This week I attended ”Dagsvara”, a conference in Stockholm organized by WAN-INFRA. Dagsvara used to be a lot about production for print, but the focus has in recent years shifted to business development for newspapers. The theme for this year was “Innovation and digital disruption in the news media industry”. A short summary of some of the presentations, far from an exhaustive list, follows below.

Marten Blankensten, Co-founder & CEO of Blendle
Blendle, a sort of iTunes for newspapers, has after much hype recently launched in Holland. With no efforts spent on marketing, they currently have about 225 000 users. Soon to launch an international version, with WSJ, NYT and Washington Post as big brands. For now articles come only from print editions – most sites in Holland only publish some material online. But for the WSJ, there will be two feeds; from print and from articles behind the digital paywall (not free ones).

Marten on “long tail” sales:

“Even for Bild (best selling non-Asian newspaper in the world), they have 2 million users in Germany, but there are 78 million people that never pay them anything. That’s what we want to change.”

Marten on competing with traditional newspapers:

”Most of our users are not even in age grops that read newspapers anymore.”

Marten on how he manages to stay innovative:

”I get annoyed a lot, and then I think, a lot of other people get annoyed too. And then I try to solve it. ”

From what I saw of the GUI, I particularly liked the horizontal scrolling and that you can set up alerts for getting notified when articles matching your selected keywords show up.

Sara Öhrvall, previously at Bonnier, now Co-founder of Mindmill network
Sara’s presentation was very inspirational. Here is her recipe for how to stay innovative in turbulent times:

1. Live the life of your users
2. Don’t trust industry forecasts and reports
3. Thrive in data
4. Experiment and prototype
5. Think in a new box
6. Reimagine your core products
”Like 2015 – I think this will be the year of the voice – think about a voice interface”
7. Forced marriage, physical + digital
”If you can make that happen, then you’re unique, you’re better than tech companies”
8. From destinations to systems and platforms

Markus Pettersson, Founder of Eljester
Eljester is a Swedish start-up that wants to help news producers reach out with their news by identifying “the barren land” in the media landscape. In practice this means identifying areas where there are people, but not a lot of news – like certain geographical areas, or interest areas.

It was refreshing to listen to Markus, rather than trying to be polite he seemed to quite consciously provoke his audience. Easily achieved by statements like: ”We’re not charity. Get rid of the people you don’t need. And don’t offer severage packages, you’ll only end up losing the very people you should keep.”

Markus described a simple method in finding out what to focus on. Asking:
1. What does the audience want?
2. What do others offer?
3. What’s the discrepancy? May we be able to fill that need?

According to Markus, you also need to address the “elephants in the room”, meaning to:

1. Make up with your self-image and demolish structures
2. Test new logics and establish new market positions you’re unaccustomed to
3. Bring in new expertise, get rid of what you don’t need

Frederik Guttormsen, Sales Director & Partner at United Bloggers
United Bloggers is an exciting initiative in Norway, trying to match bloggers with advertisers in need of an audience.

Established needs, according to Frederik:

Match bloggers & advertisers
Compelling creatives / stories
Credibility
Channels / medium

A lot of the bloggers are quite young and at times, all they need to be able to write is a place to be. That’s why United Bloggers now has opened a 450 square meter office, despite only being ten employees – to offer them that place.

United Bloggers also has plans to expand to the UK, Sweden and more places.

Peter Nelander, Head of Commercial at Aftonbladet
Our very own Peter Nelander was also there to talk about Aftonbladet’s journey towards a future that may or may not include paper:

“We’re an online business that also has a print edition”.

Had there been a prize for “most photographed” presentation, Peter would easily have won it.