About Yachtrevue

Yachtrevue

Yachtrevue is Austria's specialist magazine for sailing, motorboating and watersports, published in German in Vienna and describing itself as Austria's magazine for watersports. It appears monthly, is edited for the Austrian Sailing Federation, the Österreichischer Segel-Verband, usually shortened to ÖSV, and is produced commercially by VGN Medien Holding GmbH, one of Austria's large magazine publishing groups. Its print ISSN is 1013-7823 and its website is yachtrevue.at. Founded in 1977, it has served for almost five decades as the shared printed home of a sailing community that is unusually large and unusually active for a country with no coastline of its own.

That apparent paradox is the starting point for understanding the magazine. Austria is landlocked, yet sailing is an established Austrian sport with deep roots on the country's lakes, a national federation founded in 1946, clubs dating back to the nineteenth century and a long record of international and Olympic competition. Yachtrevue exists to serve that world. It covers cruising and regatta sailing, boats and technology, electronics, clothing and equipment, and the cruising grounds at home and abroad where Austrian sailors actually spend their time on the water. For readers, researchers and advertisers alike, it is the Austrian sailing title against which the size and seriousness of the country's watersports scene can be measured.

A Sailing Magazine from a Landlocked Country

Austria's sailing geography is a geography of lakes. The first Austrian sailing clubs were founded in 1886, in Vienna, on Lake Wörth in Carinthia and on Lake Attersee in Upper Austria, and the sport developed, as the Austria-Forum's sailing history puts it, very well despite the country being landlocked, on account of its many Alpine lakes. Neusiedler See, the large shallow steppe lake on the Burgenland border with Hungary, became another centre, with sailing and surf schools, a sailing academy of the Austrian Sailing Federation at Neusiedl am See, and, in the summer months, a regatta somewhere on the lake on almost every weekend. Attersee, Traunsee, Wolfgangsee, Wörthersee and Lake Constance, which Austria shares with Germany and Switzerland, complete a domestic map that gives Austrian sailors demanding, varied and often very windy inland waters.

Austrian sailors have never confined themselves to those lakes. The country produced European and world champions and Olympic medallists in the decades after the Second World War, and Austrian crews have long cruised and chartered in the Mediterranean, above all on the nearby Adriatic coast of Croatia, as well as travelling further afield for blue-water cruising. A national sailing magazine therefore has a double task. It must report the home scene faithfully, club by club and lake by lake, and it must also speak to readers whose biggest sailing weeks of the year may be spent on salt water abroad. Yachtrevue's mixture of domestic regatta coverage, boat and equipment tests and cruising and sailing-area reports reflects exactly that double life.

Origins in 1977

Yachtrevue first appeared in 1977. The German-language reference record describes it as created that year by the union of two earlier titles, the federation journal Österreichischer Yachtsport and the magazine Surfrevue. A fuller contemporary account by the naval and sailing historian Wladimir Aichelburg, who wrote a long-running history series for the magazine, records that it began in October 1977 in Vienna at the publishing house Orac, as a successor to a newsletter previously edited by the architect Kurt Jirasko. The two accounts agree on the essential points: a new title in the autumn of 1977, created out of what had gone before, and from the very beginning the organ of the Austrian Sailing Federation.

Distribution at the start explains the magazine's instant reach. According to Aichelburg's account, every member of a club registered with the sailing federation received Yachtrevue free, which gave it some 50,000 readers from the outset. It also fitted, in his words, into the publisher's programme alongside titles such as Autorevue, Golfrevue and Pferderevue, and took a distinctive face from that family of Revue magazines. From the beginning, fostering Austria's own sailing tradition was part of the plan. A standing feature was intended to remind sailors of the history of the waters they sailed on and to carry other historical contributions of interest to them, and Aichelburg's own articles, beginning with the first issue in October 1977, ranged across the Imperial and Royal yacht squadron of the old monarchy, historic regattas at Abbazia and Pola, early motorboats and the yacht clubs of Trieste. That historical strand is a reminder that Austrian sailing did once have a sea, in the Habsburg Adriatic, and that the magazine has treated that inheritance as part of its identity from issue one.

The publicly documented history of the magazine after its founding is, it should be said plainly, sparse. No detailed decade-by-decade chronicle of editors, redesigns and ownership changes is available in the open sources used for this profile, and this profile does not invent one. What can be verified is the continuity of the essentials: the title, the monthly rhythm, the federation role, the Vienna base and, in its present form, publication by VGN Medien Holding with its head office at Taborstrasse 1-3 in the second district of Vienna.

