Slow journalism to the rescue?

Finland has been traditionally a country with very strong newspaper readership. According to Statistics Finland, Finns are ranked number one in newspaper readership in European Union and number three in the world, behind Norway and Japan. Number of local newspapers is unusually high in Finland, compared to most of the world.

However, for the last decade, the newspaper circulation has been in harsh decline. Total circulation reached it's high point in 1989, after which the circulation stopped growing. In the time period 2001-2011, the total circulation in has decreased 1-2 percent a year, making up total of 19 percent decrease The advertising revenue numbers tell a similar tale. At the same time, all the big publishing houses have axed significant amounts of employees. If these trends are to continue, it begs the question: does newspaper have a future? It seems that the traditional business model of newspapers is breaking down. Usually the blaming eye turns to the internet. People don't seem to have the need to pay for news when the web is already full of them.

Internet also offers many possibilities but online journalism is still at it's infancy. It has not been able to turn the direction of newspaper's downhill slide. Online journalism is not associated with slowness, quite the opposite actually. However, in January of 2013, several well-establised Finnish journalists launched online service called LongPlay. According to the founders of the service, LongPlay's purpose is to offer an alternative to the mainstream online journalism, which they consider very hasty and shallow. In the LongPlay website, only one piece of journalism is published in a month.

The stories costs 3-6 euros or you can became support member of LongPlay by paying atleast 54 euros and get all the stories. The articles are large pieces of investigative journalism and narrative storytelling, usually about five times longer than the longest articles published in newspapers. The stories are available on Apple iBookstore and several Finnish online reading applications. So far three articles have been published and one of them has caused a big stir. The second LongPlay article was story about government-financed ”future report” by philosopher Pekka Himanen. Himanen and his research group were paid 700 000 euros to produce report about future of Finnish values and society. The article launched a hot debate about public spending and also calls for official investigation of the financing decision.

LongPlay is the first online servide of it's kind in Finland. Similar journalism experiments are taking place mainly in the US. The editor-in-chief also cites ProPublica and Slate as inspirations. LongPlay articles take advantage of the fact that internet offers possibility not only for real-time news but also for much deeper coverage. The founders of LongPlay believe the latter possibility is often neglected. They describe their approach as 'slow journalism'. The usual online stories are read in maybe few seconds but LongPlay stories are not necessarily meant to be read in one sitting but to take in with time.

LongPlay has been received pretty enthusiastically, atleast among journalists and other media people. LongPlay is not intented to make big profits as it's not the main source of employment for any of it's writers, however it is an interesting experiment which will tell us something about the livability of slow journalism. The second LongPlay article, the story of about the Finnish future project, sold 4000 e-copies which translates into revenue of 15 000 euros. Maybe the way to turn internet journalism profitable is not to produce more and faster but more demanding and better-researched content.

LongPlay website (only in Finnish): http://longplay.fi/

Tuomas Koukkunen