Zetland CEO Tav Klitgaard and editor-in-chief Lea Korsgaard Picture: Daniel Urhøj

Swedish news giant Bonnier News has taken a majority stake in Danish publisher Zetland, which has built a digital subscriptions business for long-form storytelling with a strong base of members in their 20s and 30s.

Digital-only start-up Zetland, which has a team of almost 100 people, launched its eponymous news product in Denmark in 2016 and expanded into Finland in January this year with the brand Uusi Juttu.

Zetland now has 70,000 members, with subscriptions making up more than 80% of revenue according to Zetland chief executive Tav Klitgaard.

The rest comes from Danish public service media subsidies as it does not run any advertising. The business is expected to generate around €10m (£8.7m) in revenue this financial year.

The Danish arm of Zetland has been profitable since 2019, according to Klitgaard, while the new operation in Finland is “not yet profitable, but it is actually not far off from being profitable, which is way faster than we had even hoped.

“And so combining all of these things, let’s see about the fiscal year 2025 – the group will probably not be super profitable, but if you’re not looking at like capital investments, yes, we are a profitable company and that’s also why this is not a panic sale. We could have continued. It’s a way to secure our ability to continue to grow in the direction that we want to.”

Zetland had been working on a deal for “quite some time”, Klitgaard said. It was originally funded by angel investors who have now been bought out. “It’s part of the life cycle of such a company that you want to give those early investors return on their investment, and then you want to get to a place where you can develop the business the way you want to.”

Alongside Bonnier News, Zetland’s leadership team of Klitgaard, editor-in-chief Lea Korsgaard, international director Jakob Moll, and head of product and growth Sebastian Winther also remain co-owners.

“We still own part of the business, but now we have one majority shareholder, which is from the industry and has the same mission as us. Bonnier News, they wake up every morning and think about the value of journalism and our original investors, they didn’t do that. They were wonderful, but they were investors, and not media people.”

Klitgaard also described Bonnier News as a “long-term investor owner” and said it had been “amazing” to stay within the Nordics instead of a publisher from further afield.

Why Zetland and Bonnier News decided to work together

Klitgaard said they had been “lucky enough” to be able to choose the partner they went into business with because “there has been quite a lot of interest… so we really had the great fortune of being able to take the time and have a lot of companies show up and actually try to pitch us on their vision.”

Bonnier News owns newsbrands and magazines in 11 countries including: Norway, Denmark, Germany, Finland and Poland. In its home market of Sweden it owns three daily national newspapers: Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and the country’s only daily business title Dagens industri – as well as a roster of local newspapers, magazines and specialist titles including Dagens Media, Sweden’s equivalent of Press Gazette covering media and marketing. In 2023 it took a minority stake in Ireland’s Business Post Group, which publishes the Business Post newspaper.

Klitgaard said Bonnier News has “the same balance as we try to strike, which is, yes, first and foremost, this is about telling true stories about the world, but we’re also very aware that in order to do that, we need to make money, and so we have the same kind of focus on journalism, but also business”.

He also praised the Bonnier News leadership team including chief executive Anders Eriksson, saying that hearing them talk “you’re not in doubt that this is serious, they really mean what they’re saying, and we didn’t necessarily get that impression from all of the candidates that we were in discussions with… It seems very genuine that what they’re trying to do is to learn from us.”

Eriksson told Press Gazette in a statement: “We are very impressed with Zetland’s product, in particular the member/community approach, the journalistic content and the focus on audio, which we believe have been crucial to engage a younger audience. We hope we can learn from this going forward.”

[Bonnier News CEO interview: Content bundles and personalisation to boost subs]

Eriksson is becoming chairman of Zetland’s board, alongside Peter Wolodarski, editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter and business area manager of Bonnier News Consumer and Editor-in-Chief. Zetland editor-in-chief Korsgaard also remains on the board.

Otherwise Zetland’s leadership team will remain the same and it will continue to operate as its own “family of newspapers” within the wider group.

Reaching young people: Audio formats and ‘having a constructive perspective’

Klitgaard told Press Gazette Zetland did not specifically set out to target young audiences – describing it instead as “for all curious people” – but that what they have built has naturally appealed to this demographic. Some 40-45% of members are aged in their 20s and 30s, he said.

Klitgaard described Zetland as a “daily news service where we publish quality stories in engaging ways, basically about what’s most important in the world.

“We don’t publish hundreds of stories per day. Instead, we publish usually around two to five stories, and then they are told in a very engaging and personal way.”

Everything published by Zetland is in both text and audio format, and Klitgaard said: “When we give our audience the choice between text and audio, more than 80% of them choose audio.” A lot of it is also published in video.

