austrian business press describe how a merger in 2001 led to the relaunch of the weekly Format, the former general-interest paper of the News group, and how its editorial policy was changed in 2003 in order to avoid in-house competition. From then on, Format, still published every Friday, focused on economy and finance, as indicated by its new subtitle, Magazin für Wirtschaft und Geld, magazine for economy and money. The logic was portfolio management: with News occupying general news and society, a second title duplicating that territory divided the group's own audience and advertisers, whereas a business weekly could attack the business-magazine market held by trend and Gewinn. The repositioning was not, by the scholarly account, a success in reach terms. As a general-interest weekly, Format's reach had amounted to 7.1 percent in 2000; as the new magazine for economy and money, its reach was to drop to a mere 3.2 percent in 2005. That single comparison explains much of Format's subsequent history: it retained a respected business brief and a loyal professional readership, but at a smaller scale than its launch ambition.

What Format covered

In its mature form, Format covered topics mainly on business, politics, culture and lifestyles, and it also featured the views of bankers, trade experts and financiers. That combination, business-led but not business-only, distinguished it from a pure financial journal. Its readers were managers, investors and the financially interested public, who wanted Austrian company and market news, political context, and guidance on money, together with enough culture and lifestyle material to make a weekly magazine rather than a trade paper. Its Friday publication day placed it as a weekend read and as the closing summary of the business week. Within the Verlagsgruppe NEWS, it sat in a portfolio that included News itself, profil after the group's later consolidation, trend, Woman, TV-Media and other titles, which allowed shared services and cross-promotion but also, as the merger of 2015 would prove, made titles vulnerable when the group decided that two magazines in adjacent territories were one too many. Format's identity in its final decade was thus double: a distinct editorial voice in Austrian business journalism, and a portfolio asset whose survival depended on group strategy.

Circulation: the documented figures

Format's circulation is unusually well documented for an Austrian magazine, because it was reported in a succession of international media fact books and industry sources, and the figures together tell the story of its market. It had a circulation of 68,000 copies in 2003, the period of its business repositioning. Its circulation was 50,000 copies in 2007. The sold circulation of the weekly was 47,155 copies in 2009. In 2010 its circulation was 61,000 copies, a figure from the Western Europe media facts series that may reflect a different measure from the sold circulation of the year before, and which is reported here as published, without harmonisation. Its circulation in 2012 was 31,021 copies, the low point in the series. During the first half of 2013 its circulation increased to 39,296 copies, and the magazine sold 50,000 copies in 2014 according to the euro topics summary of the Austrian market. Read together, the series shows a title that declined from its early scale, stabilised at a lower level, and was still selling a substantial weekly number in its final full years. Its closure was therefore not the death of an unread magazine; it was a consolidation decision about a viable but subscale title.

The Austrian business-magazine market it contested

Format spent its business years in a three-cornered contest. trend, founded in 1970 by Oscar Bronner, was Austria's largest business magazine by circulation and the historic market leader, though trend and Gewinn together had been losing readers since 2001, their combined reach standing at 5.3 percent in 2005 in the scholarly account. Gewinn, the money and investment monthly, exchanged the top position with trend in the late nineteen-nineties, trend having reached its highest reach ever in 1994. Behind the contest lay structural pressures that historians of the Austrian business press identify clearly: slow economic growth and high unemployment from the late nineteen-nineties weakened the market; quality daily newspapers responded to every new business title by expanding their own business coverage and weekly supplements, absorbing the magazine reader's need; and magazine reading generally was becoming the habit of the over-fifty generation. Format's history cannot be understood without that context. It was launched into the last years of a boom, repositioned into a shrinking segment, and sustained for a further decade by group support and a professional niche, before consolidation ended it. Its story is the Austrian business magazine's story in miniature.

Merger with trend and the last issue

The end of Format was announced as a merger. Industry reporting in November 2015, carried by the advertising industry press, announced that the business magazines Format and Trend would merge to form one title: Trend. The magazine merged with its sister publication trend at the end of 2015, and the last issue of Format was published on 21 December 2015. The combined title continued under the trend name, absorbing Format's business territory into the older and larger brand, itself founded in 1970. A small correction to this directory's seed research should be recorded: the seed described Format as closed in 2016 and merged into trend in 2016, which reflects the first full year of the merged title, but the documented dates are the merger at the end of 2015 and the final Format issue of 21 December 2015. The distinction matters for bibliographic accuracy, since libraries and researchers date a magazine's run by its last issue. After that date, Format ceased to exist as an independent title, its web address and brand surviving only as history within the group that had created it seventeen years earlier.

