[2][3] The paper is published by AS Eesti Ajalehed,[3] a part of the public media company Ekspress Grupp (EEG1T) that is listed on the Tallinn Stock Exchange.

In March 2010 the newspaper shifted to a magazine-like format (275 × 355 mm)[4] resembling Der Spiegel and Stern.

[6] Making use of Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost, it was established as a weekly newspaper in 1989[3] by Hans H. Luik and others.

Considerably thicker than other newspapers of the late Soviet era, it was one of the first to make use of digital publishing technologies and photographic typesetting.

[citation needed] Consequently, it has been notorious for popularising the incorrect usage of 'sh' and 'zh' in substitution of the characters 'š' and 'ž', which in late 1980s were rather inconvenient for computer processing but appear in a number of Estonian loanwords (e.g. garaaž, borrowed from French garage and tšau from Italian ciao) and names transliterated from Slavic languages, most importantly, Russian.