The Media
Newspaper stands in city centres, large train stations and well-touristed resorts stock a variety of English-language newspapers . You can usually get the European edition of the British broadsheet The Guardian ( www.guardian.co.uk ), printed in Frankfurt, by mid-morning the same day. Similarly, the International Herald Tribune ( www.iht.com ) is widely available the same day, and contains a useful distilled English version of the Frankfurter Allgemeine , also available on-line at www.faz.de . Other papers tend to be a day or so old. The weekly English-language newspaper Austria Today is occasionally available in the big cities, and a fairly dull rundown of Austrian news. Heavily subsidized by the state, the Austrian press is for the most part conservative and pretty uninspiring. Nearly half the population reads the reactionary Neue Kronen Zeitung tabloid, while plenty of the rest read another right-wing tabloid, Kurier . Of the qualities, Der Standard , printed on pink paper, tends to support the Social Democrats (SPO) while the rather strait-laced Die Presse backs the conservative People's Party (OVP). The latter two are considered to be Vienna-centric by folk outside the capital, hence the popularity in western Austria of two major regional dailies, the Salzburg-based Salzburger Nachtrichten , and Innsbruck's Tiroler Tageszeitung , both of which are again fairly conservative. One peculiarly Austrian phenomenon is the bags of newspapers you'll find hung from lampposts. Law-abiding Austrians take one and put their money in the slot. Vienna boasts a good weekly listings tabloid, Falter ( www.falter.at ), which is lively, politicized and critical, and comes out on a Friday. Although it's entirely in German, it's easy enough to decipher the listings. The national and regional dailies will also have limited listings of what's on in their particular area. Nearly all cafes and bars, and the traditional Viennese coffeehouses, have a wide selection of newspapers and magazines for patrons to browse through, occasionally even English-language ones. Austrian television is unlikely to win any international awards for cutting-edge programming or presentation. There are just two state-run channels: ORF 1 and ORF 2, with no independent competition at all as yet. As a result, Austrians tend to tune into German channels such as ARD and ZDF for a bit of variety. Many hotels and pensions have satellite TV, bringing the joys of CNN and MTV straight to your room. The state-run radio channels all feature a lot of chattering, though O1 (87.8/92FM) offers some decent classical music, in addition to news in English and French at 8am. The state-run English-language Blue Danube Radio was axed in 2000 after over twenty years of service, to be replaced with FM4 (103.8FM), an anodyne AOR music station with hourly news and weather in English. The BBC World Service ( www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice ) broadcasts in English on 100.8FM in Vienna, though you'll have to revert to short wave in order to receive it anywhere else in the country. If you do have short wave, look out, too, for Radio Austria International, which broadcasts Austrian news in English, Spanish and Russian.
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" Mathematician of the Phillipineserrol gumagay says "this is a good country and should be the very best i have ever traveled once in my own life
" Boogeymanjared dutosme says "Want some good country to travel? Austria is there!!!
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