Knives come out in Viennese paper-chase

Brilliant, cussed and shamelessly interfering in national politics, the Viennese press tycoon Hans Dichand has for years been top dog in the overcrowded hothouse of Austria’s newspaper market.

Dichand will turn 86 on 26 January and appears indestructible, to the profound regret of his unhappy German business partners, the Essen-based Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) group, with whom he is engaged in a semi-permanent litigation.

Dichand’s power-base is the raucous, Catholic-conservative, tabloid Kronen Zeitung, founded in 1900, which he publishes and half-owns with WAZ, which in the 1980s bought out the shares held by Dichand’s former friend, then bitter enemy, Kurt Falk.

Read by just under half the Austrian population aged over 15, the Krone has the largest readership per head of population in any country in the world - all the more remarkable given that Austria (population 8 million) has a total of 17 dailies.

Dichand says he knows what Austrians think and that the Krone is the best indicator of the national mood. Certainly their fickleness is reflected in Dichand’s and the paper’s likes and dislikes. There were years of promoting the populist Jörg Haider, for instance, then a rejection of former chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel’s coalition with him, then promotion of another grand coalition...

But even if it’s not always clear quite what he wants, the Krone boss is the man who can deliver the worst heeby-jeebies in the political class. Kow-towing to Dichand, who writes under the pen-names Cato and Aurelius, verges on the indecent, as during the 1994 referendum campaign on EU entry. The government’s reward for his eventual support was a 66.6% victory for the ‘Yes’ campaign.

The Krone subsequently cooled off on Europe, for a time making a hero of the Eurosceptic MEP and spooker of his colleagues, Hans-Peter Martin, until WAZ put a stop to that. Austrians, too, have generally turned against the EU. Because of/with their favorite paper? Chicken or egg?

Dichand said in a rare interview last autumn that the kind of Europe he favoured was General Charles de Gaulle’s ‘Europe des patries’. The EU now on offer was a threat to Austria’s independence. Europe was a great idea and most Austrians agreed: "But what we have in the EU is actually foreign (fremd) to us."

Or is the truth simply that no newspaper ever lost money insulting bureaucrats and foreigners?

If mortality does not get Dichand, will Wolfgang (52) and Helmuth (50) Fellner, founders of the News Group (majority owners Bertelsmann)? Last September they launched a new daily called Österreich, full of stuff about sex-mad film-stars and bloodthirsty farmers, with a glossy colour magazine and highly sophisticated internet pages.

Free copies are everywhere at the moment. The Fellners claim to be selling 400,000 copies a day. Few believe them. But they insist they can wait two years to break even; they have an amazing track record of successful magazine launches, the banks are behind them, including the Raiffeisen Bank, which also has money in the Krone and its more serious sister paper the Kurier. Welcome to Austria.

The overcrowding of the Austrian media market owes much to a long history of subsidies to smaller papers, and governments’ understandable reluctance to court bad publicity by cutting off the money. EU rules meant subsidies could not be withheld from a growing number of foreign media investors. German holdings like those of Bertelsmann’s publishing arm Grüner und Jahr in the weekly news magazine market now stand at around 70%.

The respected Salzburger Nachrichten, with 294,000 readers, is a rarity in Austria in remaining in private hands. But several perfectly decent papers survive, even flourish, in the hands of foreign capitalists: the recently re-designed, centre-right Kurier (readership 238,000, also owned by Dichand/WAZ), Der Standard (about 101,000, 48% owned by the German Süddeutsche Zeitung) and the up-market, slightly stodgy Die Presse (101,000) and Graz-based Kleine Zeitung (305,000), both of which now belong to the Styria AG holding company.

As for Dichand, he is vainly demanding to buy back his 50% share of the Krone from WAZ and install his son Christoph as editor; he has even threatened to start up a rival daily if he does not get his way. But the latest rumour circulating in Vienna is that he has changed track and has chosen his bright, glamorous blonde daughter-in-law Eva as his future representative on earth. Publisher of a successful free-sheet, Heute, she is said to be working secretly on yet another start-up.

Brilliant, cussed and shamelessly interfering in national politics, the Viennese press tycoon Hans Dichand has for years been top dog in the overcrowded hothouse of Austria’s newspaper market.