About Neue Vorarlberger Tageszeitung

Neue Vorarlberger Tageszeitung

Neue Vorarlberger Tageszeitung, almost always shortened to NEUE, is a German-language regional daily newspaper for Vorarlberg, the westernmost federal state of Austria. It has been in circulation since 1972 and is published for a state whose capital is Bregenz, a city on the eastern shore of Lake Constance, close to Austria's borders with Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Reference listings give Bregenz as the newspaper's headquarters, while its newsroom has worked since the mid-1990s under the same roof as its sister paper in the media house at Schwarzach, a municipality near Bregenz in the Rhine valley. Its official website is neue.at. The NEUE is the smaller of Vorarlberg's two daily newspapers, but it occupies a distinctive place in the state's media life: it was founded as a deliberate alternative to a dominant rival, it keeps an unusual publishing rhythm that rests on Mondays instead of Sundays, and it continues to compete editorially with that rival even though both titles have belonged to the same publishing house since 1990.

The newspaper is described in English-language reference works as a small-format newspaper with an independent political stance. Its publisher is listed in German-language reference works as NEUE Zeitungs GmbH, and the title is published by Russmedia Verlag, part of the Russmedia group run by the Russ family. That combination of small scale and long continuity defines the NEUE. Vorarlberg is Austria's second-smallest state by area and population, with around 413,000 inhabitants recorded for 2025, yet it sustains a strong regional identity, an Alemannic dialect distinct from the Austro-Bavarian dialects spoken in most of Austria, and a nickname, the Ländle, that reflects its sense of itself as a small land apart. A regional daily written for such a state is necessarily close to its readers, and the NEUE has built its identity around that closeness.

Foundation in 1972 as an Alternative

The NEUE was established in 1972 as an alternative to the Vorarlberger Nachrichten, known as the VN, which at the time dominated Vorarlberg's daily newspaper market in what German-language accounts describe as a monopolistic position. That founding purpose matters, because it explains the new paper's reason to exist: readers and advertisers in the state were offered a second daily voice where previously there had effectively been one. The VN itself dated from 1945 and was published by the Russ family's Bregenz printing and publishing house, whose roots went back to 1919. A challenger launched against such an entrenched title faced a difficult market, and the NEUE's survival through the 1970s and 1980s as an independent competitor is the first chapter of its history.

Reference works record the basic facts of that foundation consistently. The Europa World Year Book and later listings date the establishment to 1972, give the language as German, the headquarters as Bregenz and the coverage area as the whole of Vorarlberg. From the beginning, therefore, the NEUE was not a town paper for Bregenz alone, even though Bregenz is the state capital. It was a state newspaper, aiming at the Rhine valley towns, including Dornbirn, which is larger than Bregenz, and Feldkirch, as well as the smaller Alpine communities of the Bregenzerwald, the Montafon and the Walgau. That state-wide ambition has remained the paper's frame ever since.

Acquisition by Russmedia in 1990 and Life Under One Roof in Schwarzach

The second chapter began in 1990, when Russmedia Verlag GmbH, then still known as the Vorarlberger Medienhaus, bought the NEUE. The acquisition ended the paper's existence as a publication owned separately from its competitor and made the two Vorarlberg dailies sister titles. The publishing group itself was renamed Russmedia in 2012, having previously traded as the Vorarlberger Medienhaus, and its headquarters is in Schwarzach. German-language listings of Austrian newspapers record the ownership of Russmedia Verlag as 61.5 percent held by Russmedia Holding GmbH and 38.5 percent by the Sophie Kempf-Russ Privatstiftung, reflecting the Russ family's continuing control of the group through its holding and foundation structures.

Since the mid-1990s the two newsrooms have worked under a common roof in the Medienhaus, the media house, in Schwarzach. What makes the arrangement unusual, and what accounts of the NEUE consistently stress, is how strictly the two operations are kept apart inside that shared building. The NEUE and the VN are separated spatially and in personnel, and they stand in editorial competition with one another: separate newsrooms, separate editors and separate journalistic judgements. The synergies that common ownership does exploit lie outside the editorial product itself, in the advertising market and in distribution, where the two titles share commercial and logistical systems. In other words, the house sells and delivers the papers together but does not merge their journalism, a model designed to preserve the appearance and, as far as possible, the reality of the two-paper market that existed before 1990.

The Unusual Publishing Rhythm: Tuesday to Sunday

The NEUE's most distinctive feature is its publication pattern. It appears from Tuesday to Sunday, and Monday is its rest day. German-language reference works describe it as one of the very few daily newspapers in the world to organise its week in this way. Most Austrian and European dailies traditionally appear from Monday to Saturday, or daily except Sunday; the NEUE inverts that convention. Its readers receive no Monday edition, but they do receive a Sunday edition, published as NEUE am Sonntag, at a point in the week when, as German-language accounts note, there is no comparable competing product in Vorarlberg.

