Sport (Austrian daily newspaper)

Sport was an Austrian daily sports newspaper. It was published from June 7th to July 8th, 2004.

history

From June 7, 2004, Sport was the first daily sports newspaper in Austria. Editor Robert Proksch, previously sales manager at WirtschaftsBlatt , planned the newspaper without the backing of a large publisher. The budget of a few million euros referred Proksch than enough , after only two and a half years, which should break even be achieved. The money for this came from a consortium of private investors led by the public accountants Geyer & Geyer.

At a price of one euro for 16 pages of daily sports reports in large color format (49 cm), the whole of Austria should be supplied with a print run of 100,000 copies.

The starting point was well chosen with two top-class sporting events, the European Football Championship and the Summer Olympic Games . But right from the start, the newspaper printed in Bratislava struggled with insufficient distribution and was hardly or not at all available in large parts of the country.

Editor-in-chief Michael Kröll, formerly editor-in-chief of Daily Everything , wanted the newspaper to focus on the Holy Trinity - football , skiing and Formula 1 . But marginal sports should also be served.

According to the publisher Robert Proksch, the core team comprised between 15 and 20 editors. A total of around 60 employees worked on the newspaper. There were also comments and analyzes from celebrities from the world of sports.

The failure

After only 32 issues, sport had to be stopped on July 8, 2004 due to lack of money.

The reasons for the failure, in addition to the tightly calculated budget and the lack of sales, are also due to the questionable quality of sport . With ironic, sometimes absurd headlines, idiosyncratic access to German spelling and factual errors, the newspaper frightened a large part of the potential readership. The title of the newspaper was also unclear. Originally announced as Die Sport , the finished newspaper was then simply called Sport .