“Audio is just in many ways an intimate and super personal way of consuming stories. And again, these are not breaking news stories about something that Trump tweeted ten minutes ago. These are actual stories about how the world works, and we believe that those stories are the most engaging, and actually the stories that you learn most from.”

Klitgaard said people in their 20s and 30s are “just so underserved when it comes to news” but that it is “just super important that they get true stories that will engage them in the world and in society”.

He added: “They like that we tell stories in a way that they know how to consume. It’s a lot about the way we tell the story. We don’t tell different stories to legacy newspapers – well, maybe a little bit, but it’s mostly about the way we tell the story. So that’s about tone of voice.

“It’s about having a constructive perspective, not always being critical towards anyone just to be critical…

“And then it’s about telling the stories in a very personal way. So it feels like a friend who is telling you an engaging story about the world, and not so much like a voice from nowhere where a journalist has tied a tie and are here to tell you how the world works. No, it’s more like a conversation.”

Zetland charges 1,390 kroner (about £162) per year for access to its content including its app updated six days a week, and a daily news podcast. On a monthly basis the cost is 60 kroner (£7) for one month then 139 kroner (£16.27).

“I so often hear that young people are not willing to pay for news. That’s complete bullshit,” Klitgaard said. “Young people are so interested in the world.

“And the news fatigue – I don’t buy it. I think there’s a fatigue of news the way that news was told ten years ago, but there’s definitely not a fatigue of current affairs, like understanding the world, and I think we as a media industry, we need to really focus on that, and focus on the user needs that we are filling… And I think that’s the positive story that people need to take away from the success of Zetland.”

Denmark roughly matches the average proportion of people willing to pay for news in a pool of 20 richer countries, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism which in July found that 19% pay for online news in the country. The report said Zetland has a weekly reach of 4% of the population, equal to BBC News.

The average proportion of people paying for online news across the 20 countries surveyed was 18%. Norway, the location of Zetland’s recent launch, had the highest proportion of people paying (42%) while the UK is near the bottom on 10%.

Zetland paywall: ‘We need to teach our audience that in order to consume quality news, you have to pay’

Zetland has a hard paywall in the sense that if you visit zetland.dk, you see information about the news organisation and what it does differently – but cannot preview any content.

But in another sense, Klitgaard said, its paywall is not strict. That’s because once people are paying members, they can share content with family and friends for free.

He said this “builds upon the fact that journalism should be shared. It’s something that exists in the real world, that you should talk to your spouse or your friends about. That is a user need – I want to discuss this thing with my wife. So we need to make a newspaper that does that.”

Klitgaard explained: “What’s important is that we need to teach our audience that in order to be able to consume quality news, you have to pay… so even when we open up the articles for people’s friends, we will say to them it’s not because the article is free, but it’s because someone else paid for it – your friend.”

Another key tenet of Zetland is its decision not to run any advertising. Klitgaard said there were several reasons for this, and that “first and foremost” it is about giving users a good experience.

He said that when people are paying, “selling their attention on the side is just wrong. We want people to use their attention on our stories. And if there’s a blinking banner telling them to buy travel or a new shirt on the side – well, that takes away attention from the stories about the world.

“We are razor-sharp focused on really teaching people and allowing people to spend their attention on what is really important to them.”

Klitgaard added that having a selling point of telling good stories “provides a lot more value than whatever we would be able to make from ads. So it’s also a business decision that makes sense.

“And then there’s the last thing, which is the ethical aspect. So what we are seeing in newspapers, both in Denmark but around the world, is that you get into these difficult situations where, for instance, political parties will buy the front page of a newspaper. That is not a good way to protect the trust of the population… as soon as you have ads, your customer is not the news consumer, and that just leads to a lot of wrong choices.”

Klitgaard said the launch of Uusi Juttu in Finland has proved that Zetland’s model is scalable and the Bonnier investment will allow them to look at expanding further.

They have just opened an office in Norway and entered the “listening phase” on a new project there led by three journalists.

“Of course, we’re still a fairly small company, so we’re taking it one step at a time, but the way that the Finnish population has received the news that we were setting up a new media company up there has just been overwhelmingly positive, and that has sort of proven to us that what we’ve built is not just a Danish newspaper, but it is actually a concept that can travel beyond borders,” Klitgaard said. “And so now we’re trying Norway, and we will definitely try elsewhere also.”

Eriksson said in a statement: “Our aim is to support them in continuing their current model, technology, and strategy, while backing their vision and entrepreneurial spirit as they expand into new markets.”

Topics in this article : Denmark

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