New Newspaper (Vienna)

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The Neue Zeitung was an Austrian tabloid that appeared from October 3, 1967 to July 10, 1971 in the Vienna area and was financed by the Vienna SPÖ .

background

The electoral defeat of the SPÖ in the National Council election in 1966 , which led to the sole government of the ÖVP under Josef Klaus and ended the grand coalition that had existed since 1945 , was also due to the split off from the DFP of the former top social democratic functionary and union president Franz Olah . He had financed the sensationally successful start of the Neue Kronenzeitung with union money. On the other hand, the traditional party newspaper of the SPÖ, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, with a shrinking circulation and an increasingly aging readership, took care of it. One of the lessons that the party could learn from the electoral defeat was the need for a new press policy and the conviction that the SPÖ had to have its own small-format tabloid again, as it did in the interwar period . ( After the Second World War, the Kleine Blatt was only founded as a weekly newspaper).

Rapid failure

The Viennese SPÖ launched the Neue Zeitung as a conscious response to the Kronenzeitung and as an attempt to modernize social democratic press policy. However, the attempt failed within a short time. Regardless of the usual competitions and elaborate advertising campaigns, the newspaper makers did not succeed in breaking the mark of 100,000 copies or seriously damaging the "Krone". The new party chairman Bruno Kreisky , who was elected at the beginning of February 1967 - not necessarily the favorite of the Viennese party - also turned out to be a media professional who knew how to impress even non-socialist journalists with his upper-class charm and who became the “media chancellor”. With the success of the National Council election in 1970 , in which the SPÖ gained a relative parliamentary majority, and the National Council election in 1971 , in which an absolute majority was achieved, Kreisky established a phase of social democratic hegemony that seemed to make costly media experiments à la Neue Zeitung superfluous. Due to high losses, the Neue Zeitung was therefore converted into a weekly newspaper in December 1970 and discontinued in mid-1971. The basic problem that the Austrian social democracy did not have its own modern print media, of course, did not change during the Kreisky era. The Arbeiter-Zeitung continued to worry with a shrinking circulation, although Kreisky shied away from discontinuing the paper founded by Viktor Adler for economic reasons. A later attempt to “tabloid” the traditional central organ, in which the Vienna SPÖ was again involved, also failed.

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