Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Aus...

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted every aspect of our lives, including the media industry. With the crisis creating great uncertainty, the media industry has played a crucial role in providing up-to-date information and entertainment during times of quarantine and social distancing. However, the pandemic has also hit the media industry hard, resulting in a loss of advertising investment and increased unemployment rates.

As a consequence of such difficult times, the Austrian media industry faces unique challenges regarding (re-)financing its products and searching for new monetization models, mainly due to changes in user behavior in the digital and online sphere for both news and entertainment sectors. These challenges added to the existing problems of the media industry in Austria, where media companies were already struggling with shrinking revenues and declining readership even before the pandemic.

Through this research project, we want to understand how the Austrian media industry has reacted to these challenges and the overall impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on it. Thus, the project aims to record, analyze, differentiate, and compare the transformation processes initiated, forced, or accelerated by the pandemic and evaluate its economic, management, and cultural implications for media development in Austria.