About Vorarlberger Nachrichten

Vorarlberger Nachrichten

Vorarlberger Nachrichten, usually shortened to VN, is a German-language daily newspaper for Vorarlberg, the westernmost federal state of Austria. It is published in Bregenz, the state capital on the eastern shore of Lake Constance, and it serves readers across the whole of Vorarlberg rather than a single town or district. The newspaper is published by Russmedia Verlag, part of the Russmedia group that is run by the Russ publishing family, and its official website is vn.at. In a small state with a strong regional identity, the VN occupies an unusually central position: it is described in reference works as the daily newspaper with the strongest reach in Vorarlberg, holding a market share of about 56 percent among daily newspapers in the state. It appears daily except on Sundays, combining state politics, municipal news, business, culture and sport with coverage of Austria and the wider world.

The newspaper's history reaches back well beyond its own name. Its recognised predecessor is the Vorarlberger Landeszeitung, a title that first appeared in the nineteenth century, and the publishing house behind the VN dates to a Bregenz book printing business acquired by Eugen Russ in 1919. The paper that readers know today emerged in the autumn of 1945, in the first months after the Second World War, and it has remained in the hands of the same family ever since, now in its fourth generation. That continuity, together with a series of printing and digital firsts, explains much of the VN's standing in Austrian media history as well as in daily life in Vorarlberg.

Overview and Identity

The Vorarlberger Nachrichten is a regional daily in the Austrian tradition of the Bundeslandzeitung, a newspaper whose primary loyalty and primary market is one federal state. Vorarlberg is Austria's second-smallest state by population, set between Lake Constance, the Rhine valley and the high Alps, and bordering Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. A newspaper covering such a compact but economically active region can plausibly aim to cover every council, valley and major employer, and the VN is built around that ambition. Its reporting is in German, the language of the state, and it is written for a readership that lives largely in the Rhine valley towns of Bregenz, Dornbirn, Feldkirch and Bludenz, as well as in smaller Alpine communities.

The VN is an independent daily rather than a party newspaper. Austria-Forum, the Austrian reference lexicon, describes it as an independent daily newspaper founded in Bregenz and published in the newspaper publishing house of the Russ family. That independence from political parties distinguishes the post-war VN from its nineteenth-century predecessor, which had a semi-official character. Today the title operates inside a wider family media group alongside a sister daily, the Neue Vorarlberger Tageszeitung, known as NEUE, the weekly paper Wann & Wo, the regional online portal VOL.AT and the radio station Antenne Vorarlberg. Even within that portfolio, the VN remains the flagship and the largest newspaper in the state.

Roots in the Vorarlberger Landeszeitung

The VN's roots lie in the Vorarlberger Landeszeitung, which is regarded as its predecessor. That paper began as a weekly, first appearing on 11 August 1863, and it became a daily in 1887. Before it, Bregenz had the Bregenzer Wochenblatt, whose publisher Anton Flatz received the government concession to publish an official gazette in 1863; the weekly ceased publication on 4 August of that year and the Landeszeitung followed a week later. In its early form the Landeszeitung combined an official section with a non-official part, and its political line tended to follow the government of the day, reflecting its semi-official status and the subsidy attached to its contract with the state government. Its outlook changed over the decades, described variously as liberal, then conservative, then Christian-social and finally patriotic in character.

That long first chapter ended abruptly in 1938, when the Landeszeitung was banned by the National Socialists following the annexation of Austria. By then the title had already passed into the orbit of the family that still publishes the VN. In 1919 Eugen Russ, who lived from 1877 to 1962, acquired a book printing business in Römerstraße in Bregenz that published the Vorarlberger Landeszeitung, and he worked there as editor, publisher and proprietor. In 1929 the printing works moved to Kirchstraße in Bregenz, where Russ converted the former Gasthaus Rose into a sizeable printing plant. When the predecessor title was prohibited in 1938, the printing house survived, and it was to the Russ family that the task of launching a new daily fell at the end of the war in 1945.

Foundation in 1945 and the Russ Family

The dates of the VN's first appearance are recorded in two stages, and a careful account should state both openly. Austria-Forum dates the founding of the Vorarlberger Nachrichten to 1 September 1945, and German-language reference accounts explain that the first edition under this name appeared on that date, initially as a licensed paper of the French military government, Vorarlberg then lying in the French occupation zone of post-war Austria. The first independent issue followed on 16 November 1945, the date Russmedia's own company history gives for the first issue of the Vorarlberger Nachrichten, with Eugen Russ as editor-in-chief. Anniversary coverage in 2025, marking eighty years of the paper, uses the same distinction: licensed publication from 1 September 1945, then a party-independent daily from 16 November 1945.

