was first printed on 3 July 1848 as a
liberal (libertarian)-
bourgeois newspaper within the meaning of the
revolutions of 1848 by the entrepreneur
August Zang. Its staff split in 1864 under the leadership of
Max Friedländer,
Michael Etienne and
Adolf Werthner to form the
Neue Freie Presse, which later was
aryanized by the
Nazis in 1938 and effectively closed in 1939. In 1946, after the
Second World War,
resistance fighter
Ernst Molden, who had been
vice-editor-in-chief of the
Neue Freie Presse from 1921 until 1939, reestablished the newspaper as . The
"Presse" had been struggling for financial survival for a long time, until during the 1960s, the Austrian
Chamber of Commerce became the main shareholder. Since 1999 it has been owned by the
Styria Medien AG, a
conservative-liberal media group founded by the
Catholic Church. Its publisher is Die Presse Verlag GmbH. The daily covers half-page science news each day. The political position of the can be described as
classical liberal, with a strong emphasis on
free-market economy and
small government, traditionally opposing Austria's
grand coalition and its
neocorporatist tendencies. It therefore stands in contrast to other Austrian newspapers of quality, including the more
conservative Wiener Zeitung and the
social-liberal Der Standard. Emphasis is placed on the 1848 revolutions as the beginning of its tradition as a liberal newspaper, citing them in its slogan, "
Free since 1848". Despite its liberal free-market orientation,
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels wrote a series of articles on the
American Civil War for in the early 1860s, which were later collected into the book
The Civil War in the United States. In 2007, the editor-in-chief of was
Michael Fleischhacker, who had been appointed to the post in 2004. Next year, the paper was named Best Editorial Team in Austria. ==Circulation==