Fellner, Wolfgang

(1954–)

   One of the major figures in the Austrian press in the latter decades of the 20th century, Fellner and his businessman brother, Helmuth (1956–), gained their reputations for hardhitting feature stories, eye-catching visuals, painstaking marketing research, and precise identification of readership with the magazine NEWS, which first appeared in 1992. Wolfgang had been a presence in Austrian journalism since the age of 14 with his RennbahnExpress, a young people’s magazine first published in 1968 that eventually circulated not only in Salzburg, where he lived with his parents, but throughout Austria. His next important creation, Basta, packaged gossip, sensationalism, and sexual innuendo deliberately targeted at Austrian twenty-somethings.

   His most recent, and most ambitious, venture was the daily Österreich, which made use of all the techniques on which he had relied in the past, as well as a flat-price scale that undercut most of Austria’s established dailies. Unlike previous Fellner periodicals, Österreich, which first came out in September 2006, belongs to Wolfgang alone.

   Fellner has been widely criticized in Austria for what some see as his disregard for intellectual seriousness, his heavy reliance on tie-in offers, and pandering to the public fascination with personal scandal to bulk up his readership and subscription list. Even his naysayers, however, admit that he has done much to keep print journalism in Austria alive. NEWS alone doubled the circulation of national magazines after it came out.