The pandemic has highlighted how dependent the media is on public money. The Corona years were “not bad financially” for the industry thanks to short-time work and government advertisements.
At the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus reached Austria. Schools and universities closed. The first communities were placed under quarantine. The first corona lockdown began on March 16.
Austria’s media are reporting on the crisis, but are in the middle of one themselves. The population needs information, and urgently. Reach is increasing. But the advertising industry, on which many publications depend, is collapsing.
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The pandemic plunged the entire economy into crisis; economic output shrank by 6.6 percent in the first year of the pandemic. The government promised to do everythingto avert the worst and save jobs. One of the most important means for this: short-time work.
Dependent on the public sector
This is intended to help companies to bridge economic downturns. Companies reduce working hours, the state replaces part of the salary via the AMS and thus saves jobs. In the early days of the Corona pandemic, mass layoffs were avoided thanks to short-time work. In the first twelve months It cost 7.8 billion euros.
But how the public sector distributed this aid remained secret until the very end. The journalist and ORF presenter Martin Thür fought in court to have the data on short-time work published – that took years. It was not until March 2024 he gets right.
Although the dataset is still not publicly available, the AMS has day one but can be provided for research purposes upon request.
The data analysis shows how dependent the Austrian media landscape was on public aid and advertisements during the Corona pandemic.
38 million euros in short-time work allowance for media
According to calculations by day one to Austrian media and publishers – 35 million euros for 2020, three million euros for 2021 and 115,000 euros for 2022. At least ten media brands received short-time work assistance of over one million euros.
day one has identified over a hundred media companies that received at least 100,000 euros in short-time work subsidies. To do this, the team compared companies that received state media funding from Telekom Regulierungs-GmbH RTR with recipients of short-time work assistance. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The highest sum, around 4.4 million euros, went to the ORF, which largest media companies of the country.
According to its own information, the public broadcaster sent over 500 ORF employees on short-time work, which corresponds to 470 full-time equivalents (FTE). Among the editorial staff, 38 positions in sports, 14 in entertainment and nine in culture were affected. There was no short-time work in the news department itself; on the contrary: employees from other departments were brought in.
In second place is the Austrian Media Group with around 3.6 million euros. (This includes: Austrian Media Group GmbH, OE24 GmbH, OE24 Redaktions- und Produktions GmbH, Radio Austria GmbH, A. Digital Errichtungs- und beteiligungs GmbH and A. Digital Content GmbH.) In response to multiple inquiries from day one Austria did not react.
A former employee of oe24 Radio, who wishes to remain anonymous, was working as a freelancer in the editorial department at the beginning of the pandemic. day one he says that his fees have been reduced by up to 20 percent. The corresponding fee notes are day one And because he wasn’t permanently employed, he couldn’t work short-time either. So he didn’t get any state aid.
Short-time work was “unavoidable”
The Standard received around 2.3 million euros for its publishing company and media company. According to the newspaper’s own information, 142 of the 322 full-time equivalents on short-time work were in the editorial department. Journalists from departments where there was little to do helped with the Corona reporting. This meant that editorial bottlenecks could be avoided despite a smaller workforce.
Short-time work was “very important, not to say the only option” at the beginning of the pandemic, wrote a spokesperson for the daily newspaper in a statement on day one. During the first Corona summer, it became clear that business would recover. The Standard therefore ended short-time work at the end of September 2020.
The Kleine Zeitung, which received over 2.1 million euros in short-time work subsidies including advertising and marketing, does not want to give any figures. The newspaper took advantage of the opportunity and it was “in any case a help in getting through this difficult phase economically,” says a spokesperson for the Styria Media Group, to which the newspaper belongs.
A former editor of the Kleine Zeitung tells us anonymously that his working hours were reduced by 50 percent. One week he worked full-time, the next week not at all. The size of the newspaper was reduced overall, but not the domestic politics section.
So how did the team manage to fill the pages with far fewer workers? With the help of the news agencies and a lot of effort, he says. Colleagues from other departments also helped out.
The television station group around ProSieben, Puls 4 and ATV suffered a massive market slump during the first lockdown. The TV group received around 1.4 million euros in short-time work assistance.
