He was a lover of the printed word. It has a dignity and authority that must be defended for democratic, political, cultural and aesthetic reasons. Kurt Kribitz, the Styria manager, did not play off the printed and the digital headlessly against each other. The Carinthian firmly believed that both worlds, the old and the new Gutenberg, would continue to complement each other even in times of all-pervasive digitality. Kurt Kribitz was a businessman, not a defiant dreamer.
If the branch in necrophilic lust for congresses, once again intoned a requiem to the printed newspaper, he could jump out of his skin, to which the devoted humanist and Catholic was otherwise seldom inclined. Kribitz believed in the print business model. He could go into raptures when the mighty printing presses in Graz, St. Veit (his St. Veit) or Zagreb started up like a beguiling symphony in front of guests and school classes. In strategy meetings, which he attended as Board Member for Printing and Logistics, he warned of the untapped potential of the printed daily newspaper, including the journalistic one. He was an alert, knowledgeable reader. The newspaper (his newspaper) will remain resized and fit for the future. His confident look ahead. It could be that he cited international experts as witnesses, whom he did not need: “There is still a lot of money on the table”. The exhausted self will rediscover the sensuality of print as a need, especially on weekends. The analogue as a place of refuge.
Am Prinzip Online First is not to be shaken, Kurt conceded at a lunch he suggested, but requires intelligence in internal differentiation: the print lead article must remain a solitaire and must not be congruent with the digital first commentary published the day before. This is only accelerating the decline of the newspaper, it is economically unreasonable. The lawsuit was one of his favorite refrains in the annual budget acceptances. He studied social media, but personally stayed away from them. He disliked the self-portrayal as well as the unbridled rawness, the anonymous anyway.
In the SMS memory Scraps of dialogue remind the precise reader and gentle reminder: “A wrong comma in the title on a school topic”, January 2021. The addressee wriggled moderately convincingly on the net: “Apparently the title was changed late and hastily after the proofreading. Annoying. Greetings.” . A final short message acknowledged the digital morning mail to which he subscribed. At the height of the Viennese advertising scandal, the newsletter disclosed its own turnover from ministerial campaigns. Kribitz, agreeing: “Only merciless transparency leads out of the crisis of confidence”. Attached is a short postscript: “Surgery survived well. Leaving the clinic today”.
Kurt Kribitz died yesterday as a result of his serious illness. He was 64 years old.
Hubert Patterer
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