Creativity in Slovenia - how to improve the weak market position?

Dietmar Sternad from Zurnal Media (Slovenia) spoke about how a free weekly with an average market position can turn into a successful free daily.

In 2006, a free weekly “Zurnal” had a circulation of 253,000 copies (with readership much lower than its circulation). The number of copies would have to be increased by 100,000 copies to match the competitors. A simple circulation raise would not be a smart move without the strategy on how to attract the readers to increase the readership as well.

“The strategic plan was not to change the circulation but to change the game” - Sternad said.

That way a new product, “Zurnal24″, was created, plus a multi-platform model for all three products that were produced in one newsroom only:

• “Zurnal24″ - a free daily, street-distributed on weekdays - Mondays to Fridays (circ. 110,000 copies)
• “Zurnal” - free, distributed to households on weekends (circ. 290,000 copies)
• zurnal24.si - dedicated to reach the audience 24/7

The printed products are diversified. Due to the fact readers do not have time to read the entire newspaper on the regular working day, “Zurnal 24″ is addressed to young, active, and mobile reader. On weekdays it is 32 pages thick, and its main feature are short, quality news. On weekends, the paper is twice as thick (64 pages) with full range of topics, local editions and opinions. There are three main principles that those products share, and those are:

• independence
• free means quality
• usepaper (importance of benefit for the reader)

The digital newsportal was also important for the Zurnal Media. Not only a user involving, picture and video website was created, but zurnal24.si managed to attract its users with high quality games. These games were downloaded by 150,000 users, and played online 16 million times (all of that in Slovenia, a country with population of 2 million). In fact, the popularity of such tools allowed Zurnal Media to sell advertising space in those games:

The results so far, after almost 1 year of working in that model, are:

• Zurnal has yet the biggest market share of all Slovenian newspapers (26%).
• The readership of “Zurnal24″ is the second largest in the country, lower only then “Slovenske” that represents yellow journalism. “Zurnal24″ is, however, the no. 1 urban daily, read by almost 22% of the population of the 5 largest Slovenian towns. Every edition of the weekend “Zurnal” is read almost by 50% of the population in the same cities.
• In half year, zurnal24.si doubled its number of unique visitors by 400,000, and is the fastest growing webportal in Slovenia.

Worth noticing are also the Zurnal tools it uses to attract the readers. Among the citizen journalism tools are e-mails, MMS and text messages that combined on the webpage create a citizen news agency, also advertised in the newspaper. An interesting tool for both readers and the journalists the live screens showing on charts how many and which articles are being written, as well as the popularity of them among readers.

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