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TIME EUROPE Friday, January 19, 2001 News on the Net Norwegian online journal Nettavisen is giving print newspapers a run for their money By URSULA SAUTTER Bonn If Odd Harald Hauge gets his way, fishmongers on Oslo's waterfront won't have newspapers to wrap their fish in for much longer. Hauge, 44, a journalist and co-founder of Nettavisen (www.nettavisen.no), Norway's first online news service, is betting that as more and more Norwegians turn to the Web for news, printed papers could well be a thing of the past. Only four years after it was launched by Hauge and fellow-journalist Knut Ivar Skeid, also 44, Nettavisen has gained immense popularity. Some 250,000 Norwegians read it every day, 10% of them via palmtop computer or WAP cell phone. That's about a tenth of the country's 2.4 million Web users, and some 35% of its adult population. Few, if any, of Europe's other Web-only papers can boast such readership figures. The secret of Nettavisen's success is turbo-journalism. Its staff of 50 continually scour the Net for newsworthy facts and events. "We work more like a radio station than a print medium in that we are entirely focused on speed," says co-founder Hauge. "In contrast to traditional dailies that often report yesterday's news, we update our pages around the clock and keep our readers informed about breaking stories as they happen." By monitoring which stories get the most pageviews, Nettavisen's editors can also tailor the website's content more closely to the interests of its readers. After a difficult first three years, Nettavisen, unlike most of its struggling competitors in Europe, is now operating in the black. Funded exclusively through banner ads, the online paper had a turnover of $4 million in 2000, a 100% increase over the previous year. Hauge expects another 50% growth for the next twelve months. Internet company Lycos Europe recently bought Nettavisen when it acquired Sweden's Spray Network, which picked up the Norwegian Web news service for $25 million in early 1999. Hoping to repeat Nettavisen's success elsewhere in Europe, Hauge and company helped Spray Network launch a German version of the online paper, Netzeitung (www.netzeitung.de), in Berlin last November. While he concedes that "it's difficult to export something that is not a product but an idea," Hauge is optimistic about Netzeitung's chances in Germany's competitive newspaper market, the largest in Europe. Given that Germans are adopting the Internet much more slowly than people in the Nordic countries where the web was eagerly welcomed at an early stage — only 18% of Germany's households are currently online — it might take much more of an effort and much more time to turn Netzeitung into a gold mine than it did with its Norwegian model. Even though Hauge thinks that it will be years before Internet news services completely oust traditional papers — "People's habits change slowly," he says — he's convinced that the future of journalism is electronic. "Web news reporting is fast, free, interactive, and better for the environment," he argues. "One day people will ask themselves, 'Do I really need a paper which isn't all that?'" However, since newspapers have proved remarkably resilient to competition from new media in the past — neither the radio nor television have managed to supplant them, despite dire predictions of their extinction — that day might still be long in coming.. To check out Nettavisen and Netzeitung for yourself, go to www.nettavisen.no and www.netzeitung.de.
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