Former Fellow's journalism startup wins 250,000 Euros
13 Nov 2013
Long Play, a Finnish digital service for 'slow journalism', has won the Uutisraivaaja innovation contest. The prize is 250,000 Euros.Long Play is a new kind of digital publisher of e-singles, founded by former RISJ Fellow Johanna Vehkoo with seven other Finnish journalists. LP publishes 12 well-developed pieces of long-form narrative journalism per year. Long Play is also an experiment in finding a new business model for investigative journalism, which is suffering in the age of severe newsroom cuts. Next up for Long Play is the launch of its own publishing platform, optimised for long-form narrative content and multimedia. This happens in January 2014. During the year 2014, Long Play will launch the World's first franchise model for investigative journalism and long-form feature writing. Journalists in any country can form Long Play collectives and start publishing using the platform. “We will help them with starting out and give them the publishing platform, so they don't have to start everything from scratch like we have. Journalists everywhere will be able to cut the middleman and sell their stories directly to readers,” Vehkoo says. For background about Long Play in English, read this and this. Uutisraivaaja is an innovation contest organized by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. The contest seeks ideas for renewing distribution of information and creating sustainable business models for journalism. Uutisraivaaja is based in Finland but open to submissions from any country.