Alongside Eugen Russ senior, his son Toni Russ worked in the business as company head and editor-in-chief, and after his father's death in 1962 Toni Russ led the newspaper to market leadership in Vorarlberg. Toni Russ died in 1969; his wife Rosa Russ succeeded him as publisher. Eugen A. Russ, Toni's son, entered and then led the group in the following generation, becoming managing director of the media house and editor-in-chief of the VN in the early 1980s, and he is credited in company and anniversary accounts with driving the paper's later printing innovations and its transformation into the Russmedia group. The family connection continues into a fourth generation, represented today by Eugen B. Russ and by Isabel Russ, who became editor-in-chief in February 2024.

Growth and Market Leadership

Under Toni Russ and his successors the VN consolidated a position that regional competitors have not displaced. Market analyses of Austrian regional media note that Vorarlberg is the exception to the national pattern in one respect: the nationwide tabloid Kronen Zeitung is not the most significant newspaper in the local market there. Instead, the VN and its sister title NEUE, published by the same house, dominate daily newspaper reading in the state, and studies of media concentration observe that the house's print products reach more than half of the regional population, alongside its leading positions in regional radio and online media. That concentration is itself a recurring subject of academic and public discussion about media plurality in a very small market.

The paper's influence has at times extended beyond routine reporting. Anniversary histories recall, for example, the central role the VN played in the Fußach affair of 1964, a celebrated confrontation between Vorarlberg and the federal government in Vienna over the naming of a Lake Constance ship, which became a defining episode in the state's assertion of its own identity within Austria. Whether or not every reader shares that tradition, the episode illustrates the kind of state-level cause a dominant regional paper can amplify. The VN's growth also proceeded by acquisition and launch inside its own house: the weekly Wann & Wo was bought in 1984, and from 1990 the house also published NEUE, the second Vorarlberg daily founded in 1972.

Printing Innovation and International Recognition

The VN has a notable record in production technology. In 1993 it became the first daily newspaper in the world to be produced entirely, throughout the paper, in four-colour printing, a milestone recorded by German-language reference works, by the Russmedia group history and by anniversary accounts of the title. Some English-language summaries date the paper's four-colour milestone to 1994 and describe it as the first traditional Austrian newspaper to print in four colours; the 1993 date is the one attached specifically to continuous four-colour production on the group's new press. Either way, colour throughout the paper was exceptional for a regional daily of its size at the time and required substantial investment by a family publisher.

International recognition followed. On 5 June 2006, at the 59th World Newspaper Congress in Moscow, the Vorarlberger Nachrichten was named Newspaper of the Year. English-language reference accounts explain that the award recognised the paper's quality journalism, its innovation, its use of multimedia and its economic management. For a German-language regional daily from Austria's smallest-but-one state, the award placed the VN, at least for that year, at the head of an international field of much larger titles, and it remains one of the most frequently cited honours in profiles of both the newspaper and its publisher.

Circulation, Reach and Market Position

Circulation figures chart both the VN's strength in its home market and the long decline affecting print newspapers across Austria. At the start of the 2000s the paper sold around 72,000 copies, a figure recorded for both 2002 and 2004, making it one of Austria's ten best-selling dailies at that time. Sales then eased gradually: about 63,625 copies from Monday to Saturday in October 2010, an average of roughly 63,000 copies in 2013, and 56,914 copies in 2018. The audited figures published by the Österreichische Auflagenkontrolle, the Austrian circulation audit body known as the ÖAK, show the trend continuing in recent years, with sold circulation in the second half of each year falling from 55,916 in 2019 to 53,968 in 2021, 51,369 in 2022, 48,829 in 2023 and 46,909 in 2024.

The most recent audited figure in that series is a sold circulation of 45,260 copies in the second half of 2025, according to the ÖAK. Readership, as distinct from copies sold, is considerably larger. Anniversary reporting citing the Austrian Media-Analyse for 2024/25 puts the print edition's readership at 153,000 people, a print reach of 38.2 percent in Vorarlberg, and a cross-media reach of 259,000 people, or 58.4 percent, when print and digital are combined. Those reach figures, together with the roughly 56 percent share of the state's daily newspaper market, are the basis for the standard description of the VN as Vorarlberg's strongest-reach daily newspaper. Readers should note that reach and market share come from survey and reference sources of different dates, so they describe the paper's position in broad terms rather than a single audited snapshot.

Publisher, Leadership and the Media House in Schwarzach

The VN is published by Russmedia Verlag GmbH. The group behind it was known for most of its modern history as the Vorarlberger Medienhaus, the Vorarlberg Media House, and it adopted the name Russmedia in October 2012. The group's headquarters is in Schwarzach, a municipality near Bregenz in the Rhine valley, where its media house stands, while the newspaper's own roots and newsroom identity remain in Bregenz, the city of its founding. Russmedia describes Bregenz and the VN newsroom as the core from which the whole group grew, even as the company has expanded into other Austrian locations and into digital marketplaces and media businesses in Germany, Hungary, Romania and the United Kingdom.