On average, 135 of the total of around 550 employees were on short-time work from the beginning of April to the end of August 2020. “The journalistic sector was excluded from short-time work with a few exceptions,” says a company spokeswoman to day one.
Other media outlets declined to answer questions from day one to answer. The funding is subject to a standard review, said a spokesman for the free newspaper Heute. “We do not want to comment on it until that is completed.” The AHVV publishing house, which publishes the newspaper Heute, received over 920,000 euros.
The Kurier also does not want to comment on the topic of short-time work. The daily newspaper received around 560,000 euros. In addition, there was help for the tech department Futurezone (9,000 euros) and the channel Schau TV, which is now called Kurier TV (92,000 euros).
A former Kurier employee who worked in the sports department for around two decades remembers that care was taken to ensure that working hours were correctly observed and recorded. Journalists from other media outlets who were randomly interviewed by tag eins also confirmed this for their employers.
At the beginning of the pandemic, user numbers increased
The need for journalism was particularly high in the first few months of the pandemic, says Denise Voci, who researches and teaches at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the University of Klagenfurt. She is coordinating a research project run by the Austrian Science Fund FWF on the effects of the pandemic on the media industry. Among other things, surveys are being conducted on short-time work in the media industry.
This increased need for journalism is also reflected in the online reach, which reached record figures in March 2020.
While the trend on platforms such as derstandard.at and orf.at remained positive throughout the year, other online media were unable to maintain the growth. For example, the number of users on oe24.at was below the previous year’s level in some months of 2020.
Why? According to Voci, Austrians consume the media they trust the most, especially in times of crisis. When it comes to information about the coronavirus, respondents rated ORF and Standard as credible.
News hunger to news fatigue
After the beginning of the pandemic, things quickly went “from news hunger to news fatigue,” says Voci. “Trust in the media is at rock bottom,” she knows from surveys.
This is a direct consequence of the pandemic. At the beginning of the Corona crisis in particular, people had the impression that the media had been involved in “scaremongering” instead of providing information. Respondents are also critical of the connections between politics and the media. Less than a fifth of respondents in a Gallup study said that the media helped contain the crisis. Almost twice as many said instead that the media had spread panic.
Advertising money finances the tabloid
The state invested a lot of money to help the media through the crisis. In addition to short-time work, advertising was particularly relevant economically.
From 2020 to 2021, the government placed advertising worth almost 93 million euros in Austria’s media, more than twice as much in the first year of Corona like 2019 – this is shown by an analysis of the data that public bodies have to report to the broadcasting authority RTR. This means that more public money flowed into the media through government advertisements than through the labor market policy instrument of short-time work.
Tabloid media such as Krone, Heute and Österreich are at the top. The Krone newspaper, website and TV channels received around 17 million euros from government advertisements in the two years 2020 and 2021, making them by far the most. The Krone is still the most read daily newspaper in the country.
“Some media managers have said: Actually, the Corona years weren’t bad financially,” says Voci.
Generous government aid and advertisements saved some jobs in journalism at the beginning of the pandemic, Voci knows from interviews with media managers. But those days are over.
As early as 2021, the Austrian Media Group reported 40 employees at the AMS Only a few months ago, the Crown confirmed the Reduction of 40 jobsIn July of this year, the Austrian Media Group announced that the news department of oe24-radio to dissolveThere were also staff cuts at standardthe Small newspaper and at Delivery man.
Years ago, media expert Andy Kaltenbrunner attested that the domestic industry was becoming increasingly dependent on government advertisements and subsidies. In 2018 and 2019, many newspaper publishers already showed that income from public advertisements and subsidies was higher than profit.
“The media manager state is therefore directly economically influencing the market, its design and thus the possibilities of journalism more than ever before,” writes Kaltenbrunner in his book “Apparently Transparent,” which was published in 2021.
The Corona crisis has made omnipresent problems in the industry visible, Voci agrees: “The media landscape in Austria was apparently no longer marketable before and now, after the funding and support has been stopped, this is also becoming apparent.”
