About Zur Sache

Zur Sache

Zur Sache is a party-affiliated digital magazine and political blog of the Austrian People's Party, the ÖVP, published online in Vienna since 24 February 2021 and operated by the ÖVP parliamentary club. Its name is a phrase meaning, in effect, get to the point, and its full web address, zur-sache.at, turns that phrase into a slogan. Wikipedia classifies it as a political blog, while the Reuters Institute has described it as a digital news website explicitly linked to the ÖVP. With Claus Reitan as editor-in-chief, it covers domestic and foreign policy from the perspective of the ÖVP's programme, as its own statement of orientation declares.

Zur Sache cannot be understood alone. It was launched, as reference sources state directly, in reaction to the SPÖ's Kontrast.at and to Peter Pilz's ZackZack, the two declared-standpoint titles that had shown Austrian parties and political movements could build magazine-style audiences of their own. Zur Sache was the ÖVP's answer, and its launch rhetoric — promising factual, reliable information at first hand and a platform for the bourgeois centre — was aimed explicitly at those rivals. It is therefore both a publication and a move in a competitive transformation of Austrian political communication that researchers call the rise of the digital party press.

Launch on 24 February 2021

Zur Sache went online on 24 February 2021. The date is given consistently in its reference listing, which records the operator as the parliamentary club of the Austrian People's Party, the editor-in-chief as Claus Reitan, and August Wöginger, the ÖVP's parliamentary club chairman, as the organ authorised to represent it. The February 2021 launch placed it in a specific political moment: the ÖVP led the federal government under Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in coalition with the Greens, and the party faced sustained critical coverage from opposition-aligned and investigative digital titles.

The launch was presented as a deliberate alternative model. Before the blog began, Reitan said that Kontrast.at and ZackZack.at had forgotten the journalistic virtues of factuality, while Zur Sache would take entirely different paths and guarantee factual and reliable information from first hand. In an interview with the media magazine Horizont, Reitan described Zur Sache as a platform for the bourgeois middle and rejected the accusation that it was message control in favour of the ÖVP. Those launch statements are part of the verified record and define the title's self-image: not propaganda, in its own account, but first-hand factual communication for the centre.

Publisher: the ÖVP parliamentary club

The operator of Zur Sache is the parliamentary club of the Österreichische Volkspartei in Vienna. The ÖVP, the Austrian People's Party, is one of Austria's two traditional major parties, a centre-right, conservative party that has led many federal governments, including the government in office at the time of the launch. Its parliamentary club organises its members of the National Council and Federal Council and is a publicly funded political institution in its own right. As with the SPÖ's Kontrast, published by the Social Democratic parliamentary club since 2016, the club rather than a commercial publisher is the legal home of the magazine.

That structure has practical consequences. The magazine does not depend on advertising sales or subscriptions documented in the public record, and it does not need to maximise reach for advertisers. Its purpose is communication: to publish the ÖVP's reading of domestic and foreign policy at length, in a magazine format that supporters, journalists and interested citizens can read and share. Its orientation, by its own statement, follows the election programme and the working programme of the ÖVP parliamentary club for the respective legislative period. No party magazine in this Austrian wave states its alignment more formally than that.

Claus Reitan as editor-in-chief

Claus Reitan, born on 1 July 1954 in Innsbruck, is the editor-in-chief of Zur Sache, a role he has held since February 2021. Reitan brought a long career in Austrian journalism to the post: he was editor-in-chief of the Tiroler Tageszeitung from 1995 to 2005, of the daily newspaper Österreich from 2006 to 2008, and of Die Furche from 2008 to the end of 2012. He is also an author, columnist and moderator, completed an academic certificate programme in sustainability and journalism at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2014 and 2015, and since 2017 has been a co-editor and co-author of the annual Medienhandbuch Österreich published by the Association of Austrian Newspapers.

Appointing a former editor-in-chief of three newspapers was a signal about the kind of legitimacy Zur Sache sought. The ÖVP did not staff its magazine only with party press officers; it placed a recognised, if politically sympathetic, media professional at its head, one who could argue in public — as he did at launch — that the new title would observe journalistic virtues its rivals had abandoned. Whether critics accept that claim is a separate question, and many do not, but the appointment itself is a documented fact that distinguishes Zur Sache's presentation from a pure party bulletin.

Editorial focus and declared orientation

According to its own statements, Zur Sache concentrates thematically on domestic policy, foreign policy and political communication. Its ideological orientation is directed, in its own words, by the election programme and the working programme of the ÖVP parliamentary club for the respective legislative period. The magazine therefore covers the questions on which the ÖVP governs or campaigns: economic and fiscal policy, security and migration, European and foreign affairs, education, family and social policy, and the conduct of political debate itself, including criticism of rival parties and of media coverage the ÖVP considers unfair.

Political communication as a named subject is revealing. Zur Sache does not only argue policy; it argues about argument — about how politics is reported, framed and contested in Austria. That meta-level coverage fits a party that, in government, frequently complained about hostile or inaccurate reporting, and it fits Reitan's background as a media handbook editor and media commentator. For the directory reader, the practical summary is simple: Zur Sache publishes the ÖVP parliamentary club's perspective on Austrian and international politics, in magazine and blog form, under a professional editor, with its alignment declared in its own orientation statement.

