About Novice

Novice

Novice, in full Novice – Slovenski tednik na Koroškem, meaning News – Slovenian Weekly for Carinthia, is a Slovenian-language weekly newspaper published in Klagenfurt for the Carinthian Slovenes, the recognised Slovenian minority of Austria. It was created on 11 April 2003 by merging the two historic weekly papers of the minority's two main representative organisations: Naš tednik, first published in September 1949 by the Council of Carinthian Slovenes, and Slovenski vestnik, first published in June 1946 by the Central Association of Slovenian Organisations in Carinthia. The merger united the minority's Christian-conservative and left-liberal press traditions in a single title, jointly owned by both organisations and distributed through their shared media company, SloMedia. A study of the Slovenian ethnic group in Carinthia by the OGM research institute, published in September 2022, found Novice to be the most-used own medium of the Carinthian Slovenes across all generations, ahead of every other minority publication and programme.

The two predecessor papers

Novice is unintelligible without its two predecessors, because the merger of 2003 ended a division that had structured Slovenian-language journalism in Carinthia for more than half a century. Slovenski vestnik, the Slovenian Herald, appeared first in June 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as the paper of the Central Association of Slovenian Organisations in Carinthia, the minority organisation that emerged from the wartime liberation movement and stood politically on the left-liberal side of the minority. Naš tednik, Our Weekly, followed in September 1949 as the paper of the Council of Carinthian Slovenes, the Christian-conservative representative body founded in the same period. For the rest of the twentieth century the two weeklies spoke in parallel to a small readership, each attached to one camp of a divided minority politics: the same villages, schools, parishes and cultural associations were reported twice, from two editorial standpoints. Both papers documented the central struggles of the Carinthian Slovenes, including the long conflict over bilingual place-name signs and the campaign for bilingual education, and both depended on the Austrian system of press and minority support that made small-language publishing economically possible at all.

The merger of 2003

Novice was formed in 2003 by the fusion of Naš tednik and Slovenski vestnik and appeared for the first time on 11 April 2003, with an initial print run of 3,500 copies. The decision to merge was both editorial and political. Editorially, a single weekly could pool scarce journalistic resources in a very small language market and offer readers one fuller paper instead of two thinner ones. Politically, a joint paper required the minority's two historically rival umbrella organisations to cooperate as co-owners, and the structure they built reflects that caution: the two main publishers and owners, the Council of Carinthian Slovenes and the Central Association of Slovenian Organisations in Carinthia, distribute Novice through SloMedia GmbH, the Slovenian Media Centre, in which each side is represented by two trustees holding fifty per cent each. That parity arrangement has allowed the paper to present itself as the common weekly of the whole ethnic group rather than the organ of one camp, and it is the institutional foundation on which its later success with readers was built.

Ownership and the SloMedia model

The ownership of Novice is unusual in Austrian journalism. Its proprietors are not a commercial publishing house but the two principal interest organisations of an ethnic minority, acting jointly. The Council of Carinthian Slovenes is described in reference sources as Christian-conservative, and the Central Association of Slovenian Organisations in Carinthia as left-liberal; together they represent the two historic political traditions of the Carinthian Slovenes. Their joint vehicle, SloMedia, the Slovenian Media Centre in Klagenfurt, handles the paper's distribution and business side. This structure has two consequences for the paper's journalism. First, Novice is accountable to the minority's own institutions, and its coverage of minority politics is therefore both insider reporting and, at times, a subject of debate within the community itself. Second, its economics are those of minority media generally: a small circulation in a small language group cannot by itself finance a professional newsroom, so the paper operates within Austria's framework of ethnic-group and press funding, a reality that its own pages have discussed openly in periods of financial difficulty, including a widely reported funding crisis in the mid-2010s when the paper's future was publicly debated before it continued publication.

Content and role as the minority's weekly

As the joint weekly of the Carinthian Slovenes, Novice reports the life of the minority in Slovenian: the work of its councils, associations, schools and cultural groups; bilingual education and language policy in Carinthia; church and village news from the Slovenian-speaking south of the province; culture, literature and sport; and the politics of Klagenfurt, Vienna and Ljubljana insofar as they affect the minority. It also serves as a forum in which the community debates itself, carrying commentary and readers' contributions across the old camp boundaries that its merger was designed to soften. Alongside the church-owned Slovenian weekly Nedelja, which concentrates on diocesan and cultural life from a Catholic standpoint, Novice is the minority's secular general newspaper, and the two titles together give Slovenian-language readers in Austria a small but complete weekly press. Because the Slovenian-speaking population of Carinthia numbers only in the tens of thousands, every institution that produces regular, edited Slovenian prose carries a language-preserving weight that a similarly sized paper in a majority language would not: the weekly is simultaneously a news product, a cultural archive and a practical demonstration that Slovenian is a living public language in Austria.

