About WirtschaftsBlatt

WirtschaftsBlatt

The WirtschaftsBlatt was Austria's only daily financial newspaper. Published in Vienna in German on every trading day, Monday to Friday, it appeared from October 1995 until its last issue on 2 September 2016. It specialised in business, economic policy, markets, stock exchanges and investment, and was produced by a newsroom of about fifty journalists with some thirty production staff. The paper was founded with Styria Multimedia of Austria and Sweden's Bonnier Group each holding fifty per cent; in the middle of 2006 Styria bought Bonnier's shares and became sole owner. Its publisher was the Wirtschaftsblatt Verlag, its editor-in-chief in its later years was Wolfgang Unterhuber, and its circulation in 2013 was about 27,000 copies. For twenty-one years the WirtschaftsBlatt gave the Austrian market something it had never had before and has not had since: a dedicated daily business press of its own, modelled on the Scandinavian financial dailies and read by the country's executives, investors and economic policymakers.

Founding in 1995: an Austrian first

The WirtschaftsBlatt was first published in October 1995, in the year Austria joined the European Union. Contemporary press histories record that it began with an initial print run of about 58,000 copies, financed by an Austrian syndicate together with the Swedish publishing group Bonnier, distributed by Mediaprint, and published at first on a Tuesday-to-Saturday rhythm as a subscription-only title carrying financial and economic news. The concept was imported: Media Landscapes' account of the Austrian press describes the paper as based on the concept of the Swedish Dagens Industri, Bonnier's successful business daily, with the strong initial financial backing of the Bonnier Group. That Scandinavian model — a salmon-toned, tightly focused business paper for executives — had no Austrian equivalent; the quality dailies Die Presse and Der Standard carried business sections, and business magazines such as trend and Gewinn served the monthly and weekly market, but no Austrian publisher had attempted a daily devoted exclusively to the economy. Styria Multimedia, part of what became the Styria Media Group, supplied the Austrian half of the founding partnership.

Ownership: from Bonnier partnership to Styria sole ownership

On its founding, Styria Multimedia AG and the Swedish media group Bonnier each owned fifty per cent of the paper and its online portal. The partnership lasted a decade. In mid-2006 — one business-press history dates Bonnier's sale to May 2006 — Styria purchased all of Bonnier's shares and became the one hundred per cent owner of the newspaper. The publisher of record was the Wirtschaftsblatt Verlag, and the paper operated as a cooperative member of the Austria Press Agency, the APA, like most Austrian quality titles. Under Styria, the WirtschaftsBlatt belonged to a group whose other newspapers included Die Presse and the Kleine Zeitung, giving the business daily siblings at both the national quality and regional levels. The ownership change did not alter the paper's format or mission, but it did make the title a wholly Austrian property whose economics would be judged within a group that, a decade later, was consolidating its newspaper portfolio — a restructuring of Die Presse's newsroom and, in 2016, the closure of the WirtschaftsBlatt itself, as the Media for Democracy Monitor's account of Styria's consolidation records.

Content and readership

The WirtschaftsBlatt specialised in the areas that its name announced: business news, economic policy, markets, stock exchanges and investment. Appearing every trading day, it served readers whose working lives followed the financial calendar — company executives, bankers, investors, consultants, officials of the economic ministries and the social partner organisations that shape Austrian economic policy. Its circulation of about 27,000 copies in 2013, recorded in reference sources, was modest beside the Austrian tabloids but substantial for a subscription business title in a country of eight million, and an earlier figure of 23,500 copies is given by Media Landscapes for its later years. Older accounts describe the paper at launch as available only by subscription, a distribution model typical of financial dailies, whose readers pay for utility rather than impulse purchase. The paper's presence raised the standard of Austrian business coverage generally: Media Landscapes judges that the coverage of economic developments in Austria had improved considerably since 1995, when the WirtschaftsBlatt was launched — praise that makes its closure in 2016, in the same account, a setback for the country's economic journalism.

