Meet Spatz – an AI project to counter news deserts in small Swiss villages

While hundreds of small Swiss municipalities inform themselves as best they can due to the lack of hyper-local media, the Spatz project appears as an innovative solution.

Thanks to an AI tool, all public or semi-public local information is collected – association calendars, political announcements, or commercial events for example - before being structured in a CRM and later formatted via a prompt that generates content for an email newsletter or WhatsApp feed. Everything is sent weekly, free of charge, with human review before distribution.

Available in several small Swiss regions, the project is very successful. Within 12 months, the Alttoggenburg newsletter became the first local outlet on the first try, with about 10 percent of the local population subscribing. The project, which could now be exported to other countries, is now working on a way to monetise it.

The Fix spoke with Hannes Grassegger, founder and CEO of Spatz.

How did you come up with the idea? How did you start to create Spatz?

There was one guy who was doing the only local newspaper for a place close to Zoug. He was not much of a writer but had to write these things here and couldn't be in three places at the same time. So we built him a chatbot that would read all the local websites and give him a news feed. He could then integrate these tools into his workflow.

Then, we were contacted by the newspaper Alttoggenburger. They approached us and said that it was very hard for them to get local news for and from the region. So we built a tool that is ultra-hyper-local and combines different sources of information in it, like public information and open data sources. So it would get all sorts of local, official, body schools, churches, associations, clubs, or whatever sort of public information out there.

Alttoggenburger was a place where the reality of the post-news environment had become true. People started to hear about our project and came to ask us to set it up elsewhere. So we had the idea of starting Spatz.

So the idea of Spatz is to offer hyper-local information content?

I really got pulled on the local level when I understood that it's far easier to learn about how Trump is doing than to understand what is going on in front of my door. I don't know why the kindergarten is shut down and rebuilt and the media are really not helping me a lot with my local life.

There is so much news accessible for free on the international, national and regional levels, but not on the local level, on the municipalities levels, where Swiss democracy is happening. The local news outlets have either never existed because readership would have been too small for a paper company to set up or what you get is not an independent press. The editor-in-chief is the mayor.

So around 40% of the Swiss municipalities within the last 10 years have increased their spending for local information. Why do they spend more and more? Because for them, it's a political tool. So at the end, people have this feeling of an increasing disconnect, and this is because the business model of media is an advertising model, mostly.

How do you find the news for Spatz?

The information we have is half from the stuff that our AI found on the local internet, and the other half of it in a developed region comes from the people who send it to us. We do not do our own reporting. We are an ultra-slow social network with localised content moderation according to journalistic standards.

Then, there is a local content moderator, who has a set of standards and will select what is important. They will prioritise and double-check the veracity – if different links say the same thing – and so we've built a tool that gives like a local news feed where the local content moderator picks from that, and in that tool, there is also the news that the locals send us.

How do you distribute Spatz?

Every Thursday you can get it via WhatsApp or via email in 7 different regions.

What are the first results?

I think the best case for a developed environment is to look at what we've achieved in Alttoggenburg. Within 12 months we became the leading local outlet on the first try.

There are 15 000 adult persons in Alttoggenburg, and we have 1200-something email subscribers and 560 WhatsApp subscribers. So we say we are about 10 percent of the local population.

What are the profiles of the people who subscribe?

We are very well centred from 30 to 55 [years old]. We believe that people between 20 and 30 are not so much interested in the local news because they are exploring the world, but once they have kids, they are [settled]. Younger than 20 years old is hard for us because they like to be on social media, but we are competing with social media.

Since your launch, have you been receiving more requests from communities who want to implement the same project?

Yes, people had heard about our project through some friends of friends, and they came to ask us. We have now a list.

We had also been contacted by someone in Luxembourg who was interested in our project and wanted to see if we could develop it there. And we are also talking with some people in the U.S. In the end, this can be implemented everywhere because it's the same system.

Are you also going to start monetisation?

We are starting to introduce a monetisation concept because people like to do hyperlocal advertisements, and it's very hard for them to do that in the digital world because they can't target as precisely on Instagram and Facebook.

So we're starting to do advertisements in the emails and boosting events, but we are developing and testing different advertising and monetisation approaches to optimise in the next months.

Source of the cover photo: FULVIO CASSANI via Unsplash