Note from the author: For this article, I did two separate interviews. The first one with Jakob Moll, Zetland’s co-founder and international director, and the second one with Antti Pikkanen, one of the co-founders of Finnish Uusi Juttu. I then brought both perspectives together by combining the interviews.

Innovate or die. This could be the motto of Uusi Juttu, a Finnish media start-up that is now launching its first crowdfunding campaign to recruit at least 5,000 members.

The ambition? Nothing less than challenging the legacy media on the Finnish market – using the insights of Danish Zetland.

Launched in 2016, Zetland is now well established, with more than 44,000 paying members. To achieve this success, despite challenging times for the media industry, it used innovative methods to engage its core audience, such as so-called ambassadors campaigns.

In Zetland’s vision, journalism is a global movement, and the time has now come to export its recipe for success to other countries – starting with Finland.

Ahead of Uusi Juttu’s big jump, The Fix spoke with Antti Pikkanen and Jakob Moll to find out more about their vision.

Hej Jakob! How come Zetland is now launching in Finland? Of all places?

Jakob Moll: There are of course some business considerations. We are based in a small country, which means that if we want to have very big ambitions, it’s almost necessary to look outside Denmark to see where the market is.

More importantly, our analysis is that what we succeed in doing in Denmark is dealing with some pretty fundamental challenges, both for our democracies and especially for journalism.

The way journalism [works], and the context in which journalism exists, is basically the same across countries. So, it was quite obvious for us to say, well, we’ve succeeded in Denmark, we don’t see why something similar couldn’t work elsewhere.

We see Finland as a kind of test, a market where we get to understand how to do this in the right way.

Hei Antti! Can you explain to me how this collaboration between Uusi Juttu and Zetland started?

Antti Pikkanen: I have been having discussions with Zetland for years before anything really happened.

At that time I was working as a business director in a communications agency, but as a former journalist, I still deeply cared about journalism, and how to make it beneficial, especially for the younger audience, and was very inspired by what Zetland had done in Denmark.

I started to be convinced that this is something that needs to be done in Finland or at least attempted because the Finnish people and the very stagnated media market in Finland would really benefit from a Zetland type of product. So, we decided to give it a try. I left my previous job and started working on this project.

Jakob, how does this work in practice?

Jakob Moll: What we’ve done is to help the Finnish team understand what we do, so that they can copy what makes sense and avoid making some of the same mistakes we’ve made.

The rule of thumb that I usually say to them is that if you don’t have a clear idea of how to do something, you might as well copy us, and then you can figure out along the way how you want to do it.

So, the truth is that they are in charge in Finland – I’m available and I’m part of the team as far as that goes.

Antti, in the past, Zetland tried to expand to Finland and failed. What happened?

Antti Pikkanen: The question of the failure is actually the question of timing, because Zetland decided to postpone the launch. We were trying to find a perfect time to do it, and now when I look back, I think the time is now better than ever, because the world is moving in a direction where people want more reliable information and quality journalism that doesn’t require following news 24/7.

There are things that are now shaking our economies and societies in the Western world, and especially Finland. The country is having a huge economic crisis that questions the social welfare system which traditionally has been very strong. This kind of large phenomena builds a good base for a new kind of quality journalism, because launching a media product like this is also about building momentum.

How would you describe the Finnish media landscape?

Antti Pikkanen: The way the media system works in Finland right now hasn’t really changed that much during the past few years. It has been very stagnated and centred for a very long time, because traditionally it has relied on very strong regional newspapers, and the problem is that the future of these regional, very small newspapers is at stake because either someone needs to buy them or they are closed down.

The flip side of this is that the market will become even more concentrated because it’s owned by basically three big players at the moment, and there’s no real competition, so the media will increasingly resemble each other.

This lack of competition is starting to be a real problem. That is why I think that it’s really good news for Finns and the whole media market in Finland that now there is a new player that wants to enter the market.

What is your ambition with Uusi Juttu?

Antti Pikkanen: I hope we can disrupt the entire Finnish media, and I see that we’re already doing it, in a positive way. I wish there were more media startups in Finland. There have been a few, but they were not able to build growth and startups offering real products like quality journalism every day don’t really exist.

I believe that competition is always good for the quality of journalism, but at the same time I hope that others in the media industry will learn from us, especially in understanding their audience. The traditional media do not seem to have a very deep understanding of who their subscribers are, and why they subscribe to them in the first place.

This is the same everywhere, but I think it’s even more true in Finland, because the media market is so stagnated, so journalism is still a top down process, from institutions to people and not from people to people.

Jakob, what’s in it for Zetland?

Jakob Moll: It’s the dream to say that every time we try to succeed with this, we get better at it and Zetland as a whole becomes much stronger, because we can already see that being involved in starting from scratch in a different place, where there are many new people involved with new ideas, gives an insane amount of return. For instance, we’re in the process of finalising the crowdfunding site, and the funny thing is that the day it launches in Finland, we’ll be able to look at it in Denmark and say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s a much stronger presentation of what Zetland is all about, what we stand for and fight for’.

So, there is hopefully a huge potential for working together, doing things, exchanging ideas and perhaps also doing some international projects, investigative projects that we could do much more easily within our own family of media to produce some fantastically good and quite innovative journalism.

