How Per Grankvist built an explanatory journalism startup in Sweden
He believed that consumers didn't need dumbed-down news.
Per Grankvist had the kind of media career most journalists only dream of. He was a high-profile columnist for a leading newspaper and a regular face on one of Sweden’s top broadcast networks. But over time he grew disillusioned with mainstream media and its tendency to dumb down coverage of complicated policy issues.
So Per quit his traditional media jobs and launched an outlet called Vad Vi Vet. It started with just an Instagram account that explained thorny election issues, but from there it blossomed into an entire media outlet that spanned across social media, podcasts, and newsletters.
I recently interviewed Per about how he built the company, his approach to monetization, and whether he misses working for mainstream media publications.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.
How Per got his start in journalism
Per didn’t enter journalist through the traditional route. In the mid 2000s he was working as the head of sales and marketing at a coffee company and started up a blog on environmental sustainability on the side. Eventually, this put him on the radar of a Swedish business magazine, which hired him to come write at the outlet. “So I got to head up a new division focused on covering emerging climate issues, emerging supply chain issues, and so on.”
Per’s role raised his national profile in Sweden. “I'm a curious person, and some have referred to me as the Malcolm Gladwell of Sweden, because I was sort of constantly getting interested in all kinds of new stuff, and I would try to explain it as soon as I learned something, and that gave me the kind of reputation that landed me a new job on the opinion pages of one of the bigger newspapers in Sweden. And I also got a gig at a national broadcaster that’s basically the Swedish equivalent of PBS in the U.S.”
Why he left mainstream media
Working for these national outlets raised Per’s public profile considerably, but eventually he grew disillusioned with how they delivered information. “I had too many middle managers who were telling me what to do and how to explain things and what topics to explain and in what format they should be explained. I tried to explain to them that it works differently in digital, that if you can grab the audience’s attention, you can then go on for 20 minutes without any problem. But they were always trying to make me write shorter or talk slower. So I was a bit fed up with that.”
Per began to put together a framework for how news organizations could deliver information through native content on social platforms. “All the media organizations were trying to drive traffic back to their own websites. I was trying to help people understand the news by publishing to the channels where they actually are.” He started with an account on Instagram. “In a hundred days we gained 23,000 followers starting from zero.” His goal was to use little more than a photo and caption to explain complicated public policy issues that ranged from voting to healthcare. “We're always trying to look for the ‘aha’ moments that would make you feel slightly smarter. It would provide you with enough information that you could bring it to the dinner table and have a conversation with a friend.”
How he monetized the startup
Once Per had a proof of concept with the Instagram account, he began building an entire media company around it. He also started working with advertisers by applying explainer storytelling to their brand marketing. “Brands told us that they have really complex issues that require someone to explain in a way that people can understand it. They asked, ‘could you do that for us?’ And I'm like, ‘sure, why not?’ Now we have major banks and services companies as clients. We have Spotify as a client. We've been profitable basically since two years back.”
Advertising revenue plummeted during the pandemic, but his team realized that the tech stack they had built for managing all their social media accounts would be valuable to brand marketers. “We brought on companies who can actually use that tech platform to publish in their social feeds, optimizing them through our data. So that's a big revenue stream for us as well.”
While many news startups today place most of their efforts on driving readers back to their websites, Per’s team has remained focused on creating content that’s native to platforms. “We operate on a distributed model. So basically it's social media, it's podcasting, and it's newsletters. We only operate the website as a repository for all the content that we have, but we don't try to drive people to the website all the time. That's not our business model. We bring our content to where the people actually are. Across platforms, we are approaching 150,000 subscribers, and 85% of the audience is women in the range of 25 to 45 years old.”
I asked Per if he ever missed his perch in mainstream media, but he seemed satisfied with his role as a media disruptor. “I left big media in order to start this and it's going fairly well. Social media has changed the nature of media and changed the role of journalism in the Nordic region, and the media companies here haven't changed enough. They are basically utilizing the same old business models and same old offerings. There's lots of commentary, but not a lot going on in terms of explanatory journalism that will make you smarter. That’s the kind of journalism I'm very inspired by.”
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.