Leadership of the newspaper reflects the family's continuing role. Eugen Russ is listed as publisher of the VN, and Isabel Russ is its editor-in-chief, a role she took up on 1 February 2024 together with a position in the management of publishing and digital at Russmedia. Isabel Russ, born in 1990, came to the post from outside daily journalism: she studied economics at the University of Warwick and took a master's degree in banking and finance at the University of St. Gallen, worked in venture capital and start-ups, and served as digital chief of the Austrian news magazine Profil from 2021 to 2022 before returning to the family company. Industry coverage of the newsroom under her leadership focuses on digital transformation, subscription growth and journalism designed to resonate with local audiences. Earlier editors-in-chief named in reference accounts include Christian Ortner, and the managing directors listed for the publishing company include Eugen Russ, Markus Raith and Isabel Russ.

Coverage and Editorial Focus

Editorially, the VN is a full-service daily whose centre of gravity is Vorarlberg itself. State politics in Bregenz, decisions in the state's towns and villages, the regional economy of export-oriented manufacturers, construction, tourism and cross-border work around Lake Constance and the Rhine, schools, health, courts, culture and sport all fall within its core territory, alongside Austrian national news and international reporting. A regional paper with the VN's market position is expected to function as a record of everyday life in the state as well as a scrutineer of its government, and its pages carry the announcements, debates and community reporting on which readers in a small, tightly networked state rely.

That local focus is an explicit strategy at Russmedia rather than merely a tradition. When the group revised its newsroom and business strategy in 2023 and 2024, its managers described a visit to competing regional news organisations in Bergen, Norway, as the turning point, after which the Vorarlberg newsroom reorganised around readers and subscriptions, putting breaking regional news and follow-up reporting at the centre of its digital work. Editor-in-chief Isabel Russ and managing director Georg Burtscher presented the case study to the World Association of News Publishers' innovation network, framing the aim as keeping the Bregenz newsroom growing by publishing relevant journalism that local audiences recognise as their own. Anniversary accounts likewise name reader orientation, regional journalism and the careful use of artificial intelligence as elements of the VN's current strategy.

Digital Publishing Through VN.at and VOL.AT

The VN's digital presence works on two levels. Its own official website, given in reference listings and by the publisher as vn.at, is the home of the newspaper brand online, carrying its subscription journalism, including its paid digital offer known as V+, and access to the e-paper, the digital replica of the printed edition. The VN also offers its print edition as an app-based e-paper for phones and tablets, presenting the full content of the newspaper in its familiar page layout, with a reader mode for articles and page-by-page navigation. Print subscribers were among those offered digital upgrades tied to the e-paper during the paper's eightieth anniversary in 2025, an illustration of how the publisher now treats print and digital access as one subscription relationship.

Alongside vn.at stands VOL.AT, Vorarlberg Online, the group's broader regional news portal, which Russmedia launched in 1995 as an early regionally focused news website, at a time when the group was also acting as an internet provider. VOL.AT carries fast, free regional news for a wider online audience and has its own app, published by Russmedia Digital, while vn.at carries the newspaper's own paid journalism. The distinction matters for understanding the VN today: the printed daily, its e-paper and vn.at form one subscription product, and VOL.AT extends the same house's reach to readers who follow Vorarlberg news online without taking the newspaper itself. Together with Antenne Vorarlberg in radio, this gives the Schwarzach house a cross-media reach well beyond its print circulation.

Community Role and Cultural Commitment

A dominant regional newspaper in a small state inevitably plays a civic role beyond news, and the VN has formalised part of that role in an annual prize. Since 1970 the paper has awarded the Toni-Russ-Preis, established in memory of Toni Russ, its former publisher and editor-in-chief, who died in 1969. Since 2023 the award has continued as the Kunst- und Kulturpreis Vorarlberg, the Vorarlberg Art and Culture Prize, keeping the founder-generation name associated with support for cultural life in the state. Anniversary histories also point to the paper's engagement with social and environmental initiatives in Vorarlberg as part of its public role.

Today the Vorarlberger Nachrichten continues to publish as Vorarlberg's leading daily, in print six days a week and continuously through its digital editions. It does so in a harder market than the one in which it won its international honours: audited print sales fall year by year, as they do across Austria, and the publisher's strategy is openly built around converting that print loyalty into digital subscriptions while defending regional journalism as the product readers will pay for. What has not changed is the structure established in 1945 and 1919 before it: a family publishing house in the Rhine valley, a newsroom rooted in Bregenz, and a newspaper whose name simply promises its readers the news of Vorarlberg. On the evidence of its reach figures, it remains the first source most of the state turns to for that news.