Elimination of mandatory advertisements in the “Wiener Zeitung” postponed

An EU directive that has yet to be implemented requires a central point for the documentation of company information. In the official gazette of the republic’s own “Wiener Zeitung”, information such as the annual financial statements of large stock corporations has been published so far. This is how the world’s oldest daily newspaper still published generates a large part of its income. If this path were to fail, the existence in paper form would be endangered.

According to “Der Standard”, the managing director of the “Wiener Zeitung”, Martin Fleischhacker, informed the workforce that there should be a new draft for the national implementation of the EU directive. The measure will not be implemented in the summer.

Editor-in-chief Walter Hämmerle was hoping for a solution to “Kurier” that would be based on the European Official Journal. For reasons of legal certainty, this is not only published digitally, but also in print. If the compulsory publications were to continue to be printed in excerpts, one would have the opportunity to retain the editorial staff and put them on a modern footing, said Hämmerle. He is convinced that the “Wiener Zeitung” has to remain in print, at least in the medium term.

The green media spokeswoman Eva Blimlinger believed in an interview with the industry medium “Horizont” about a week ago that the daily newspaper would continue to exist in the form of a digital platform or a weekly newspaper. “We can’t just inject money,” she said. At the same time, one is sounding out all the variants and checking whether they are possible under subsidy law, said Blimlinger.