Is curation the way forward? A Swiss media group's take on getting people to pay for regional news

Credit: Image by Looker_Studios on Shutterstock.

About one and a half years ago, Tamedia, the largest media group in Switzerland, which encompasses daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and websites, decided to develop a new digital product that would make people want to pay for regional news.

They settled on creating an app called Zwölf, or 12, which would essentially curate and repackage existing stories from Tamedia’s range of titles in one place, delivering only the 12 most important stories of the day to readers.

“It tells people they don’t have to read everything and pay for everything, so it saves them time,” said Michael Marti, head of digital at Zurich-based newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, speaking at the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Europe event in Vienna today (20 April).

“It’s about using repackaging and taking a data-driven approach to editing our content.”

Zwölf launched on iOS in October 2015 and became available on Android in February 2016.

Marti and his team of five – journalists, developers and designers – spent about ten months developing the app, which is priced at 6 CHF (£4.32) per month, “sort of a Spotify pricing”. It is also offered as part of the packages available for existing subscribers of some Tamedia-owned titles.

The small team is in charge of choosing the 12 stories they think readers should know about from everything published across the titles. The selection is delivered to subscribers through a push notification at noon every day.

They are also tasked with repackaging the articles in one way or another before they are published in the app, most often by changing the lead image, adjusting the headline of a story or recreating interactive maps and graphics in a mobile-friendly format. “Images really make a difference on a smartphone," said Marti.

In the six months since it launched, the app has gathered some 35,000 subscribers and has 15,000 people using it daily, which includes people who are accessing it as part of their existing subscription packages.

Marti said the goal is reaching 2,200 paying subscribers to “break even”, but he is optimistic they will reach that number considering the feedback received from the audience so far. The app does not feature any advertising.

Zwölf's success is “measured through a simple metric” – through a yes/no button added at the end of each of the 12 stories, readers are encouraged to say whether they’ve found a particular articles useful or important.

This is called the rating metric, and the team also looks at reach by taking into account the number of screen views.

By dividing the number of positive answers to the total number of votes, the team ranks the stories to see which topics are most popular and therefore what people would like to read more of.

“It was surprising to see that we get between two and three thousand ratings in each curated edition, so people are actually providing feedback,” said Marti. “The ratings are quite high, between 0.8 and 0.9 per story.”

“News and foreign affairs are rated very highly, followed by science and politics. People don’t care much for sports and digital topics,” he added.

So what has the team learned from developing a paid-for app for regional news? Here are Marti’s key takeaways:

• “An open dialogue about quality can increase people’s satisfaction with the product and therefore the quality of the product as well, and allows us to build a relationship with our readers.”

• The model can be replicated for other publications – “we are thinking about how we can do similar things on our other news platforms".

• “It’s more than just an app, it has become a workshop where we are working on the journalism of the future."

Update 25/04: An earlier version of this article said Zwölf had 1,500 daily readers. The number is actually 15,000.

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).