The Fellner group and Gruner und Jahr

Format's ownership history places it at the centre of the Austrian magazine industry of its era. Its publisher was the Verlagsgruppe NEWS, the magazine group of the Fellner brothers, whose stable also produced News, and at various times much of Austria's commercial magazine market. Gruner und Jahr, the Hamburg magazine giant, had a stake in Format, as it did in the group's wider business, bringing German capital and know-how into Austrian magazine expansion. That structure had consequences. It financed launches and relaunches on a scale Austrian capital alone rarely attempted; it also meant that Format's fate was decided by portfolio logic in Vienna and Hamburg rather than by its own newsroom. When the economics of Austrian business publishing tightened, the rational group decision was to keep the stronger brand, trend, which the group also controlled following its consolidation of the market, and to fold Format into it. The magazine's end was thus the final proof of the system that had created it: in the Fellner model, titles were instruments of a portfolio, launched to contest categories and retired when the contest was better fought with fewer flags.

Editorial reputation and Peter Pelinka

Within its lifetime, Format was regarded as a serious business weekly whose pages carried the views of the Austrian financial establishment. European media manuals of the two-thousands, prepared for diplomats and researchers, cited it as a source that featured bankers, trade experts and financiers, which indicates that its interviews and market coverage were read as a record of Austrian business opinion. Peter Pelinka, recorded as one of its former editors-in-chief, was among Austria's best-known journalists, and his association with the title underlines that Format, especially in its earlier phase, aspired to journalistic weight beyond its business brief. Its founding mission against profil also left a mark: even after repositioning, it retained the news weekly's habits of cover-story journalism and political coverage alongside its economy and money core. Assessing its reputation honestly requires holding two facts together: it never displaced profil, and its reach halved after repositioning; yet it sustained, for seventeen years, a weekly business magazine of record in a very small language market, which many better-capitalised launches elsewhere failed to do.

Format in the longer history of Austrian magazines

Format's lifespan, 1998 to 2015, maps almost exactly onto the final expansion and consolidation of the Austrian consumer-magazine industry. It was born when German capital, the Fellner group's promotional machine and a growing advertising market made new weeklies plausible. It was repositioned when portfolio competition demanded differentiation. It declined with the structural fall of print reach, the expansion of newspaper business coverage and the migration of readers online, and it ended in a merger of the kind that closed or combined titles across Europe in the twenty-tens. For media historians, its complete documentation, founding purpose, relaunch, reach and circulation series, named editor, merger and final issue date all on public record, makes it an exceptionally useful case study, more instructive than many larger titles whose records are fragmentary. For this directory, it also serves as the necessary counterweight to the surviving titles around it: not every magazine in the Austrian list is alive, and a directory that records only survivors falsifies the market's history.

What survived Format

When Format ended, its territory did not vanish. trend, the surviving title of the merger, continued as the group's business weekly and, in its own history, records the 2016 merger with Format as the event that consolidated its position as Austria's business magazine of scale. Austrian business readers continued to be served by trend and Gewinn, by the expanded business sections of the quality dailies whose growth had squeezed the weeklies, and increasingly by digital business media. Format's journalists, in the normal pattern of such mergers, dispersed through the group's titles and the wider Austrian media. Its back run remains the physical legacy: seventeen years of weekly issues recording Austrian business and politics from the euro's introduction and the eastern enlargement of the European Union through the financial crisis and its aftermath, a source that researchers into Austria's economic history of those years can still consult in library holdings. A closed magazine is not a failed archive; it is a completed one.

Why Format is remembered

Format is remembered as the Fellner group's boldest attempt to outflank profil, as a business weekly that carried the voices of Austria's bankers and financiers, and as a case study in the economics that governed Austrian magazines between boom and consolidation. Founded in Vienna in 1998, published weekly on Fridays by the Verlagsgruppe NEWS with Gruner und Jahr participation, relaunched toward economy and money in 2003, and merged into trend with a final issue on 21 December 2015, it lived a complete magazine life in seventeen years. This profile has recorded that life in the past tense, as accuracy requires, corrected the seed's closing date from 2016 to the documented end of 2015, and preserved the circulation and reach figures that allow future readers to judge its scale for themselves. In a complete directory of Austrian magazines, the closed titles matter as much as the living ones, and few closed titles are as well documented, or as representative of their era, as Format.