Innovation: rethinking print and online

The WirtschaftsBlatt was an early Austrian example of a converged newsroom. On 25 January 2007 the online version of the newspaper was launched — the date is also given as January 2007 in summary accounts — and the paper then became a case study in international media-design circles for rethinking how a financial daily should work across print and web. A detailed account by the García Media consultancy, which worked with the paper for a year, describes the reorganisation carried out under editor-in-chief Wolfgang Unterhuber and chief executive Hans Gasser, with Alexis Johann as online manager: every journalist was trained to think as a news person rather than a newspaper person, all staff were given the systems to work for both online and print, and a clear distinction was drawn between how online covered a story, from alert to report to full development, and how print covered it, with more analysis and a second-day angle applied on the first day. Images would show how the news item breaks online, after which the printed edition would develop it. That path-of-the-story concept made the small Vienna business paper a reference point in European discussions of newsroom convergence in the years before the financial crisis.

The Austrian business press context

The WirtschaftsBlatt occupied a niche that Austrian media economics made both valuable and fragile. Austria's market is small and German-speaking, open to competition from Germany's large business titles and, increasingly, from free online financial information. Within Austria, the paper competed for business readers with the economic sections of Die Presse and Der Standard, with the ORF's business broadcasting and with magazines such as trend and Gewinn, while its model came from abroad — Sweden's Dagens Industri and, in the background, the Financial Times, to which it was sometimes compared as the Austrian equivalent. Research on the Austrian business press notes that the field remained strongly male-dominated in ownership, journalism and readership, reflecting Austrian business life itself, and that Austria, unlike Sweden, Switzerland or Germany, sustained only this one business daily. The paper's daily presence nevertheless mattered to the market's information culture: it gave Austrian companies, and the Vienna stock exchange, a specialised domestic chronicler, and it gave business readers a paper edited in Vienna about the economy they actually worked in.

Closure in 2016

The last issue of the WirtschaftsBlatt appeared on 2 September 2016. Media Landscapes records that the paper, the only special-interest daily newspaper in Austria, closed down for economic reasons, and studies of Austrian media ownership place the closure within Styria's decade of consolidation, in which the group restructured the newsrooms of Die Presse and closed its economic daily in 2016. No successor title replaced it: Austria's business journalism reverted to the business sections of the general quality papers and to magazine and online formats. The closure ended a twenty-one-year run that had begun in October 1995 with a print run of about 58,000 hopeful copies and ended with a circulation in the low twenty-thousands — a trajectory shaped less by editorial failure than by the structural economics of a small-language market in which a specialist daily must compete with the internet's free financial data and with the business pages of papers its readers already buy. The title's full name, capitalisation and all, should not be confused with the older, unrelated weekly Börsen-Kurier or with German business publications of similar name; the WirtschaftsBlatt was the Vienna daily of 1995 to 2016.

Place in Vienna's newspaper landscape

Vienna's daily market in the WirtschaftsBlatt's lifetime was crowded at the popular end and thin at the specialist end. The capital supported the Kronen Zeitung, Heute, Österreich, the Kurier, Der Standard, Die Presse and the Wiener Zeitung, yet among all of them the WirtschaftsBlatt was the only title defined by a single subject. Austria-Forum's survey of the Austrian press made the point taxonomically, dividing the country's newspapers into the tabloid press, the supra-regional quality papers, the provincial papers and the smaller party-linked papers, and noting the WirtschaftsBlatt apart as the only financial paper among them. That singularity shaped its newsroom culture: it did not need a feuilleton, a local desk or a sports department, and its prestige was measured by the accuracy and speed of its market and company reporting rather than by political influence. It also shaped its vulnerability, because a single-subject daily has no second audience to fall back on when its one market shrinks. In the taxonomy of Austrian journalism the paper therefore stands as a category of one — before 1995 the category was empty, between 1995 and 2016 the WirtschaftsBlatt filled it alone, and since 2016 it has been empty again.

Legacy

The WirtschaftsBlatt's legacy is threefold. First, it demonstrated that Austria could sustain a daily business newspaper for a generation: for twenty-one years, through the dot-com boom, EU enlargement and the financial crisis of 2008, a Vienna newsroom of about fifty journalists chronicled Austrian business every trading day. Second, it professionalised Austrian economic coverage, a judgement recorded independently in the Media Landscapes country study, which treats the post-1995 improvement in economic reporting and the setback of the 2016 closure as bookends of the paper's life. Third, its converged newsroom experiment of the late 2000s gave it an international afterlife in media-studies literature as a worked example of print-online integration in a small newsroom. Since its closure, Austria has had no daily financial newspaper, and none has been launched to replace it; the WirtschaftsBlatt remains, in the past tense that its history now requires, the only one the country has ever had.