Constructive journalism has a bad reputation in Finland. How do you plan to change that?

Antti Pikkanen: Constructive journalism has a mixed reputation among professionals in the field. If you ask the audience, they probably say, “Oh, it sounds great to not only point to problems, but also find solutions!”.

The bad reputation comes from the media itself, because they see it as the opposite of being critical, but I think this discussion leads us in the wrong direction.

The trend in Finland is that more and more people feel that the news and the media is causing them anxiety and instead of arguing whether the answer is constructive journalism, I think we should focus on solving this problem of people feeling that the media are not doing good for them in their daily lives.

We did our own survey in Finland in June, and there was quite a remarkable number of young people in particular saying that they have reduced their consumption of news over the last six months. The main three reasons behind this trend are that news is affecting mental health, then that they are negative, and finally that the audience can’t stand it because there is too much news about war and violence.

As a newcomer in the market, this is something we should actually deeply care about. We should focus on the big picture, whether we are bringing people what they want from us in their everyday lives. We are trying to build something that people want more and more from the media. So, we are basically trying to listen to what people want and build a product that is based on that.

How does Uusi Juttu launch and growth strategy look like?

Antti Pikkanen: Our strategy at the moment puts the audience at the very core which is why we decided to start with building a very small and committed target group that represents the whole country.

The basic idea behind is that the first people need to love us so that they would want to join us and be willing to pay for us, even follow the journey from the very beginning before we even have a product, and then recommend us to their friends and their communities.

So far, we don’t have a product, but we have 6,000 subscribers for our newsletter and these are mainly people who have expressed their interest in hearing about the journey.

Most of them are also the early stage founding members that will pay for the product. They are very committed and very engaged. The number of followers on our social media channels is growing at high speed, there is already a community around it.

The crowdfunding is starting now, and after, we will know if we have succeeded or if the growth strategy has really worked.

To what extent is launching a media product different from other types of products?

Antti Pikkanen: A media product is not like a burger chain that you can just take somewhere as it is and give it a new price. We share the same values as Zetland, but we need to start with community building before we have the product, to test if our concept is good enough to be launched. If the product in the first stage is not good enough, people don’t really want to pay for it because the competition is so strong.

I haven’t seen so many international media companies that have successfully built something new on the same base, taken it elsewhere and made it work in a new market.

Jakob Moll: I started this work in 2021. We have done market research, and I have also simply researched, as a thorough journalist over a long period of time, which means that I have talked to many people with different specialisations.

What has often gone wrong in journalistic attempts to export or open up new countries is actually some lack of humility about the fact that national contexts are different, and journalism is a cultural product. So, we’ve put it in the hands of people who are much more likely to understand what a media is, how it should look like in Finland to be successful, and then we give them all our knowledge, technology and resources.

How is it going so far?

Antti Pikkanen: The worst case scenario could be that no one is really interested and we struggle with building the community.

Now we have a very good baseline, but it diverged from our original launch plan. We made some changes, because we needed to try it in practice, and realised that it costs slightly more to simply reach people.

Even though organic visibility gives us a lot, these days it is impossible to rely only on it. So, we needed to make new decisions on where to put the resources in the very beginning.

The groundwork we have done since 2021 is paying off, because the audience is at the very core of everything, because without the audience’s trust, we can’t really do anything.

One of the big questions when doing something like this is to find the right people to do it. I was the one who also built the team together with Jakob and it required talking to hundreds of people in the media field to find out who would be the perfect fit to do something about it.

Jakob Moll: It’s a combination of the business side of things, it’s socio-political, it’s cultural, and now it’s creating a momentum in terms of communication and market change in Finland.

We’ve been working for a long time. It’s also been a bit expensive, of course, but it also means that we’ve found the right team.

Is there anything other news outlets can learn from this experience so far?

Antti Pikkanen: We’re doing the right thing, because we can see that there’s definitely a need and a demand. The audience wants us and the market needs us, so I see us as a fast-growing media that is in its own way changing the whole media industry in Finland.

Disrupting doesn’t need to be a negative thing. Trying to understand what people really want from us to make the right conclusions for instance instead of moving into the direction of clickbait journalism is good for the whole industry because it also forces the other players to see their audience differently and try to be more in dialogue with them.

What are Zetland’s plans beyond Finland?

Jakob Moll: I’ve actually been researching this for a long time, in Norway, Sweden and Germany and other countries. We’re still very open as to where something like Zetland can benefit both journalism and democracy. So that’s what I’m doing right now, and that’s kind of where my focus is. As soon as we can see that there is something here, like a model that has worked, we will expand to country number 2 and 3.

It is my dream to show that this membership-based and value-based journalism is not a Nordic phenomenon, or something that can be found in small countries. It’s always the case with entrepreneurship that we tend to focus a lot on the product, especially journalists who really love journalism, but most often the biggest challenge is the go to market, right?

On the cover photo: Uusi Juttu’s team; from left to right: Sonia Zaki, Olli Seuri, Jussi Sippola, Tuuli Hongisto and Antti Pikkanen (photo by Heli Blåfield)

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Uusi Juttu is trying to expand Zetland’s member-centric model to Finland