Looking to Europe for news-industry innovation, Part 3: The Swiss “mikrozeitung” small community news model

NiemanJournalismLabs reporting:

Today we look at a small community news model. That’s hugely important. Much of the news world focuses on the twists and turns of national/global news players and of largely devastated metros. But smaller community papers deliver much of the news to readers in the U.S. and across the world.
Gossweiler Media, for that reason, offers an intriguing model, built on straightforward arithmetic. It’s a family story, as newspapers were a family story for centuries. Rolled up and corporatized in the 20th century by chains, we’re now seeing the early sprouts of individuals and families once again expressing ownership interest. If that movement continues to pick up steam, examples such as this small Swiss news operation are instructive.
Urs Gossweiler, CEO of Gossweiler Media AG, is the grandson of a newspaper founder. Running the company out of Brienz, a large hamlet in Switzerland, Gossweiler’s newspaper/news site Jungfrau Zeitung has become well known in European newspaper circles.
Their hallmark: focusing on news creation and community service first, divorcing the news business from the means of distribution. Their model: low costs, high margins — a model that Gossweiler is now franchising. I spoke with him at last fall’s WAN-IFRA World Newspaper Congress in Vienna. He spoke on an “Opportunities” panel there, one of his many speaking engagement spreading the gospel of news-without-paper throughout Europe...
 — Most importantly, it sells advertising in a totally integrated way. When advertisers buy ads, they’re forced into a combination of print, online and, newly, mobile inventory. That inventory is allocated by formula. “It used to be they’d say ‘we’re buying print, and we’ll take online.’ Now they say, we’re buying online, and we’ll take print,” says Gossweiler. While its print circulation (now around 8,800) is in decline, its overall reach has grown, now including 57,000 monthly unique visitors.
— To that end, the company sold its presses way back in 1994 and began outsourcing that work. “A lot of publishers are not publishers,” he told me. “They are printers.”
Given the new economics of the business, Gossweiler says he earns more than a 30 percent profit — a number that’s led him to begin franchising the business to other communities. Where smaller newspapers were bought up by the Gannetts of the world in the late 20th century, Gossweiler is trying to spread his model through a different model. The company launched its first licensee last year, in a neighboring town, and the company is now actively pitching other potential publishers in Austria and Germany.
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