A thought provoking encounter

In The Snail – Tallinn’s hidden gem — a fascinating couple of hours with Priit Hobemagi, editor-in-chief of Eesti Ekspress, and Hans Luik, the founder and owner.

They run the “New Yorker” of Estonia…well, not really, but it is weekly, it aims high and it specialises in long pieces of reportage and investigation.

It is not rolling in cash but it is surviving — though some pretty aggressive commercialism being (near enough) Berliner format newsprint wrapped in several glossy pages of (mainly) advertising.

This, in a country of less than 1.5 million people where 400,000 of them are Russian speakers and therefore not in the market for an Estonian weekly, seems remarkable.

Hobemagi and Luik are entirely matter-of-fact about their success. First, they only print content that is original work and exclusive to them. Second, they only print what you cannot get from any other publisher in Estonia: high quality story telling, long-form journalism, eye-witness features and in-depth exposes.

They are dimissive about any information that is freely available anywhere - sports, news, weather etc. “Why bother competing?”. They reckon anyone of influence in Estonia has to read Eesti Ekspress every week, which attracts advertisers.

And they are reviewing their policy of putting the complete edition on the web on the day of publication in favour of delaying it by a couple of days or erecting at least a thin veil around it by asking for full registration details before giving away content for nothing.

The believe they are making something valuable and unique, selling it for a decent price and creating a clear channel for advertisers.

How delightful it was to hear the confidence they had evolved over two decades of publication in such a sensible journalistic model. And how impressive that they are able to publish the sort of journalism in a tiny country that we, in a far larger and richer country, don’t seem to be able to afford.

It slightly made me wonder: are we overstating the media revolution? Do we perhaps have too many excitable visionaries and media eggheads in London for our own good? How many hundreds of media businesses are quietly humming along in the UK, like Eesti Ekspress in Tallinn, and will do for many years to come?

Add comment February 21st, 2009

An Estonian publisher explains Russian journalism

The reporter goes to see a businessman and says: “For five thousand dollars I will do a piece about your business”. The businessman pays up and the reporter writes a piece.

The reporter takes it to the editor who says: “For three thousand dollars I will publish this piece”. The reporter hands him the money.

The editor looks at the piece and contacts the businessman’s main competitor in the market and says: “For seven thousand dollars I can prevent this nice piece about your competitor from being published”.  The competitor pays. The article is spiked. The editor returns three thousand dollars to the reporter. The reporter returns five thousand dollars to the original businessman.

End result: the reporter has made nothing. The newspaper has made seven thousand dollars. One businessman is happy. The other has ended up no worse off than he started.

This purely illustrative example was told to me last night in The Snail, a restaurant in Tallinn, by the Estonian Richard Branson, a major media owner throughout eastern Europe.

He lived under the Soviet yolk until Estonia was liberated in 1992; Tallinn is only a day’s journey from St Petersburg and Estonia is still has a 30% Russian population. I do not think that he was joking.

1 comment February 21st, 2009