Fakt

Fakt

Front page of a September 2006 edition
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Tabloid
Owner(s)	Axel Springer AG
Editor	Robert Feluś
Founded	2003; 14 years ago (2003)
Political alignment	Centrist, populist
Headquarters	Warsaw
Circulation	270,331 (October 2016)
Website	www.fakt.pl

Fakt (Polish for "fact") is a Polish tabloid-style daily newspaper and is one of the best-selling papers in the country.

Fakt was launched in October 2003 by the Polish outlet of the German publishing company Axel Springer AG,Axel Springer Polska, and modeled on Springer's German tabloid Bild, the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe. Like its German counterpart Bild, Fakt is characterised by its downmarket, often sensationalist journalism with a populist appeal. However, politically it is by and large centrist. Then the paper supported former prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz's policies; Marcinkiewicz also regularly contributes invited comments. Other regular contributors of op-ed pieces include Tomasz Lis, a prominent television journalist with political ambitions, TVN anchorman Kamil Durczok, and former Rzeczpospolita columnist Maciej Rybiński.

Untypically for a tabloid and in contrast to its usual content, Fakt has a weekly supplement entitled Europa which contains highbrow (non-original) essays by scholars and public intellectuals, which in 2006 have included Niall Ferguson, Francis Fukuyama, Jürgen Habermas, and Robert Kagan.

The headquarters of Fakt is in Warsaw and the paper is published in tabloid format.

The circulation of Fakt was 715,000 copies in 2003, making it the best selling newspaper in the country. Its circulation was 373,700 copies in Germany.

Within a short time, Fakt replaced the upmarket to middle-market Gazeta Wyborcza as Poland's biggest-selling newspaper, also putting pressure on Super Express, until then the only national tabloid. Gazeta Wyborcza's publisher Agora S.A. responded with the (failed) launch of a distinct middle-market paper Nowy Dzień to compete directly with Fakt.