Swisster: English-speaking news for Switzerland (and a daring business model)

Among the many attempts to develop new business models for quality online media -- from ProPublica's philanthropic funding to MediaPart's subscription-only to the FT's finite-free -- a new Swiss site launching today offers a novel and intriguing approach.

Swisster (tagline: "local news, global views") is a Swiss English-language site that will cover business, finance, politics, science&tech and lifestyle stories "with a regional twist", says editor Christophe Rasch. Switzerland has four national languages, but English is not one of them. It is becoming one in fact, though, being increasingly spoken daily in banks, multinational corporations, academic and media organizations, design and advertising firms, and well beyond. It's now commonplace in Switzerland to find English-language national advertising campaigns or English-named stores and products and sports clubs. But this hasn't yet translated into national locally-produced English-language media (although the average newsstand carries a generous variety of British, US and international -- Monocle, IHT, WSJE, etc -- publications).

This situation has been slowly evolving in recent years, with the likes of Swissinfo and World Radio Switzerland (a web site and a radio channel produced by Swiss Public Broadcasting), or with the launch of the "English corners" on newspaper websites such as Geneva's Tribune de Genève and Basle's Basler Zeitung, and of independent sites such as GenevaLunch.

Now Swisster wants to fill the vacuum (Disclosure: LunchOverIP will be featured on the site's blog section). "Our core target are the 100'000 expatriates or Swiss who live in Western Switzerland (the Lake Geneva region) and use English as their main daily work language. Later -- we plan to go national with our coverage within two years -- we will also reach out to the 300'000 in the rest of the country", says Rasch.

Although impressive for Switzerland, these are small figures, which explains in part why no significant national English-language news outlet has existed so far. It also explains why Rasch and his team are adopting a very unusual business approach to make Swisster economically viable. The site of course carries advertising. The rest of the revenue will come from a particular, and daring, form of subscription. "Our potential market is a niche", says the editor, "and the people in that niche can be generally found in big organizations". Swisster is published by Edipresse, one of Switzerland's top-three publishers, and SNP, the Swiss branch of France's Hersant, but counts a number of other "founding members", big multinational corporations, leading private banks such as LODH, and academic institutions such as EPFL, which have contributed to the initial funding and will contribute to developing the readership by buying subscriptions in bulk and distributing the accounts among their executives and staffers (and their families). While anyone will be able to subscribe individually -- yearly subs will cost a rather steep 300 CHF apiece -- Swisster will focus primarily on selling group subscriptions to big companies and organizations, where its target readers work.

Additional twist: the general (non-paying) public will also have access to the site, but only to the stories that are 48 hours old or older (and some stories will never be "free access"). Subscribers will instead receive breaking news, daily news, newsletters, service information (from detailed information on snow conditions on the Alpine slopes to housing info) and have access to a social-networking platform. Partnerships are also being established, including one with TimesOnline, the web site of the UK's The Times.

Swisster will be produced initially by an editorial staff of 6, based in Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich, and Edipresse has been able to attract professionals with both significant journalistic experience (they come from the Economist, the Guardian, Reuters etc) and a good knowledge of Switzerland. "Editorial independence is guaranteed", Rasch stresses when we argue that the chosen business model will put it under pressure: "the founding members have committed for several years and will have no say on our editorial choices".

Comments

[Ellen Wallace, editor, GenevaLunch.com]

It's an interesting development, based on a model that goes back to 1995, with salon.com, which took 10 years to be successful. And there is a major difference: Salon's subscribers are not bulk, which means that they have to choose to subscribe. Traditionally, in journalism, that has an impact on editorial content and quality. It remains to be seen if people whose company or school subscribe to this for them will view the news with the same indifference as many corporate blurbs that cross their screens.

I'm afraid I disagree with your line "hasn't yet translated into locally-produced English-language media" - GenevaLunch has had more than 225,000 pages viewed in its 21 months of existance and we have good regular traffic among English speakers. We are locally produced, with a Swiss-American publisher and regional team and our traffic appears to be higher than that of Swiss media English language projects. Like so much news that circulates among English speakers, we're known by word of mouth. If you meant print publications, I don't think your Swiss examples qualify. And much as I like Monocle, it's available only on one newsstand in Geneva, or that was the case last month when I was hunting for it.

[BG]

Hello Ellen. Thx for your note. Apologies for the unclear wording; yes, I was thinking particularly of press products (you know that I've been advocating them for a long time now, unsuccessfully) and broadcast -- so I was talking about traditional media. I've added a totally deserved link to GenevaLunch. B-

[nick]

Very interesting! I like Swisster, well made and good public content. However, the fact that there is no RSS feed (at least for the free public content) is rather old school.

[Ellen Wallace, editor, GenevaLunch.com]

Thanks for the comment, Bruno, and I take your point. I do wonder if Edipresse has looked closely at the problems WRS has been having covering all of Switzerland in English. It's so tempting to think this will work but it's tricky - in the end how much do people who speak English in Geneva have in common with those who speak English in Zurich, once past the work permit issues?

[Massimo D'Onofrio]

Hey, there is also Ticino in Switzerland.
I hope you will include all the English speaking people living and working on the sunny side of Switzerland!
I am using Endo aggregators and a RSS feed would be much appreciated by me, too.
max ;-)

[Uncle]

...or there's the non-commercial englishforum.ch, which delivers on its promise to provide answers to English speakers needs here in Switzerland.

Donations keep it afloat and members use the site as a genuine social networking platform which delivers user-generated information. Plus a vibrant social scene.

Or are we only interested in investment vehicles?

[Jennifer]

in the geneva / lausanne region, there's www.glocals.com

they have 20,000 members, and any self respecting expat from around here is a member.

they are less about news, mind you, and more about a community and user generated content (activities & info).

will be interesting to see if / how they react to swisster.

[Jennifer]

one last one: why would i pay for news, when i can get it for free from swissinfo and their likes (especially as swissinto also put a local spin on news).

will the swisster news be really that superior / different?