“It was the worst of times, it was the best of times,” wrote Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities.
This moment of upheaval in the media industry can seem like the “worst of times”. But innovative projects like Polish regional media outlet Slazag.pl show that it can also be the “best of times”.
Slazag.pl was founded by a group of journalists who left Poland’s largest regional daily, Dziennik Zachodni in 2022 to serve two neighbouring regions in southern Poland: Slask and Zaglebie. Today it employs 13 people.
These two industrial regions were combined in a new metropolitan association in 2017, but they have very different histories: the bigger region of Slask – or Silesia – was previously part of Prussia and the German empire, while Zaglebie was part of the Russian empire in the 19th century. Despite efforts to bring the two regions closer together at the administrative level, they remain culturally distinct.
Slazag was set up with the intention to tell the tale of both regions, but when we started this project in late 2024, it did not have any journalists based in Zaglebie and only about 10% of the content created was about the smaller region. If the news organisation was to attract more readers – and advertisers – in Zaglebie it needed a strategy to put “More ZAG in SlaZAG”.
“There is an invisible border between the regions, an emotional separation, sports animosities, a historical division that mentally divides people in the region. It’s time to change this … We want to show people from Silesia that Zaglebie are also people with an equally interesting story to tell,” said Katarzyna Pachelska, editor-in-chief.
That is why Slazag sought support to hire a local journalist to increase exposure to the Zaglebie region and its 1 million inhabitants, as well as to its businesses.
We set three main goals for the mentorship:
- To brainstorm and guide the content plan and discuss how the new reporter will be integrated into the broader team and what their workflow will be like.
- To help structure an audience survey, user personas and help create a value proposition for the project.
- To use the audience funnel concept to develop a communication strategy for the launch of the project and an audience engagement plan.
However, the project quickly encountered a problem: Zaglebie does not have as extensive a journalistic tradition as Silesia and Katarzyna struggled to find a reporter with the right experience.
But she did know a local activist from the region who was very knowledgeable about the area and had a strong presence on social media: Robert Lechowski. Katarzyna decided to take a chance on Robert and give him a crash course in journalism.
“Robert’s distinctive, sometimes controversial style allowed him to develop engagement with the regional community on his Facebook profile,” she said. “He fitted right in, but with a very flexible and fresh approach. This certainly allowed us to take a different perspective on journalism today and a more flexible approach to hiring staff in the future.
Robert quickly became a prolific contributor, exceeding the project’s targets for the number of articles generated and increasing the proportion of content on Zaglebie on the main Slazag website to 16% from 10% previously. His articles were complemented by comment pieces from prominent figures from the region, helping Slazag to expand its contacts among important audiences: activists, cultural figures, and politicians.
The highlight in Robert’s development as a journalist came with an in-depth investigation published in October about a complex local case of a drunk driver. Robert’s background as a lawyer helped him to dig deeper into the case.
This project took place against the backdrop of seismic changes in the media landscape: at the start of our mentorship, we spent a lot of time discussing how traffic to Slazag’s website was being hit by changes to Facebook algorithms to deprioritise news. By the end of the mentorship, we were talking about how AI was having an even bigger impact.
That was why it was so important for the mentorship to focus on identifying what the audience in Zaglebie is really interested in and building a strategy around that. That led to a big shift in mindset among the senior team at the outlet: they realised it is time to abandon the idea that journalists and editors always know best what their audience cares about. Instead, they decided that they need to work harder to connect with their readers and build a strategy around that.
We crafted an audience survey and created profiles of different potential users to work out how best Slazag could serve their needs and interests. That also helped inform the business strategy and sales pitches in the region. As the team better understood the Zaglebie audience, they decided it was not enough to just have a section for the new content on the main website, but they needed to create a new local website: 24zaglebie.pl.
The mentorship also helped senior management to think about bigger questions: “Although this fell completely outside the scope of the project, these meetings stimulated us to think and act strategically for the entire organization,” said co-owner Lukasz Kluczny.
The project involved experimenting with videos featuring AI avatars of reporters, but Slazag did not pursue this as they drew some negative reactions from viewers. “This tool is too risky to use as an avatar of a real journalist potentially leads to a decline in trust in the newsroom,” Lukasz said.
The project missed its targets for a significant increase in advertising sales in Zaglebie, but it has started to see some success and Lukasz is sufficiently hopeful for the future that Slazag plans to hire another reporter to cover the region, alongside Robert.
“As the project progresses, our involvement and recognition in the region increase, and consequently, our sales potential increases. This allows us to be optimistic about our goals in the coming months, especially with the upcoming holiday season, which is a promising time for sales,” Lukasz said.
But aware that this is the “worst of times” for website traffic, Slazag wants to pursue other ways to connect with its audience, such as sponsored newsletters and possibly in-person events.
“We must further decouple ourselves from traffic sources like Google and Facebook in favor of direct channels like newsletters. To achieve this, we must further focus on building Robert’s personal brand and building relationships with users,” Lukasz said.
To return to Charles Dickens, Slazag is playing an important role in telling A Tale of Two Regions. And even if it might feel as if the media industry is in “the winter of despair”, working with projects like this leaves me with the sense that it is also “the spring of hope”.
This mentorship process was conducted as part of the Business Innovation Synergizer programme within the Deepening Digital: Reinforcing Resilience project.