The 2022 OGM study

The strongest evidence of Novice's position comes from research rather than from the paper itself. In September 2022 the OGM institute published a major study of the Slovenian ethnic group in Carinthia, commissioned within the framework of ethnic-group support by the Federal Chancellery, which for the first time in twenty years assembled valid demographic data on the minority and, in doing so, measured for the first time how frequently the group's own media are actually used. Its finding, as reported in the reference literature, is that the weekly newspaper Novice is the most-used own medium of the Carinthian Slovenes across all generations. The study's wider findings frame the paper's achievement: the number of minority members in the core settlement area continues to decline, partly through the out-migration of young women to Vienna and Graz, while Slovenian is simultaneously being revitalised in southern Carinthia by immigration from Slovenia since that country's accession to the European Union. A print weekly that remains the community's most-used medium in every age group, in that demographic environment, is performing a connective role that newer channels have not replaced.

Novice in the Carinthian media landscape

Novice appears in Klagenfurt, the Carinthian capital, which is also home to the German-language Kleine Zeitung's Carinthian operation, the Slovenian church weekly Nedelja, the bilingual Hermagoras and Drava publishing houses and the bilingual free radio station Radio AGORA. Against the German-language provincial press, which reports Slovenian minority affairs only intermittently, Novice provides continuous coverage from inside the community and in its language. Its first issue's print run of 3,500 copies, recorded in the reference sources, gives a sense of scale: the entire Slovenian-language weekly press of Austria operates with circulations that would be marginal for a German-language local paper, yet within its community its reach is comprehensive. No verified current circulation figure is asserted in this profile, because the sources consulted do not publish one that can be stated responsibly; the documented points are the 2003 launch circulation, the joint ownership through SloMedia, and the 2022 research finding on usage. Those three facts together describe a paper that is small in absolute terms and central in relative ones.

Language politics and public significance

Novice's existence is inseparable from the history of minority rights in Carinthia. The Carinthian Slovenes are one of Austria's recognised ethnic groups, whose rights were promised in Article 7 of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 and developed in later ethnic-group legislation. For decades the practical extent of bilingual schooling, bilingual topography and public funding for minority institutions was disputed, sometimes bitterly, in Carinthian politics. A Slovenian weekly published jointly by the minority's two umbrella organisations is both a beneficiary of that legal framework and one of its instruments: it reports on the implementation of minority rights, scrutinises the provincial and federal authorities, and maintains the Slovenian-language public sphere on which claims to bilingual institutions rest. The decision of the two rival organisations in 2003 to publish one paper rather than two was itself read as a sign of consolidation within the minority, and the paper's subsequent position as the group's most-used medium has strengthened its claim to speak as a common platform rather than as a factional organ.

Challenges of a small-language weekly

The difficulties facing Novice are structural and are openly documented in its own history. Its market is bounded by the size of the Slovenian-speaking population in Carinthia, which demographic research shows to be shrinking in its traditional settlement area even as Slovenian immigration from the neighbouring republic adds new speakers. Its costs — editorial staff, printing and distribution — are those of any professional weekly, while its advertising market is limited to a small regional economy and its readers are simultaneously served by Slovenian media from Slovenia itself and by German-language Austrian media. Its history includes at least one serious, publicly discussed financial crisis in the 2010s, when closure was openly contemplated in its pages and the question of public funding for the joint weekly became a matter of negotiation involving the minority organisations and public authorities. That the paper survived that episode and was, a few years later, measured as the minority's most-used medium suggests that the merger model of 2003 — one paper, jointly owned, professionally produced — was the right answer to the economics of a very small language market, even though the underlying financial fragility of such media has not disappeared.

Novice today

Today Novice continues to appear weekly in Klagenfurt in Slovenian, published jointly by the Council of Carinthian Slovenes and the Central Association of Slovenian Organisations in Carinthia through their SloMedia centre. It stands in a line of Slovenian journalism in Carinthia that runs from Slovenski vestnik in 1946 and Naš tednik in 1949 through to the unified title of 2003, and it shares the small Slovenian-language media landscape of the province with the older church weekly Nedelja. The 2022 OGM finding that it is the most-used own medium of the Carinthian Slovenes in every generation is the clearest available measure of its standing: two decades after the merger that created it, the joint weekly has become the common printed forum of a minority whose institutions were divided for most of the post-war era. For readers outside the community, Novice is also a documentary record of how Austria's smallest recognised language groups sustain a public sphere — one weekly, carefully owned, in which a whole minority can recognise itself.