Read, listen, share, participate: Welcome to vi.se!
When other media houses take the well-trodden path, Vi Magazine chooses to think a few steps further. What does the model look like for journalism that reaches out when the entire business rests on digital formats?
The target was to respond to changing media habits and thereby attract a younger audience. The result was a single-page app available for iOS, Android, and the web — where listening is as central as reading. Here is how it happened!
Challenge & inspiration
Digital vi.se was to be refined into a pure subscription service of exclusive evergreen articles. Magazine Vi already had a fantastic editorial team producing quality journalism, but needed to complement the magazine with a digital offering.
When other media houses take the well-trodden path, Vi chooses to think a few steps further — since the revamp was happening anyway. What does the model look like for journalism that reaches out when the entire business rests on digital formats? For inspiration, consider the following startups as a family with quite a lot in common:
- The Correspondent (Netherlands)
The Correspondent is a digital platform for tempo-neutral news, with a commitment to collaborative, constructive, ad-free journalism. Together with our members we want to change how news is perceived, created, and financed. - Krautreporter (Germany)
Krautreporter is an independent, ad-free paper in Berlin. Our mission: helping members better understand the connections between current events in politics and society. - Zetland (Denmark)
Zetland has a manifesto that sums them up. In short: member-driven, quality over quantity, with a clear purpose of contributing to a better world.
Guiding principles
- Articles gravitate towards understanding the present. The approach is rooted in the humanities — without being hostile to technology.
- Editorial teams call readers members rather than buyers/readers/subscribers. As a member, you are part of something rather than a consumer. There are already enough places where you can create an account and consume entertainment without any personal investment. Inviting participation, effort, and even exertion is an inherent value in a fast-moving and superficial media landscape.
- It is reasonable to pay for quality: Thanks to services like Spotify and Netflix, internet users are now accustomed to paying for what they want — and thereby avoiding what they don’t.
- Offer a service/startup/club — rather than reading a “magazine”: Broadening the concept creates more possible offerings and activities. How content comes to be is, for some members, as interesting as the published article itself. Transparency and co-determination on the digital platform are as natural as events and meetups. And who says an article always has to be delivered as written text?
It is easy to see how the Vi cooperative — with its roots in society, the humanities, and quality journalism — meets all of the above criteria. The work of investigating and detailing the packaging primarily revolved around these questions:
- Finding an overall concept for the new vi.se that also relates to Vi Magazine (with its heritage). What does a subscription offering for both look like? Do the two products presuppose each other? How important is visual recognition between them?
- Understanding how far the concept of startup/service can be applied to the new vi.se, without losing existing subscribers.
- Creating a platform to support the communication strategy of other offerings that cannot be paid content on the new vi.se.
- How do we plan for an extremely fast-moving project without knowing what the payment solution will look like? Vi Media was simultaneously switching both CRM and subscription systems — third-party providers had long queues for internal system changes, with major consequences for the vi.se project.
What did it become? Meet the new vi.se!
The solution for vi.se is a logged-in paid service where members access content on the website or on native apps for Android/iOS. Conceptually, the service rests on the following pillars:
Listen and read
Users choose whether articles are to be listened to or read, with technology supporting synchronisation between modes: start listening and finish reading, or vice versa. In the apps, listening support is given priority, to support proven user behaviour based on platform.
Quality over quantity
Content is planned to be evergreen — always interesting. Even if a current event triggers an article being published, it should hold up even six months later. This means you can think of the content as a collection of essays or like a podcast: if you like the voice, there are always interesting articles to engage with.
Locked content is open when shared
Unique links are generated when sharing, so they can be tied to the sharing member. Visitors arriving via these links learn who shared the otherwise locked article — and receive an invitation to sign up.
Curated weekend reading
The communication strategy includes a weekly summary sent to members every Saturday morning, with context for the week that has passed.
Member. Not consumer.
Members are invited to take part in the pre-work for articles, suggest topics, and so on. Familiar functions are named throughout to emphasise that vi.se is built together with members. For example, instead of “Comment,” vi.se calls this “How would you like to contribute?” followed by ways to contribute (I want to ask something / I have knowledge to contribute / etc…)
Unn Edberg
CEO, LO Mediehus AB
Is content an important part of your business?
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Kind regards, Magnus Eriksson,
Account manager, Äventyret media team
