Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The public has spoken: Finland will get a new news outlet next year.
Uusi Juttu, which means “new thing” in Finnish, will launch as a digital news outlet covering the country in January, with the support of more than 5,000 paying members.
On September 17, the site’s founders launched a campaign that aimed to attract 5,000 paying members in a month. They met with people on the streets of Helsinki, offering them coffee and porridge and telling them about Uusi Juttu (not the site’s permanent name). More than 2,500 people signed up in just the first 15 hours, and Uusi Juttu surpassed its 5,000 goal in three days. New goal: Sign up 15,000 members by October 17. (As of Tuesday morning, the site had signed up 5,932 members.)
The founders are current and former journalists Olli Seuri, Antti Pikkanen, Sonia Zaki, Jussi Sipola, and Tuuli Hongisto. Seuri, who will serve as Uusi Juttu’s editor-in-chief, worked at the Finnish public broadcaster Yle for nearly 15 years and is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Jyväskylä.
Uusi Juttu plans to publish a morning news briefing, a deep-dive afternoon news podcast, and two in-depth feature stories each weekday. All the pieces will be available in text and audio.
Jakob Moll, the CEO of Zetland and a 2022 Nieman Fellow, said Zetland’s success in Denmark as a membership-driven, ad-free publisher led him to believe that Zetland’s general model can work elsewhere in the Nordic region if it’s adapted to local needs.
“The reason we are successful in Denmark is that we did not begin by assuming that our wonderful journalism would be relevant to people,” Moll said. “We really thought deep and hard and spent a lot of time finding out what people want and need. I think that’s the only path to success.” Both Moll and Uusi Juttu’s cofounders are adamant about building a news product by and for Finns, not just a Finnish-language version of Zetland.
“When I first talked with Jakob, I was like, ‘I hope you understand, but the Zetland name is just not possible in Finland,’ because of the Z on Russian tanks and in Russian propaganda,” Seuri said. “It would never fly in Finland. We’ve had really fruitful conversations from the beginning and, it feels more like a partner and a support than Zetland coming to the Finnish market.”
An Uusi Juttu subscription is €100 per year (about $112), though the fundraising campaign lets founding members pay what they want for the first year. Moll said that, on average, people had chosen to pay around €90 (about $100). The first person to sign up was 16-year-old high school student Roni Äikkä, who woke up at 5:55 a.m. on September 17 to be the first subscriber at 6:00 a.m. when the campaign launched. He told Uusi Juttu that he’s hoping for “no shocking sense of urgency or [clickbait] headlines.”
Moll and Seuri said Finland is a prime location to launch a new news outlet. Sixty-nine percent of Finns trust the media, among the highest levels in the world, according to the most recent statistics from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and 20% pay for news. At the same time, the news market isn’t very crowded, with the major players being public broadcaster Yle, national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, and regional newspaper company Keskisuomalainen. (Of the 20% of the population that pays for news, 51% subscribe to Helsingin Sanomat.) In surveys with news consumers, Uusi Juttu found they want less clickbait, more deep dives and analyses, and transparency.
“The traditional approach to internationalizing your brand often fails because journalistic publications are these inherently cultural products,” Moll said. “If you try to drop-ship them into a new country, then typically you’re going to fail. When you look at Zetland, we know how to explain it and [what to] emphasize in our context. It’s a value-based thing. It needs different packaging in a different country with a different culture and a different idea about what our challenges are and what our democracy needs.”
Moll shared tips with me for publishers who are thinking of taking their journalism to new markets:
Avoiding hubris when launching in a new market: Tips from Zetland
Disclaimer: One of the benefits of entrepreneurship is that you don’t have to listen to people that tell you what can’t be done, or how to do things. So here are five principles you should consider — or ignore.
Treat your venture as an investigative project. Research and reporting are ideal entrepreneurial skills. Seek out data and sources providing as many perspectives as possible.
Build clear hypothesis about the what, when, why, who and how. Then challenge all of those assumptions. Those that survive, find ways to test.
Develop a product that is differentiated and imminently valuable to your target audience — but don’t put more than a third of your efforts into the journalism. The second should go into your messaging. The third should be building your go-to-market-strategy.
Don’t hire the best journalists. Hire the best minds for journalistic entrepreneurship. “Best” meaning agile thinkers with a knack for business and technology and who are fun to be around. Only hire people you can laugh with in the middle of a crisis.
Listen hard to your users, both before, during and after launch. Iterate and adjust. Things will not go as predicted. Wins will take longer to achieve than you imagined. Luckily, silencing the haters will feel better than you imagined.
