Nine years ago, Danish TV reporter Rasmus Nielsen was approaching his 40th birthday, a point in life when, he says, “you really have to decide what your future will be.”
Enter big brother Jakob, who told him: “Rasmus, you’re doing so much with television. Why aren’t you doing something with the Internet?”
The more Nielsen the younger learned about the Web, the more enthused he became about using it to pursue his journalistic passion — coverage of Danish politics. He had spent five years in the ’90s as a reporter covering the Danish parliament for regional editions of Danish broadcasting, and he imagined a Web site with a similar approach.
Too broad, counseled Jakob. So Rasmus sharpened his focus to the politics of food. He subsequently expanded to such issues as transportation, health care, energy, education and employment, among others — a collection of niches he says will grow to an even dozen with the addition of taxes and home construction.
Altinget.dk was born. Nielsen said the name conveys multiple meanings in Danish, including “everything about politics” and the idea of a place where democratic debate takes place.
The Danish-language, subscription-based news service is aimed at a high-end, professional market and reflects a vertical approach to news that the Project for Excellence in Journalism spotlighted as a growing trend in Washington earlier this year.
Recent stories on Altinget.dk include an examination of national tests for primary school students in the education section, the role of young people in Danish politics and the text of a political party leader’s speech at the party’s convention last week.
Nielsen’s news service also underscores the “profit-first” meme that is currently gathering steam as a promising path to sustaining news in the public interest.
Eight years on, Nielsen describes Altinget.dk as “not a big company, but a good company when you own it yourself.”
Nielsen’s team is comprised of 16 full-time-equivalent employees, including 12 journalists (Nielsen among them) and business-side and tech staff. The group represents the second biggest contingent of journalists with offices at the Danish Parliament. (DR, the Danish broadcasting company, is the largest.) In a setup similar to some legislatures elsewhere, the Parliament provides office space to journalists without charge. Nielsen is quick to point out, however, that Altinget does not receive the tax exemption enjoyed by most Danish media that he says saves them, collectively, more than $1 billion a year in value-added taxes.
In a recent telephone conversation, he said his company is generating the equivalent of about $2 million in annual revenues, enabling him to pocket a profit of about $150,000 in addition to what he describes as the “market-rate” salary he pays himself.
“I wanted to provide a broad audience with political journalism, but it was not (financially) possible.”
–Rasmus NielsenRevenue is generated almost exclusively through subscriptions (the site has little advertising), with salaries and benefits accounting for roughly 90 percent of the expenses. He said he pays most of his reporters in the range of $75,000 to $80,000 a year under an agreement with the Danish Union of Journalists, but adds that “a few” have decided to try to hike their base pay by linking their compensation to the success of the electronic newsletters they produce. (He declined to reveal his own salary beyond describing it as “somewhat more” than what he pays his journalists.)
Nielsen says his once and future aspirations for the service extend beyond the audience of government officials, lobbyists and others with the ability to pay an average rate of about $1,600 a year for a bundle of five subscriptions. “The original idea was a classic journalistic one,” he told me in a follow-up e-mail. “I wanted to provide a broad audience with political journalism, but it was not [financially] possible.”
Following a pattern of many subscription sites, Altinget.dk makes a selection of its paid content available outside the pay wall. Befitting an organization whose name celebrates democratic debate, he insists such freely available content is not simply a matter of using a tease to market to prospective clients. Rather, it is also a way of providing general interest news to a wider audience without charge — fulfilling, in other words, the journalistic purpose of equipping as many people as possible with the news and information they need to make good decisions about civic life.
Nielsen acknowledges limited progress toward that loftier goal, and Danish journalists I spoke with about the site expressed respect for his site’s specialized reporting but doubt about its prospects as a general-interest news source.
In our phone chat, Nielsen urged me to stay tuned: “Maybe in a few years we’ll have 25,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 [paid subscribers] and we’ll be able to provide much more [on a free basis as well].”
Asked what role his U.S.-based brother plays in the company, Rasmus said that Jakob served on Altinget’s board for the first two years and that he reads Jakob’s books and attends his seminars. “It’s an obligation,” he jokes, noting that most of their time together is devoted to catching up as brothers.
Rasmus said his brother’s focus on simplicity as a guiding principle is reflected in a site design that he describes as “pretty good but could always be improved.”
I learned about Altinget last week from Daniel Bergsagel, a Danish journalist who took part in the Sommerskole for Scandinavian journalists that Poynter runs with Update, the training center for Danish journalists.
“The written word is still the cheapest and most powerful journalistic tool.”
–Rasmus NielsenThe seminar, conducted at a conference hotel outside Copenhagen, was focused on multimedia. Our quick review of Altinget.dk revealed a site that’s mostly about words.
Nielsen said he expects the site will eventually do more with video and other media, but added: “The written word is still the cheapest and most powerful journalistic tool.”
