Alkompis’ Julia Agha on telling hard truths to your audience

Editor’s note: this interview is part of The Fix’s email course on audience building and engagement for editorial leaders by Emma Löfgren. You can subscribe for free to access the whole course.

Being responsive to the communities you cover is key for building trust. But what happens when you find yourselves on opposite sides of an issue, and your audience gets it wrong?

The so-called LVU campaign – named after the Swedish Care of Young Persons (Special Provisions) Act, which regulates how and when social services can take a child into care, known as LVU in Swedish – went viral in 2022 when it alleged that Swedish social services kidnap Muslim children. The claim was obviously false, but stirred concern in Sweden’s Muslim community, where many already distrusted the state, not always without reason.

I spoke with Julia Agha, CEO of Alkompis, Sweden’s largest Arabic-language news site, to find out how they reacted when the conspiracy began to take hold among their audience. 

Hi Julia, could you tell me about Alkompis and your audience?

Alkompis is a Swedish news channel in Sweden’s second biggest mother tongue, Arabic – articles and video. It’s a very mixed audience, people come from more than 25 countries, and have different religious and political views. The only thing they have in common is the language, and maybe that they’re new to Sweden. 

A majority came to Sweden in the past ten years, and there are around 600,000 Arabic speakers here today out of a total population of 10 million.

What’s your strategy for working with this audience in terms of audience building, retention and so on?

First of all, it’s important to be independent in terms of religion, politics but also ethnicity. We’re for all Arabic-speakers. It’s important to us that that diversity is also reflected in our newsroom, but outward-speaking, we’re a Swedish news site, but in Arabic. This Swedishness is important so that we’re not perceived as, say, a Syrian news site.

Our strategy is to be close to our audience, it’s one of our strategy pillars. By that we mean that we should never be seen as part of the establishment or only report on the big issues. There are a lot of societies and associations that we’re in close contact with and people should feel that they’re able to send news tips to us, even if it’s just a small thing.

To be close to readers, we also highlight success stories, and it’s important that they’re not just “super success stories”, not just wealthy businessmen, but there are lots of aspects to success. It doesn’t have to be exceptional to spread inspiration and positivity.

Thirdly, part of our mission is to facilitate integration by plugging the information gap in society. We want to contribute with knowledge and information, that our readers get something out of, or learn something from visiting alkompis.se. We want to do that without ever talking down to our readers – it’s not a teacher-student relationship.

I know what you mean, it’s like being a smart friend, isn’t it [the name Alkompis consists of the Arab definite article “al” and the Swedish “kompis”, which means friend]. Could you tell me about the LVU disinformation campaign? At what point did your newsroom realise that this was a story you were going to have to cover?

We had been covering this issue for years. Before it became “the LVU campaign” it was a question of a fear that existed in some immigrant groups of the Swedish social services. 

That’s a fear that means people don’t turn to the social services to ask for help until the situation completely derails and in the worst case scenario it becomes an LVU case [when the child is taken into social care, which is only the last resort in a range of things the social services can do to help troubled families], because you didn’t ask for help.

Disinformation, rumours and inaccurate information had existed before. But what happened in 2022, almost overnight, was a massive wave of hateful disinformation, fuelled by foreign actors. We saw hashtags with exactly the same message, and not just vague rumours but very direct, “Sweden is kidnapping Muslim children”, clearly false.

We went out hard to counter this, because it was very clear that it was damaging disinformation meant to divide and sow even more fear among people who are already vulnerable or very far from society. Our editor-in-chief recorded a video of himself putting the record straight, urging people to be critical of their sources and be careful.

We’re used to rumours, but this was on a completely different level, so this video wasn’t able to stop the disinformation. The opposite happened, that we were attacked, too.

The claim that Sweden kidnaps Muslim children is obviously false. But I have no trouble imagining that there is, in some cases, a difference in the treatment immigrant families and white, native Swedish families get from social services and other authorities. So how do you balance fact-checking disinformation while defending your readers, who may feel like there’s still a grain of truth to an exaggerated statement?

