Népszabadság relaunches online, ten years after Mediaworks closed the paper

Népszabadság relaunched on Thursday as a website and a weekly magazine, ten years after Mediaworks closed the print paper and cited financial losses. Editor-in-chief Ákos Tóth told Reuters the new room will employ about 90 people, most of them former staff of Népszabadság or of the left-wing daily Népszava, whose print edition stopped in May. Four Hungarian businessmen, mainly in real estate abroad, are funding the site. Tóth said they have committed money for two years and want to break even on advertising and subscriptions.

The investors bought Népszava and the rights to the Népszabadság name last month, Tóth said. The brand had been dark since October 2016, when Mediaworks shut the newsroom overnight. The paper had been the largest opposition daily. Critics of Viktor Orbán's government called the closure a political silencing. The government said it had not pressed the owner, and that Hungary met European Union standards on media freedom. Mediaworks' stated reason was losses. Both accounts have sat on the record for a decade. Thursday's relaunch does not settle them. It puts a newsroom back under the old name.

Tóth's editorial line, as he described it, is narrow on purpose. He said independent journalism in Hungary needs to return to classic, news-based reporting, to ask questions again and not state an opinion. That is a pitch against the commentary model that fills much of the remaining opposition press, and against the government-friendly outlets that take state advertising. It is also a business bet. A site that lives on subscriptions has to be useful to someone who already knows the day's argument.

The market he is entering is distorted in a way he named. State advertising under successive Orbán governments has flowed to political allies. A new title that does not receive that money has to sell ads to private clients and sell subscriptions to readers. Two years of committed funding is the runway. Ninety salaries, a website and a weekly are the cost. Népszava's decision to drop print in May is the cautionary number inside the same company: a sister paper already judged that a press run did not pay.

The weekly plus the site is a split format. Daily news goes online. A magazine can carry the longer pieces a 90-person room can still report. Tóth did not publish a circulation target or a subscription price in the Reuters interview. The staff mix is the concrete plan: former Népszabadság journalists who left in 2016 or later, and Népszava journalists whose print desk closed in May. A room built from two shut papers is experienced, and it is also a room that has already watched one owner turn the lights off.

The political calendar is not the paper's. Orbán is no longer prime minister, in the framing Reuters used for the 2016 closure, which it described as happening under the former premier. The advertising patterns Tóth described were built over successive administrations and do not vanish with one election. The test he set is break-even after two years. Until then the four investors are the publisher of record, and the brand on the masthead is one that disappeared in a night in 2016.