Is the world's oldest print daily set free?

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Wiener Zeitung, stopped its print publication last Friday. The Vienna-based German paper had its first print run on August 8, 1703, more than 50 years before the Battle of Palashi in our neck of the woods, covering 320 years, '12 presidents, 10 emperors, 2 republics'.

In 1768, the newspaper reported about a piano recital by an 'especially talented' 12-year-old Austrian. He was revealed as some Mozart kid.

Wiener Zeitung will now solely have an online edition — not quite the same thing, is it? — and reportedly has plans for a monthly print edition. Cause for the rupture? A new law that stops the legal requirement for companies to pay for publishing public announcements in newspapers, causing Zeitung a loss of income of about $19 million, and leading to a personnel purge.

But, for us, the bigger news pertains to another side of the paper. Despite being an official gazette — thus, government-dependent — it had maintained its independence and was even critical of the government on issues.

In the final edition, it blamed the government for its print demise, something that many readers of even non-state-owned publications may find astonishing, since to them any criticism may seem as biting the hand that feeds. Now even 'financially independent', Zeitung online should be even more free.