For us, it was very important to understand who had this opinion, and who were behind these accounts that were spreading the hashtags. 

We discovered fairly quickly that a lot of them were not based in Sweden. So we needed to separate who lives in Sweden and understands Swedish society, and who is doing this with an agenda, without having an interest in understanding. 

We chose to only direct our coverage to our core readers in Sweden, because we can’t affect those other people, and it’s not our job to do so.

It was important to us to say that we’re not experts either. I barely knew what LVU was before this whole thing started. So we invited experts – respected, Arabic-speaking lawyers who are well-known within this target audience – who could talk about what the law says. But also talk about what rights you have as a parent, the right to an interpreter, the right to legal counsel.

We also invited people who had worked for the social services and had experience of family problems, who could talk about, for example, cultural clashes and how families could avoid problems with the social services. There were huge problems with the social services’ role too. Sometimes case officers were very junior and didn’t understand cultural differences, and had prejudices, and we raised those issues too.

I think we balanced it fairly well. Experts, people affected, and analysis. Simply put: journalism.

I have a very close relationship with my readers, and on a journalistic level I’m comfortable disagreeing with them, because I’m confident in my professional values and know how to respond. But on a psychological, personal level, I find it harder to stay detached than I used to. How did you feel when you had to tackle this whole LVU campaign?

I’ve thought about this a lot and have settled on that when you cover a niche group and are close to that group, you’re their voice. We’ve been the voice of Arabic speakers in Sweden and their representatives to some extent. 

But it’s like a magazine for doctors or a small local newspaper: we also have to cover our target audience. Just like when the magazine for doctors has to cover a doctor who did something bad, or a local newspaper needs to raise a problem in its town. We’ll always rub against each other a little bit.

I think it also helps build trust. That’s how we felt about the LVU campaign, that it’s a hard truth, or tough love. It’s for our audience’s own good. 

We had a small dip at the start, when people said “you’re only on the side of the state, or the social services”, and we responded to that by saying that “no, we’re actually on your side, because we notice that this hate and fear doesn’t benefit you. If there are systemic faults, we cover them. But disinformation, hate and threats, that’s not how you change things in a democracy. There are other ways.”

We also let people write opinion pieces and urged them to demonstrate and exert their democratic rights. But spreading hate on the internet doesn’t benefit anyone.

I know what you’re saying, and I feel like in a lot of cases what people want is a platform where they can be heard. And as long as you can explain why you cover something a certain way, the majority respects that, even if they disagree.

Exactly. And for us, a lot of our readers come from countries where you maybe don’t have as much free speech as in Sweden, so they’re used to stating their opinion behind anonymous accounts on social media. 

But in Sweden you can have an opinion in public and put your name and photo on it in a newspaper, you won’t end up in jail. So go for it. Make your voice heard. If you see something wrong about a public authority, of course you should write about it or tip off journalists. But don’t spread things that we know are false.

What are your future plans for Alkompis?

Right now we’re keen to step up our local coverage. We’ve got pretty good presence in Malmö, but we want even more in Gothenburg and other cities as well. We get news tips all the time, but it’s hard for us to be at the scene if we don’t have anyone there.

We also recently hired a new reporter to provide more content in Swedish, because we think that a lot of the stories we break are of interest to the Swedish-speaking public too, or other Swedish media.

Alkompis in facts and figures

How big is Alkompis’ staff? Ten people, including journalists, IT, CEO and salesperson.

How big is Alkompis’ audience? There are around 600,000 Arabic speakers in Sweden, so that’s the total target audience. Alkompis.se has around 350,000 unique visitors a month, and their Facebook page which also attracts global visitors has 2.5 million followers. Ninety percent of traffic to Alkompis.se comes from within Sweden.

What’s the revenue model? Previously 100 percent ad-funded, but as of 2024 approximately 90 percent ad-funded and 10 percent from Swedish press subsidies.

Source of the cover photo: courtesy of Julia Agha

---