A reaction to Kontrast and ZackZack

Reference sources state the reactive origin without ambiguity: the blog arose as a reaction to the online media Kontrast.at, a blog of the SPÖ parliamentary club, and ZackZack.at, whose publisher is Peter Pilz. The chronology supports the claim. Kontrast had been publishing since summer 2016, demonstrating that a parliamentary club could sustain an explanatory magazine with a small team. ZackZack, founded in 2019, showed that a sharp investigative title with a declared attitude could attract paying members and public attention. By early 2021 the ÖVP was the major party without an equivalent title; Zur Sache closed that gap.

Reitan's launch criticism made the competition explicit by naming the rivals' alleged failure — forgetting factuality — and promising the opposite. Rivalry of this kind is a normal feature of the new Austrian party press: each title defines itself partly against the others, and each launch is covered as a media-political event. The Reuters Institute's January 2022 analysis of the digital party press in Austria treated the sequence as a system: kontrast.at funded and run by the Social Democrats, zur-sache.at funded and run by the conservatives, FPÖ TV run by the Freedom Party, with the Greens and NEOS moving towards platforms of their own.

Classification: blog, magazine or news website

Sources classify Zur Sache in slightly different terms, and this profile records the range rather than forcing a single label. Wikipedia classifies it as a political blog and describes it as an Austrian politics blog of the ÖVP parliamentary club founded in February 2021. The directory seed for this profile calls it a party-affiliated digital magazine of the ÖVP. The Reuters Institute described zur-sache.at as a digital news website explicitly linked to the ÖVP. All three descriptions capture part of the object: it has the regular, staffed, magazine-like output of a digital magazine, the standpoint and authorship patterns of a political blog, and the news-adjacent appearance that leads researchers to list it among news websites with an explicit party link.

That ambiguity is characteristic of the whole genre. Party titles deliberately adopt the forms of independent journalism — headlines, explainers, interviews, commentary — while remaining instruments of a political organisation. For cataloguing purposes, the safest description is the one used in this profile's opening: a party-affiliated digital magazine and political blog. What is not ambiguous is ownership, launch date, editor and declared orientation, all of which are documented in multiple sources.

Vienna base and digital-only publication

Zur Sache is based in Vienna, where the ÖVP parliamentary club sits, and it publishes only online at zur-sache.at. It has no print edition, no regional editions and no broadcast output documented in the public record. Its Vienna base is a function of its publisher: parliamentary communication is produced in the capital, close to the National Council, the federal government and the national media with which the magazine is in dialogue and dispute.

Digital-only publication keeps the operation comparatively light. A small editorial team under an editor-in-chief can sustain a blog-magazine with daily or near-daily political content without printing, distribution or retail costs. Distribution runs through search, social sharing and the ÖVP's own channels, including the accounts of club members who can link to a full argument rather than compressing it into a post. No verified audience or traffic figure for zur-sache.at was established in the research for this profile, and none is stated here; party magazines of this type are not usually measured in the same public reach rankings as commercial online news brands, and inventing a figure would mislead.

Place in the wider Austrian media debate

Zur Sache entered a media debate that intensified later in its launch year. In October 2021 Chancellor Sebastian Kurz resigned after raids connected to allegations that public money had been used to buy favourable newspaper coverage with manipulated polls — allegations Kurz denied. The scandal, as the Reuters Institute noted, sparked vigorous discussion about impartiality, ethics and the corruption of the free press, and a Gallup poll at the time found most Austrians did not expect media to report neutrally. Party-owned titles like Zur Sache and Kontrast sit inside that crisis of trust: defenders argue a declared party source is more honest than hidden influence over supposedly independent outlets, while critics argue party newsrooms deepen polarisation.

This profile does not adjudicate that debate. It records that Zur Sache's defenders, beginning with its own editor, present it as factual information from first hand for the bourgeois centre, and that its critics, including rival party media, present it as message control — a charge Reitan explicitly rejected at launch. Both positions are documented; the publication's own orientation statement, tying its line to the ÖVP club's election and working programmes, is the primary evidence readers should weigh.

Limits of the public record

Beyond founding, ownership, editorship and orientation, the public record on Zur Sache is thin in the ways typical for party publications. No verified current staff list beyond its editor-in-chief and representing organ, no audited reach, no published budget and no detailed history of later redesigns or editorial changes after the April 2023 update date shown in its reference listing were established in research for this profile. The magazine's later development should therefore not be embellished. What can be said firmly is that it was launched on 24 February 2021, that it is operated by the ÖVP parliamentary club with Claus Reitan as editor-in-chief, and that it was created in reaction to Kontrast and ZackZack as the ÖVP's entry in Austria's digital party press.

Those facts are enough to give Zur Sache a clear directory identity. In a media system where the two historic major parties once owned mass-circulation daily newspapers, their parliamentary clubs now run compact digital magazines instead. Zur Sache is the People's Party's version: Vienna-based, online-only, professionally edited, openly aligned, and named for the promise to get to the point.

Why Zur Sache matters

Zur Sache matters because it completed the symmetry that defines Austria's new political media. After its launch, both traditional governing parties had a parliamentary-club magazine, the Freedom Party had its video and online channels, and researchers could describe a system rather than an exception. Any account of how Austrian parties communicate in the 2020s — bypassing, answering and imitating independent journalism at the same time — needs Zur Sache as the conservative case, just as it needs Kontrast as the social democratic one.

For readers encountering zur-sache.at directly, the essential knowledge is short and verified: this is the ÖVP parliamentary club's own publication, online since 24 February 2021, edited by Claus Reitan, covering domestic policy, foreign policy and political communication in line with the ÖVP club's programme. Read with that knowledge, it is a useful primary source for how the People's Party wishes its politics to be understood — which is precisely what a party magazine is for.