Zetland’s tech stack for member-centric journalism

Editor’s note: we are reviving Toolbox, a series on digital tools used by news publishers. The goal is to help managers pick the most appropriate tools for themselves by speaking with media practitioners. In the previous two editions back in 2020 we looked at Dennik SME and elDiario.es. For this edition we spoke with Danish outlet Zetland, which relies on external tools but has also developed its own tech tools, including Good Tape service for audio transcription.

Zetland was born out of a need to insert more clarity in the chaos of the fast-paced news cycle. With information overload, news was losing its impact and relevance. To counter this, this Danish media organisation decided to be the solution to making journalism more beneficial and integral for society. 

BACKGROUND

Zetland is an interesting example to focus on as it does many things that are different from traditional media. They are the new generation of news. Their prime focus is their members. The organisation relies on its members and has launched several innovations in order to help better their user experience. 

Given Zetland’s focus on its members, most of its product team has geared towards creating a unique user experience for its paying audience. The Fix spoke to Zetland’s Head of Product and Growth Sebastian Winther to understand how it had upped its service of satisfying its community of readers.  

Innovations

Zetland’s sole focus on its members’ needs has rewarded them with more paying subscribers. Zetland initially tried to grow with marketing itself in ads on TV and in newspapers. When this marketing strategy didn’t work, they went to their members and asked them to support Zetland, which was then struggling financially. Within a month, their audience helped them grow organically and their membership rose by 25% in a month. 

In 2017, Zetland’s readers suggested they would like to have an option to listen to the stories. Zetland fulfilled the demand and added the audio option. They even provided the possibility to switch between audio and text seamlessly halfway through the story. This helped the organisation fit better into the reader’s lifestyle. As Winther mentioned, “articles are like products that our members want. The result is an article that easily plugs into their everyday lives without much resistance.”

On the members’ suggestion, Zetland developed an app where the members could access all their stories. They even introduced a morning news overview of the last 24 hours, based on what the readers wanted. On the suggestion of a member, they changed their recording from MP3 to Opus which helped them become 35% greener.

Zetland is in the middle of making changes to its app to make the user onboarding process easier. They also want to customise the features available on the app so that it shows the readers what they like and notifies them when there’s a new story.

In 2018, they won the Gold Medal for their custom-built publishing platform and in 2020, they won the European Digital Media Award for their app.

Startup within a startup

Zetland’s Jakob Steinn was tinkering with Whisper, OpenAI’s model, when he stumbled upon gold. The team of journalists at Zetland were finding poor results with transcription tools as many of the available tools were not catered towards Danish, a small language market. When Steinn then presented his idea of a Danish transcription tool at one of Zetland’s morning meetings, the team knew it was important and decided to dedicate more manpower to developing it.

Once the beta version of the current Good Tape was created, the team put it out on Twitter. Other Danish media started showing tremendous interest in the software, and Zetland decided to make a business out of it. It was a product developed at Zetland but now Good Tape is its own separate entity with its own leadership and team managing its operations. As Winther puts it, “it’s a startup within a startup.”

AI approach

The team at Zetland is pro-innovation and technology. Since their journalistic output is far more complex than what AI could do, they don’t see AI as a threat. They don’t shy away from using AI to generate ideas and test their hypotheses. Winther says, “We play around with OpenAI[‘s tools] and with ChatGPT to see what makes sense for us. But we use it more as an internal tool for sparing. We use it to generate ideas or find mistakes and to help code.”

External tools

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