Austria Press Agency

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APA - Austria Press Agency eG

logo
legal form eG
founding 1849
Seat Vienna , AustriaAustriaAustria 
management Clemens Pig , Karin Thiller
Number of employees 519 (2018)
sales 64 million euros (2018)
Branch News and press agency
Website www.apa.at

The APA - Austria Presse Agentur eG is the largest national news and press agency in Austria , based in Vienna . It is owned by Austrian daily newspapers and the ORF .

Headquarters of the APA - Austria Press Agency in Vienna's Laimgrubengasse

history

Today's APA goes back to the Austrian Correspondenz founded on October 10, 1849 by Joseph Tuvora in Vienna . Private telegraph and correspondent networks had already been established in other countries at that time, such as the French Agence Havas (today AFP ) in 1835 , the Berlin Wolff Telegraphic Bureau in 1849 , the Associated Press in New York in 1848 or the London- based Mr. Reuter's Cabled Messages (now Reuters ).

The Austrian Correspondenz , although it was founded privately, was intended to serve as the government's mouthpiece. In 1859 the agency was nationalized - for better access by the government -, renamed the Imperial and Royal Telegraph Correspondence Bureau and finally, after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, incorporated into the Imperial and Royal War Press Headquarters. The world's first state news agency is created. She worked internationally through exchange agreements with Reuters and Agence Havas .

First and Second World War

After the end of the First World War and the collapse of Austria-Hungary , the agency is reorganized and reduced to the level of a small, nationally oriented agency. From 1919 to 1926 Josef C. Wirth was its director. As a member of the Austrian peace delegation in St. Germain, he negotiated the resumption of the relations between the Austrian agency and the agencies Reuters and Havas, which had been interrupted by the war. In 1922 it was renamed the Official News Agency (ANA) and placed under the highest media authority, the Federal Press Service . Before that it was under the Ministry of Finance . It remained state-owned and served as a mouthpiece for those in power - so from 1933 onwards it also spread the ideas of the Austrofascists . In 1938 it was replaced by the National Socialist German News Office . Jewish employees and supporters of the corporate state were dismissed and some were deported. The other employees had to take the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler .

Second republic

In 1945 the agency is again called ANA and is state-owned - but only for one year. As early as 1942, the meanwhile globally most influential agencies Associated Press and Reuters had decided not to sign any more contracts with state agencies. So the ANA was also privatized: In 1946 the Austrian daily newspapers merged and replaced them with the “Austria Presse Agentur” (APA) cooperative, which was independent from the state .

Because the majority of newspapers were published by one of the two major parties, the ÖVP and the SPÖ , until the 1950s , the APA remained under the direct influence of politics, namely the grand coalition. As was not unusual in Austria at the time, personnel decisions were made on the basis of the proportional representation principle until the late 1960s . In 1963 the ORF became co-owner. This also did not change the political influence - the ORF was not independent from politics either. It was not until the 1970s, when the first efforts were made to remove the ORF from the control of the parties and the party newspapers were becoming less and less important in the media, that the APA was able to emancipate itself from politics.

The decisive factor for this was the second mainstay of the priority broadcasts (now OTS), which was introduced at the time and provided the agency with a new source of income. After more than four decades of economic survival, the then managing director Wolfgang Vyslozil led APA out of the red. The APA was profitable from 1988 and has been paying annual dividends to its owners since 1993. With the convergence model introduced by Vyslozil, APA has now positioned itself as the only news agency in the world to provide its customers with real-time and database services. With the exception of the Kronen Zeitung and the free newspaper Heute , all daily newspapers are members of the APA's cooperative, almost all professional media and numerous commercial enterprises and associations as well as the Republic of Austria itself are customers of the news service.

With the merger of the Schweizerische Depeschenagentur (sda) with the Keystone picture agency, APA became the largest shareholder and strategic technology partner of the new company KEYSTONE-SDA-ATS AG in 2018 . APA brought its previous 50% stake in Keystone into the new company and in return received a 30% stake in KEYSTONE-SDA-ATS AG .

The APA today

Today the APA group consists of the cooperatively organized news agency and numerous subsidiaries . She works in the business fields of news agency, picture agency, information management and information technology.

As a news agency, the APA editorial team delivers daily news from the fields of politics , business , chronicle , science , culture and sport from home and abroad in words, images, graphics and video. The APA MultiMedia team prepares multimedia content for the Internet , mobile devices and screens, while the APA financial services supply the capital market with financially relevant information. APA-PictureDesk, the picture agency, operates a comprehensive picture portal. APA-DeFacto operates a media and specialist database . It offers services in the areas of research and media monitoring as well as tailor-made analyzes for monitoring the success and efficiency of public relations and media image building for PR professionals from business and politics. Via the APA-OTS Original Text Service, press releases are distributed to the public under the responsibility of the sender via the APA editorial network and the Internet. APA-IT Informationstechnologie GmbH supplies the associated system technology in a number of technical solutions .

On January 1, 2017, the Austria Video Platform (AVP) operated by APA went into full operation. It is an exchange platform for high-quality video content between Austrian media companies.

APA group

Subsidiaries of the APA Group with shareholdings (as of June 2019):

Austria
  • APA-DeFacto database and content management GmbH: 100%
  • APA-IT InformationsTechnologie GmbH: 100%
  • APA-OTS Originaltext-Service GmbH: 100%
Germany
Switzerland

Members of the cooperative

APA cooperative members are:

Editors-in-chief

Employee

Around 150 editors work in the basic service (editorial work) at APA. They produce around 500 reports a day and thus come to around 180,000 messages a year in the areas of foreign policy, domestic policy, economy, chronicle, culture, science, education, media and sports. In addition to text reporting, the APA and its employees cover current affairs with more than 281,000 press photos and around 1,800 graphics produced in their editorial offices each year and make this material available for the visual implementation of all topics in the APA network. APA produces several up-to-date video clips, live video transmissions, live blogs and interactive graphics, especially for online media and Internet portals. At the end of the fiscal year the number of employees was 519 full-time equivalents.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ APA consolidated balance sheet 2015 with sales growth and stable result. APA grew in 2015 by 3.4 percent to 73.46 million euros - Clemens Pig and Karin Thiller form the new top management. In: APA-OTS , self-broadcast of APA, June 17, 2016, accessed on June 26, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c Annual report compact 2018 - key figures APA Group. In: report.APA.at on the Austria Press Agency website, June 12, 2019, accessed on June 26, 2019.
  3. ↑ Red./APA: APA participation in Swiss news agency SDA fixed . In: Salzburger Nachrichten . April 27, 2018 ( sn.at [accessed June 14, 2018]).
  4. ↑ Austria Video Platform starts at the beginning of 2017. In: derStandard.at , December 30, 2016, accessed on January 1, 2017.
  5. ↑ Facts & Figures. In: APA.at . Austria Press Agency, June 2019, accessed on June 26, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Imprint / disclosure according to media law. (PDF) In: APA.at. APA - Austria Presse Agentur eG (publisher), January 2019, accessed on June 26, 2019.
  7. ↑ APA editor-in-chief Michael Lang resigns. In: Der Standard , November 28, 2018, accessed November 28, 2018.
  8. ^ The APA editorial team. Retrieved June 26, 2019 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 11 '54.3 "  N , 16 ° 21' 38.1"  E