That Sunday strength shows in the figures attached to it. On Sundays the paper's circulation has been recorded as reaching 45,000 copies, a multiple of its ordinary weekday print run. The pattern was already visible in the figures for 2010 cited in reference works, which gave an average circulation of 8,346 copies from Tuesday to Saturday but 30,485 copies on Sundays. The Sunday paper is therefore not a minor extension of the weekday title; it is, by copies, the largest edition of the week, and it gives the NEUE a day of the Vorarlberg newspaper market substantially to itself, balancing the absence of a Monday paper. Austrian media commentary likewise notes that on Mondays the VN appears in place of the NEUE, so that readers of the Schwarzach house are served across the whole week by one title or the other.

Format, Editorial Profile and the Kleine Zeitung Cooperation

Physically, the NEUE is a small paper. It is printed in a format modelled on DIN A4, the standard European paper size, and English-language summaries describe it as a small-format boulevard newspaper. That compact, near-A4 page distinguishes it from larger-format Austrian quality dailies and suits a popular regional paper designed to be read quickly at home, at work and on the move. Within that compact format, the paper's stated editorial line, recorded in German-language reference accounts, is to put the people of Vorarlberg at the centre of its reporting, together with their working and living environment.

The reporting itself is divided between what the NEUE researches locally and what it takes from a partner. The paper has a close cooperation with the Kleine Zeitung, the large Styrian daily based in Graz, which supplies the NEUE with contributions on Austria-wide topics, above all domestic politics. Local topics the NEUE researches itself. Its stated focal points are state politics, business, sport, culture and the Chronik, the Austrian newspaper tradition of local news, courts, accidents and community events. Generous space is given to regional reportage and to the presentation of start-ups and portraits of entrepreneurs, reflecting Vorarlberg's economy of small and medium-sized export-oriented firms as well as its public life. National politics from Vienna thus reaches NEUE readers largely through its Styrian partner, while the journalism that defines the title, the coverage of the state itself, is produced by its own newsroom.

Circulation, Reach and Audience

By Austrian national standards the NEUE is a small-circulation daily, and its audited figures need to be read in that context. In November 2001 it sold 7,426 copies, a figure recorded in Austrian press documentation of the period, which also placed it among the smallest titles in the national circulation audit. Reference works record a circulation of 20,136 copies for 2002, a figure of 13,000 copies for 2007 and an average of about 8,000 copies in the mid-2010s. Those figures were compiled on different bases at different dates, and they should be read as a broad picture of a paper selling in the high thousands on weekdays, with the much larger Sunday sale described above, rather than as a single consistent series. The Österreichische Auflagenkontrolle, the Austrian circulation audit body known as the ÖAK, recorded a sold circulation of 7,286 copies for the first half of 2017, with a reach of 43,000 readers attached to that period.

The most recent figures compiled in Austrian newspaper listings give the NEUE a print run of 7,339 copies and a national reach of 0.6 percent. Within Vorarlberg itself its position is naturally much stronger: Austrian media reporting based on audience research puts its reach at 8.1 percent in its home state and its readership at 44,000 people, while the Sunday edition, NEUE am Sonntag, is credited in the same reporting with a reach of 14.1 percent in the state. The contrast between the modest national percentage and the meaningful state-level audience captures the nature of the title: it makes almost no impression on Austria-wide tables dominated by Viennese and national papers, but in the small market it was created to serve it is read by a significant minority of the population, and on Sundays by a considerably larger one.

Leadership and Recent Editorial Change

German-language reference listings name NEUE Zeitungs GmbH as both publisher and publishing company of the paper, with Markus Raith recorded as its managing director. The editor-in-chief is Joachim Mangard, who took over the editorship on 2 April 2024. Mangard came to the post from within the Russmedia group: before his appointment he had worked as chief reporter for Vorarlberg Online, the group's online format known as VOL.at. His appointment was announced in March 2024 in the group's own publications.

Mangard's arrival followed a transitional period in the newsroom. His predecessor, Moritz Moser, had joined the NEUE in June 2021 as a local editor after returning to Vorarlberg from Vienna, and in December 2021 he succeeded Sebastian Rauch as editor-in-chief; Rauch left to lead communications at Bregenz city hall. Moser, a political science graduate who had previously worked in federal administration and as a domestic politics editor for Austrian online outlets, left the paper in late 2023 to move to the newsroom of ORF Vorarlberg, the regional studio of the Austrian public broadcaster. Between his departure, announced in the autumn of 2023 and effective around November and December of that year, and Mangard's start the following April, his deputy Jörg Stadler led the editorial team on an interim basis. The sequence illustrates the small, interconnected character of Vorarlberg journalism, in which senior figures move between the Schwarzach media house, public broadcasting and public administration within the same small state.

