After decades of public debates to institutionally anchor Newspaper Studies (today: Journalism and Communication Studies) at the University of Vienna, the establishment of the Institute did not take place until the National Socialist era. The Newspaper Studies Institute (Institut für Zeitungswissenschaft) was ceremonially opened on 7 May 1942, and was primarily intended to serve the pre-education of National Socialist editors. In the course of de-nazification, a political and substantive reorientation took place in 1945, but it still took several decades before the discipline saw itself as an interdisciplinary social science and achieved corresponding recognition and promotion within the university.
