Vorarlberger Medienhaus Group in Austria definitely fits that mold. The company owns more than 60 newspapers, several online properties, and radio stations, not only in Austria, but Hungary and Romania as well. VM also owns Germany-based Quoka, the market leader in classifieds. Quoka publishes 18 weekly papers in Germany, with a circulation of 600,000 copies a month. It also operates www.quoka.de, Germany's largest classified website.

And in 2007, VM Group launched the wholly owned investment subsidiary VM Digital in order to speed up the increase of its online businesses. VM Digital focuses on investments and acquisitions in online media companies in the areas of classifieds, community, mobile and e-commerce.

Driving this innovation and investment is Eugen A. Russ, Publisher and CEO of the media group. Russ will be speaking at the upcoming World Newspaper Congress in Vienna (13-15 October) during a session dedicated to “Repositioning Newspapers and News Publishers.” Here he talks about VM’s and Austria’s good publishing fortune, admitting that big challenges lie just around the corner.

WAN-IFRA: How would you characterize the state of the newspaper industry in Austria at the moment, especially compared to other regions in Europe and around the world?

EUGENE A. RUSS: Austria and the German-speaking regions constitute an island of bliss for newspapers. Print media are doing extremely well. Despite high paper costs, record results are being achieved. The export-oriented economy is desperately seeking good workers and continues to favour traditional job ads as a means of doing so.

In Austria we also benefit from the fact that the federal state government as well as several regional governments in the eastern part of the country spend considerable sums on advertising. It is estimated that politicians liberally steer about EUR 130 million towards ‘friendly’ newspapers.

One thing that newspapers here can claim is that they have a high success rate of holding on to young readers. Good reach and relevant content help newspapers to survive as a successful advertising medium in the increasingly fragmented media industry.

Nevertheless: as a company, we are gearing up for difficult times. The worldwide reality in the print sector will undoubtedly catch up with us also in Austria. We are proactively adapting our structures in order to have sufficient resources for future investments.

WAN-IFRA: The VM Group is quite diversified, not only in different media but different regions as well. What have been some of the key success factors for VM when branching out into new markets and new regions?

RUSS: We take two separate approaches:

On the one hand, there is the regional approach in Austria, Hungary and Romania aimed at increasing market penetration with print and online media. Synergies enable us to offer our customers uniquely favourable communication services. And unique local content make us irreplaceable.

On the other hand, in contrast, our company’s classified ad portals are internationally oriented.

We attribute our success to the following factors:

• Our managers work as autonomous contractors.
• We model ourselves on the world’s best in each case and do not hesitate to copy good models.
• We favour simple and quick solutions.
• We work with uniform processes throughout the group.

Quoka classifieds siteWAN-IFRA: What have you learned from the success of Quoka, in terms of potential for classifieds?

RUSS: The acquisition of Quoka in 2005 was a milestone for the VM Group. Since then, we define classifieds as an independent strategic business division. Classifieds Online are national or international models and today more than 30 classified portals in Hungary, Romania and the German-speaking regions belong to the group.

Quoka’s firm focus on online as well as the separation of print and online formed the basis for it becoming Germany’s biggest classified ad portal.

We have also learned how rapidly the shift from print to online can happen in areas with an affinity to the Internet. It is then especially important to adapt the organisation quickly and determinedly in order to stay successful.

WAN-IFRA: Since the VM Group launched VM Digital in 2007, how has this division helped to increase VM's digital portfolio and presence?

RUSS: It is the objective of VM Digital to develop a group of online pure plays from the areas of classifieds, content and commerce. VM Digital now consists of more than 10 participations and portals, e.g. www.pferde.de, www.caraworld.de or www.mascus.de. Most recently we acquired the leading property rental platform www.erento.com based in Berlin. VM has become an even more online-oriented operation and at the same time in Germany we have become established in one of the most highly competitive Internet markets.

Setting out from the German-speaking market, we will internationalise our portals to develop a growing mainstay for the group.