Digital Presence at neue.at and the Joint Subscription

The NEUE's digital home is its official website, neue.at, listed as the paper's web address in reference works and in the domain records of its publisher's Schwarzach organisation. Through the site and its digital editions, the printed paper's journalism is available beyond the print run, and the title also exists as a mobile application: the NEUE Vorarlberger Tageszeitung app, developed by Russmedia Digital GmbH, has been available through Google Play since August 2014 and presents the digital edition of the paper around the clock, promising current news from Vorarlberg, Austria and the world on smartphone and tablet through a continuously updated news feed.

The paper's digital commercial model is integrated with its sister titles. In 2021, according to Russmedia's own company history, the group introduced a joint premium digital subscription under which premium articles from the Vorarlberger Nachrichten, the NEUE and VOL.at became available together. The NEUE thus sits inside a bundle in which the Schwarzach house sells its Vorarlberg journalism as a combined offer, spanning its flagship daily, its smaller daily and its free regional news portal. For a title with a weekday print run below 8,000 copies, that shared digital infrastructure, shared subscription and shared technology are part of what common ownership provides, alongside the shared advertising and distribution systems described in accounts of the Schwarzach media house.

Supplements, the Flora Gala and Community Engagement

Beyond daily news, the NEUE publishes supplements that reflect the preoccupations of its region. At the start of the football season it publishes the Anstoss football planner, a supplement presenting Vorarlberg's football clubs from the Bundesliga and the second tier down through the Regionalliga West and, from the Vorarlbergliga downwards to the second state class, all teams, with squad photographs, player names, arrivals and departures, and the chairman, coach, sporting director and season objective of each club. For a state with a dense network of village and town clubs, such a publication functions as a seasonal record of local sport as much as a preview.

A second supplement, the magazine GartenLust, is included with the NEUE three times a year. Produced in cooperation with the guild of Vorarlberg gardeners and florists, it covers garden care, native flora and fauna and attractive living, with seasonal tips and advice. The gardening theme extends into an event organised by the Sunday paper: the NEUE-Flora-Gala, an annual state-wide competition run by NEUE am Sonntag in which a jury honours the most beautiful gardens in Vorarlberg. Gardeners can enter in categories including productive, farm and guest gardens, floral decoration, green oases in businesses and the more unusual garden, and at the awards evening a winning municipality is also honoured with the Flora-Rose for floral decoration and gardens in its local area; St. Gallenkirch, Silbertal and Gaschurn, all Montafon communities, were among the municipalities so honoured in the mid-2010s. Supplements and events of this kind are typical of Austrian regional dailies, binding the newspaper to the associational and community life of its market between news cycles.

Place in Vorarlberg's Concentrated Media Landscape

Any profile of the NEUE must note the debate about the market in which it operates. Because Russmedia publishes both Vorarlberg dailies, operates the regional portal VOL.at and, according to Austrian media reporting, also runs the radio station Antenne Vorarlberg and the television channel Ländle TV, the group is frequently described as holding something close to a media monopoly in the state. Critics quoted in Austrian media analysis question how far the apparent diversity of two daily newspaper titles amounts to genuine plurality when both belong to one house, and reporting in 2021 by the national daily Der Standard and by the broadcaster Ö1 noted an initial absence of coverage in Russmedia's own titles of an affair concerning advertising dealings and personnel links between the state ÖVP, Russmedia and an associated company, coverage that followed only after outside pressure. The house's response, recorded from its management in earlier years, is that its media genuinely compete with one another, a claim supported structurally by the strictly separate newsrooms in Schwarzach.

The NEUE also operates within Austria's system of public press support. Compilations of the 2025 funding data of the Austrian regulator RTR list the paper among the recipients of press promotion, quality journalism funding and digital transformation funding, with the combined amounts recorded for the title totalling more than 1.3 million euros across those categories. Such subsidies are a standard feature of Austrian newspaper economics, directed in part at preserving regional diversity, and for a small title they form a material part of the business alongside sales and advertising. Taken together, the funding, the shared commercial systems and the separate newsroom describe the NEUE's settlement with its circumstances: a genuinely distinct editorial product, founded in 1972 to give Vorarlberg a second daily voice, sustained inside the group it was created to challenge. More than five decades after its foundation, it still appears six days a week, still rests on Monday, and still addresses itself, in German and in a compact format, to the people of the Ländle.