Publisher and the Sailing Federation

Yachtrevue has a two-part publishing structure that is typical of federation magazines. The Österreichischer Segel-Verband is the Herausgeber, the publisher in the editorial and institutional sense, and the magazine is the federation's official organ. The commercial publisher, the Verlag, is VGN Medien Holding GmbH in Vienna, the group that also publishes Austrian titles such as News, profil and Autorevue. The federation supplies the institutional mandate and the direct line into every affiliated club; the publishing house supplies the professional editorial, production, advertising and distribution machinery of a large magazine group.

The federation behind the magazine was founded in Vienna in 1946, by a proponents' committee led by Viktor Fous, in the first full year of peace after the Second World War. It is Austria's national governing body for sailing, recognised internationally through World Sailing, and it organises the sport from children's and youth classes through to Austria's Olympic sailing programme. Its modern headquarters are on the sailing grounds at Neusiedl am See. A federation of that kind needs a reliable channel to its clubs and members that is more durable than a newsletter and more independent in tone than a press release. Yachtrevue has filled that role since 1977, which is why its history cannot be separated from the federation's own post-war history.

Editorial continuity at the magazine has been unusually long. VGN's own presentation of the title notes that editor-in-chief Roland Duller had been on board for 30 years and had tested more than 1,000 boats in that time. A chief editor who has personally sailed and assessed that many boats gives a test magazine a particular kind of authority: judgements rest on a deep comparative memory of how successive generations of cruisers, racers and motorboats actually behave on the water, rather than on specification sheets alone.

What Each Issue Covers

The magazine's stated scope covers all aspects of sailing, from cruising to regatta racing, together with technology and electronics, and motorboat subjects alongside sail. In the contents summaries published for the title, reporting from the world of sailors and motorboaters is supplemented by test reports on sailing boats and motor yachts, on electronics, on clothing and on equipment, and by cruising accounts and sailing-area reports, the Törn- und Revierberichte that tell readers what a voyage or a cruising ground is really like.

That mix is deliberate. A regatta sailor on Attersee, a family crew chartering in Croatia, a motorboat owner on the Danube and a club junior moving up through the youth classes do not need the same magazine, yet Yachtrevue is edited for all of them. Racing coverage keeps competitive sailors informed about classes, events and results at home and about Austrian sailors abroad. Cruising coverage serves the larger, less visible majority whose sailing is measured in summer weeks and long weekends rather than in trophies. Technology and electronics coverage follows the rapid change in navigation, communications, safety and onboard systems that has transformed even modest boats. Motorboat coverage acknowledges that, for many Austrian watersports enthusiasts, power and sail are parts of the same lake and harbour life rather than rival worlds.

Boat Tests and Equipment Reporting

Tests are the spine of the magazine's service journalism. New sailing boats and motor yachts are sailed, measured and assessed, and the results are presented so that a prospective buyer, or a sailor choosing a charter boat, can compare designs on sailing behaviour, build, layout, equipment and value rather than on brochure claims. Electronics, clothing and equipment tests perform the same function at the level of what sailors wear, carry and fit to their boats. In a sport where a poor purchase can be expensive, uncomfortable or, at sea, unsafe, that independent assessment is a practical service and not a luxury.

The magazine's humour has its own institution. Since 2013 the writer Jürgen Preusser has written a monthly satirical column in Yachtrevue called Abdrift, a sailing term for the sideways drift of a vessel under wind and current, applied by Preusser to drifting away from the everyday route of journalism into satire. The column, later collected in book form, acquired cult status within the Austrian sailing community within a few months, according to the sailing federation's own book pages. A specialist magazine that can sustain a long-running satire about its own sport is speaking to readers who know that sport well enough to laugh at it, and the column's survival is a small but telling sign of the closeness between the magazine and its community.

Cruising, Sailing Areas and Regatta Coverage

Cruising and sailing-area reports, the Revierberichte, are the second great pillar. For lake sailors they describe home waters in detail; for cruising and charter sailors they open up foreign grounds, above all in the Mediterranean, with the practical knowledge that matters on arrival: winds, harbours, anchorages, hazards, seasons and the character of a coast. Reports of individual voyages, the Törnberichte, carry the experience of crews who have made a passage so that others can plan their own. In a landlocked country this writing does particular work. It keeps a national community of sea-going sailors connected between their relatively few weeks a year on salt water, and it lets younger sailors learn, in print, waters they have not yet visited.

