If you are a civil servant in a small town in Sweden working on labor market issues, you’d probably appreciate a monthly report on how the labor market evolves in your region. Local news service Newsworthy serves that need with its focus on the 300 municipalities of the country, although its primary customers are newsrooms rather than individuals.
Jens Finnäs is the founder of Newsworthy. He calls himself “leading figure” rather than CEO since the team is still small, consisting of Jens, his co-founders Leonard Wallentin and Måns Magnusson, data journalists Martin Olsson and Elin Thornberg, and supporting roles in sales and accounting. Starting an independent digital media was a long-term ambition for Jens, who worked as a data journalist for more than ten years. Excerpts of our conversation follow.
What made you go from freelancing to becoming a media entrepreneur?
As a freelancer, I was part of the collective of data journalists Journalism++. You always work on behalf of someone else. I found it difficult that the original idea often comes from newsrooms. We wanted to be independent publishers with a platform to publish stories and an audience to read them. We succeeded in many ways by publishing stories all over Sweden with local angles, but we need to keep pushing our ambitions and goals, grow bigger, and get more subscribers so that we can create more of our content.
You received grants from Google and the European Data Journalism Network to get started. How did you become sustainable without grants?
I have mixed feelings towards grants. Without the initial grant, it wouldn’t have been possible at all to set off. On the other hand, programs like these can easily lead you in the wrong direction. Innovation grants try to please the people who hand out the money, and drift towards buzzwords and innovation. It’s not necessarily what audiences need.
Our initial pitch was focused on using statistical models to find story leads; co-founder Måns has a PhD in statistics, and we were using his skills in that domain. But today we’re rarely doing anything that’s even close to that. We use less advanced methods, but the output is more appreciated. The best local story is often putting unique local data into a list—for example, scraping data from Google Maps to find the best campsites and tourism sites in a region. A list of the most popular attractions in a city isn’t fancy in terms of statistical modeling, but it is useful information.
Luckily, early on, we were able to establish a profitable revenue stream through the Newsworthy Content collaborations and commissioned PR work for companies and organizations. We then spent a lot of our time building the news agency for local data journalism, which is now a subscription model.
And I see journalist trainings as a part of our business in the future. We have a couple of courses that are well established, like programming for journalists and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for journalists, that we’ve done for many years. We’ve also done a couple of courses on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for journalists. It’s fun, and if we’re able to go out and promote data journalism, then that’s good for sales, too. It builds confidence in us as publishers. Giving courses for subscribers at a reduced fee could also be part of the value of being a subscriber.
What’s your advice for other founders regarding financial sustainability?
The story that is missing if we talk about funding is that it tends to revolve around the startup logic of building a small product, getting funding, and scaling it up by a large factor, backed by capital or grants. We are an example of a business that has grown more slowly and established ourselves step by step. It is more “boring,” but hopefully more resilient.
To some extent, it is a personality question, and it came naturally to us, having been freelancers for many years. I would personally find it quite stressful and frightening to get a large amount of money with the requirement of growing x percent every year—especially in a situation where all of us have small children and have been on parental leave.
Isn’t the content model of Newsworthy an example of scaling, creating 300 different local versions from one story?
Yes, but if you look at the emphasis we put on automation and on traditional journalism, the first is gradually declining over the years. That’s what we learned from our paying customers. Previously, we would focus on recurring data sources or daily stories, to do as much as possible with automation. We are spending more time now on original stories that should always have a broader angle, something newsy with as much local data as possible. With those components you have the core ingredients of a good local story. Finding a topic and data set that contains something newsy from a national perspective, requires traditional journalism skills. Packaging it as a story, understanding where you get the data, is also data journalism craftsmanship that is hard to automate. Those kinds of skills and tasks become an increasing part of what we spend our time on.
Do you think this is how newsrooms will use data and AI technology in the future?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the role division between the local newsroom and the news agency: what tasks can be centralized, and what should be left to the local newsroom. The mood and sentiment in Sweden is actually quite positive towards local journalism, in my opinion. It’s a tale of optimism. All of the local newsrooms are struggling with digital transition, but a lot have found money through subscriptions. There is no need for generic content such as what the traditional news agency used to provide—one or two pages with local content, one or two pages with national content. There is an increased demand for unique and quality content that makes people subscribe to a platform. I can see a demand for outsourcing tool production, research and news lead discovery features to a news agency like us. Small local newsrooms can focus on content production, such as interviewing people and being out there in reality.
Lastly, do you have any personal advice on work-life balance as an entrepreneur?
It becomes more stressful when you start to have employees, because then your responsibility is not just paying your own salary, but also theirs. That’s been the most stressful thing for me. I don’t see any golden rule other than trying to set your ambitions on a good, reasonable level. You can spend endless amounts of time on what you do. Try not to make it more important than it is.