antti.vilpponen.net

A new media experiment/project announced its launch to take place on the 16th of Janury. It is called Longplay.fi (actually it is the non-profit organisation for “slow journalism”).

The idea is to publish long form, investigative journalism by Finnish journalists in Finnish. Each piece will be on sale for a few euros. I’m guessing it will somehow be optimised for tablets as well (at least I’m hoping).

This is a welcome attempt to do something different with journalism. A couple of years ago Topiikki, a project where some of my friends were involved as well launched, but it later shut down.

Other new comers in the media scape are blog networks such as Indiedays, which gathers lifestyle bloggers of all sorts under one roof and then monetises everything with ads (so it’s able to pay the bloggers as well).

I’ve been following the media industry internationally quite a bit as my day job at ArcticStartup was more or less running an indie media company. My two personal favorites in terms of media projects currently that I’m following (only subscribed to the former) are:

1. Matter – this is an interesting project aimed at bringing investigative journalism to a new level through a new business model. I backed them already when they were raising money on Kickstarter and strongly recommend in getting to know them.
2. The Magazine – This is a media concept by Marco Arment, the founder and creator of Instapaper. The Magazine comes out about twice a month and is optimised for the iOS platform (given Arment’s background). The concept is honed to perfection and people pay by subscription.

One of the reasons I see the evolution of the media industry as a healthy thing, is because it has a lot of effect on how people perceive things due to the business models of the company.

What projects are you following currently? What are you excited about in the media space (especially with regards to journalism)?