About Täglich Alles

Täglich Alles

Täglich Alles was a German-language daily tabloid newspaper published in Vienna between 1992 and 2000. Its name, which translates as Daily Everything, announced its ambition plainly: to give Austrian readers everything, every day, in colour, at a price well below that of its rivals. Founded by the publisher Kurt Falk and first published on 5 April 1992, it rose with remarkable speed to become Austria's second-largest daily by print run and sales behind the Kronen Zeitung, and then declined just as quickly, losing advertising revenue because of its sensationalism and its political stance, above all its opposition to Austria's membership of the European Union. It ceased publication in August 2000, with its last issue dated 12 August 2000 in Austrian press records. Though it lived for only eight years, it remained one of the most discussed newspaper launches of the Second Republic.

Kurt Falk and the idea of a cheap colour daily

The founder, Kurt Falk, was one of the most experienced popular publishers in post-war Austria. He had been Hans Dichand's right-hand man and marketing strategist in the building of the Kronen Zeitung in the 1960s, later held a share in that paper, and went on to found the successful weekly entertainment magazine Die Ganze Woche. Falk understood the Austrian kiosk and subscription market as few others did: he knew that price, colour, games, prizes and television listings sold papers. Täglich Alles applied that knowledge to a new daily. It was printed entirely in colour, a novelty on the Austrian daily market at the time, using four-colour production that made its pages look more like a magazine than a traditional newspaper. One scholarly description indeed characterised it as a daily magazine rather than a conventional newspaper.

Launch in April 1992 and the three-schilling price

The paper was first published on 5 April 1992 and sold initially for just three schillings, about a third of the price of competing tabloids. The low price was the centrepiece of its launch strategy, supported by free copies, promotional games and prizes designed to build trial readership quickly. The strategy worked in circulation terms. Within a year of its start the paper claimed about 1.1 million readers, an extraordinary figure in a country of some eight million people. At its peak in sales terms it reached second place in the Austrian market, with a reported 423,000 daily copies sold in 1998, behind only the Kronen Zeitung, whose dominance no Austrian paper of the era seriously threatened. For a time in the 1990s, Austria's tabloid market appeared to have room for two mass titles, and Täglich Alles was the proof.

Format, style and content

Täglich Alles was edited in Vienna under editor-in-chief Oswald Hicker. Its journalism favoured short, undetailed news stories, extensive photographs, big headlines and colloquial language. Sport, human-interest stories, gossip, scandals and service pages, including a large television section, stood at the centre of the paper. This was deliberate popular journalism in the Falk tradition: accessible, emotional, visually loud and designed to be bought on impulse and read quickly. Critics in Austria and abroad described it as the extreme example of the country's sensational tabloid press, grouping it with the Kronen Zeitung and Kurier as one of the three popular-to-sensational titles that together commanded roughly sixty-five percent of the daily market in the late 1990s. Supporters of the format argued, as tabloid publishers usually do, that it reached readers whom quality papers did not reach at all.

Populism and opposition to the European Union

The paper was never politically neutral. Its alignment was described as populist and Eurosceptic, and its opposition to Austria's accession to the European Union, decided by referendum in 1994 and effective from 1995, was a defining editorial campaign. It also expressed strong views on other significant political events and was noted in academic studies for a xenophobic discourse; a 1992 study of the political orientation of Austrian newspaper readers found that forty-six percent of its readers held xenophobic attitudes, a finding frequently cited in the literature on the Austrian media and the rise of the Freedom Party in the same decade. The paper's politics were part of its commercial identity, speaking to readers who felt unrepresented by the grand-coalition establishment of Social Democrats and People's Party that had governed Austria for much of the post-war period.

The advertising problem

The same qualities that built its readership undermined its business. Because of its political stance, particularly its opposition to the European Union, and because of its sensationalist journalism, the paper significantly lost advertising revenue. Advertisers, especially larger companies and institutions that supported EU membership or feared association with controversy, stayed away. The economics of a cheap tabloid depend on advertising even more than those of an expensive quality paper, since the cover price is set too low to cover production and distribution. Täglich Alles doubled its price after about five years, a sign of the pressure it was under, but higher prices in turn weakened the very proposition, the bargain colour daily, on which its circulation had been built. The paper was caught, in the end, between a readership that loved its price and politics and an advertising market that punished both.

Competition with the Kronen Zeitung

Any account of Täglich Alles must reckon with the shadow of the Kronen Zeitung. Falk had helped to create the Krone's success, and his new paper was in part an attempt to repeat the trick against his former house. The Krone responded as the dominant incumbent, with its own regional editions, promotions and unmatched distribution strength. Press histories of the period note that the Krone's leadership in circulation and advertising was only occasionally challenged between 1985 and 2000, and Täglich Alles was the most serious of those challenges. Yet the challenger never displaced the leader, and the effort of competing, in promotions, in price and in print capacity, consumed resources that a paper with weakening advertising income could ill afford. When Täglich Alles closed, the Austrian market reverted to its familiar shape, with the Krone unchallenged at the top of the tabloid field.

Final years and closure in August 2000

By the late 1990s the paper was losing money despite its still-large sales. Falling advertising, the rising price it was forced to charge, and growing internet competition in its final years all contributed to the end. Publication ceased in August 2000; Austrian listings give 12 August 2000 as the date of the last issue. The closure came only eight years after a launch that had seemed to prove that a new mass daily could still be created in a mature, concentrated market. In one sense it had proved exactly that, for circulation. In another sense it proved the opposite, for profitability: in the Austria of the 1990s a new tabloid could win readers in the hundreds of thousands and still fail as a business. The distinction between reach and revenue was the central lesson of the paper's short life.

Place in Austrian press history

Täglich Alles occupies a distinctive place in Austrian media history as the last major attempt to launch a new national mass-market daily from scratch in the print era. After its closure, the significant Austrian daily launches were of a different kind: the free commuter paper experiment of U-Express in 2001 and, later, Heute, and the hybrid free and paid daily Österreich in 2006. None repeated the Falk model of a paid, full-colour, ultra-cheap tabloid in direct competition with the Krone. Histories of the Austrian press written around 2000 still listed Täglich Alles among the defining titles of the tabloid sector, a measure of how completely, for eight years, it had inserted itself into the country's daily reading habits and political arguments.

Assessment and legacy

The paper's legacy is double-edged. As a publishing achievement, it demonstrated the enduring power of price, colour and promotion in the Austrian market and the skill of Kurt Falk, the last of the great post-war Viennese popular publishers to launch a daily. As a journalistic and political phenomenon, it was criticised, in its lifetime and afterwards, for sensationalism, for its campaign against European integration, and for a discourse on foreigners that scholars documented and condemned. Both judgements belong to the record. Täglich Alles was not a marginal curiosity but a mass medium read, at its height, by more than a million Austrians, and its rise and fall captured, in compressed form, the strengths and the pathologies of Austria's tabloid democracy in the 1990s. When it disappeared in August 2000, an era of ambitious print launches in Vienna effectively disappeared with it.