Regatta coverage works in the opposite direction, inward to the lakes and clubs. Austria's summer calendar is dense, from club racing and national championships to youth championships that rotate between lakes, and the federation's competitive programme culminates in its Olympic classes. As the federation's organ, Yachtrevue is the natural printed record of that calendar and of the people who animate it, from junior sailors in their first dinghies to Olympic campaigners. That record-keeping function, unglamorous as it may sound, is one of the oldest reasons federation magazines exist, and one of the reasons they are kept and bound by clubs long after general news magazines are thrown away.

Readers and the Austrian Sailing Community

The core audience is Austria's organised sailing and watersports community: members of federation clubs, regatta and cruising sailors, motorboaters, sailing schools and their pupils, charter customers, and the marine trade that supplies them. Around that core sits a wider readership of watersports enthusiasts who may not belong to a club but who sail, surf, motor or holiday on Austria's lakes and on the Adriatic. The magazine began, as noted above, by going free to federation club members, and a membership-linked readership of that kind gives a specialist title an unusually stable base, renewed as clubs themselves recruit new members.

Readers per issue have been put, on the magazine's own figures, well above its print run, as is normal for club and family magazines that are passed around clubhouses, crew rooms and households. That pass-along pattern matters for understanding the title. Yachtrevue is not primarily an impulse purchase at a station kiosk. It is a magazine that arrives because its reader belongs to a community, and it is read as a community publication as well as a commercial one, which shapes both its loyalty and its tone.

Frequency, Circulation and Distribution

Yachtrevue appears monthly, and has done so since its founding in 1977. The most recent figures published in its own media data, for 2021 and cited in February 2023, give a print run of 24,400 copies, of which 18,500 copies were subscription copies, and 72,000 readers per issue, corresponding to a reach of 1.2 percent measured across Austria as a whole. Those are the magazine's own stated figures for that year, not current audited figures, and they are presented here with that date attached; no more recent verified circulation figure was available in the sources used for this profile.

Read in context, those numbers describe a substantial specialist title. A monthly magazine selling and distributing in the mid twenty-thousands, with a subscription core of eighteen and a half thousand, in a country of about nine million people and in a sport practised by a small minority of them, reaches deep into its target world. The high subscription share is itself informative: this is a readership that commits for a year at a time, much of it through the federation and club structure, rather than a readership won cover by cover at retail.

Digital Presence

The magazine's digital home is yachtrevue.at, published under the same VGN and federation imprint as the printed magazine. The site carries the magazine's journalism in online form and serves as the continuously updated companion to the monthly print cycle, which is the standard pattern for Austrian specialist magazines of its generation: print remains the curated, collectable record and the test archive, while the website carries immediacy between issues. The same imprint and disclosure page covers both the website and the printed magazine, which underlines that, institutionally, the two are one publication in two forms rather than separate products.

Digital publication also changes what a test archive is worth. Boat and equipment tests, sailing-area reports and practical advice do not expire with the month printed on the cover; online, they remain findable for the buyer researching a used boat or the crew planning a first cruise in unfamiliar waters years after publication. For a magazine whose authority rests on decades of testing, including its editor-in-chief's thousand-plus boat tests, that long digital tail is a significant part of its present-day usefulness, even though detailed online usage figures for the title are not published in the sources used here.

Editorial Character and Significance

Yachtrevue's editorial character follows from its structure. It is at once a federation organ and a commercial specialist magazine, and it has to satisfy both callings: to speak for and to organised Austrian sailing, and to test, criticise and entertain as an independent magazine must if sailors are to trust its judgements about the boats and gear they will spend money on. Its longevity suggests that balance has been held. A title created in 1977 from a federation journal and a surf magazine has survived the transformation of sailing by electronics, the growth of charter cruising, the rise and fall of windsurfing as a mass sport and the migration of news to the internet, without losing its monthly place in Austrian club life.

Its significance is therefore larger than its circulation. Yachtrevue is the printed memory and the common room of Austrian sailing: the place where the sport in a landlocked country records its regattas, argues about its boats, learns its foreign cruising grounds and laughs at itself in a monthly satirical column. For anyone studying Austrian sport, Austrian magazine publishing or the culture of the country's lakes, it is the essential specialist source, and its almost fifty-year run as the organ of the Österreichischer Segel-Verband makes it a documentary record of post-war Austrian sailing that no other publication duplicates.