CENTRAL EUROPE LETTER
Judith Belfkih has a particularly sad task to accomplish for a journalist: that of closing her own newspaper. Acting co-editor of the Austrian daily Wiener Zeitung, this 47-year-old woman with a serious and diligent look is currently busy completing the latest editions of the world veteran of the written press. Published in Vienna since 1703, the Wiener Zeitung is preparing to print its last issue on June 30, after more than three hundred years of existence.
“We used to say that we are the world’s oldest continuously published and still operating newspaper”boasts Mme Belfkih by showing around the already half-empty offices of his editorial staff. The spleen rises in the corridors as the deadline approaches. Although the title of oldest newspaper in the world is disputed by other publications in Italy, it is clear that the end of the WZ will mark the history of the printed press. And its decline.
Founded under the Austrian monarchy, with the name of Wienerisches Diarium, the daily remained a pillar of the Viennese media landscape even though its paid circulation had fallen below 8,000 copies. The end of its paper publication is a consequence of the announced abolition of its main source of funding: its monopoly on the publication of legal notices.
“Impartial and objective”
THE WZ has in fact an almost unique model in the Western press. Owned by the Austrian state since the middle of the 19th centurye century after being nationalized by Emperor Franz Joseph of Habsburg dissatisfied with its coverage of the revolutions of 1848, the newspaper has since remained under government supervision. Even the price of the copy – only 1 euro – had to be approved by Parliament.
But, beside his part Official newspaperthe drafting of about forty journalists also covered the news while swearing to its independence. “I have never had to deal with political influence,” promise Mme Belfkih, entrance to WZ in 2010 and who co-directs the editorial staff since the editor-in-chief preferred to leave rather than having to be the one who will turn off the presses. Although it prides itself on having been the first German-language newspaper to publish the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 despite the risks of censorship by the very conservative Austrian Court of the time, the Wiener Zeitung however, has always defended a clean and factual style. Investigation is clearly not his forte.
You have 53.99% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.