Our grantee Spatz

"Speed is crucial. It’s about learning quickly from the user base."

The founding story

Hannes Grassegger, an internationally renowned tech journalist, had no plans to start a company, let alone one in local journalism. But he was concerned about social cohesion and the global information infrastructure. The business models of traditional media are faltering, quality and reliability of social media are declining, and public broadcasters are facing political pressure.

What would an infrastructure look like that ensures the public’s access to fact-based information and thereby strengthens social cohesion? The question of how informational sovereignty could be established[MK1]  has stayed with him. On the occasion of the "No Billag" initiative in Switzerland in 2018 – an attempt to challenge the funding of public broadcasting – Grassegger developed a proposal for a Swiss social network for journalism, which he published as an essay for the magazine Das Magazin.

This caught the attention of the two foundations, Migros Pionierfonds and Mercator Switzerland. After two years of development work, Spatz (literal translation: sparrow) was born: the first AI-native platform for local journalism. It is a decentralized, participatory information network for Switzerland with scalability potential. It empowers citizens to take control of their own information and communication needs. The approach is non-profit. Grassegger: "My goal is not to save the press – but to bring journalism into our new era."

What problem does Spatz solve – and for whom?

Spatz makes it easy for people to stay informed about life in their local community or neighborhood – and to have a say in local matters. This fosters a sense of community. Especially outside major urban centers, citizens have few opportunities to systematically stay informed about what is happening where they live – not just in Switzerland. Local newspapers are on the decline, and hyperlocal, human-driven journalism is expensive. This contradicts the journalistic principle: "the closer, the more relevant." Organizations or individuals with vested interests pursuing a political or commercial agenda are stepping into the resulting information vacuum.

Spatz counteracts this. Through its infrastructure – based on a simple website plus distribution via email and WhatsApp – the “Spatzen" enable people to report what is happening in their communities. This is supplemented by publicly available material that Spatz collects and processes using AI tools. This creates a decentralized information infrastructure. In every location, local moderators review the quality and selection of content.

What is the business model?

Following a foundation-funded start-up phase, Spatz relies on a mix of several public-interest revenue streams: self-service ads from local businesses and organizations, which can upload them easily and independently, as well as manually arranged advertising partnerships with regional SMEs or nationwide partners. One-time donations and supporting memberships flow in from the community. All of this strengthens Spatz’s non-profit mission of providing citizens with local information. Since the summer of 2025, Media Forward Fund has been supporting growth with 400,000 euros.

What the founders did: development in phases

Phase 1: The Greenfield Project Hannes Grassegger starts with a blank slate – what is known as a greenfield exercise. Unbound by traditional models from the media industry, he asks: What do you really need when building a reliable and digitally sovereign information infrastructure from scratch? To explore this, he holds numerous discussions with people from diverse backgrounds about the idea of a social network for reliable information. It became clear that citizens tend to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of news. Yet they lack easily accessible sources of information right in their own neighborhoods. At the same time, it became apparent that publishers and journalists, with their completely different political and economic interests, could not be brought together under a cooperative solution.

Phase 2: Experimentation In 2022, Spatz designs a kind of ultra-local app intended to compile local news from public open data sources, contributions from local institutions, and user input. A "journalistic chatbot" named "Reporter" is designed to systematically ask users the most important journalistic questions in order to generate short articles. Shortly after the funding commitment from the foundations arrives in October 2022, ChatGPT hits the market in November. The timing is perfect. But using chatbots is not yet a common practice. The team therefore relies on existing infrastructures, such as local micro-media and distribution via email or WhatsApp.

Phase 3: Crisis The chatbot works, but the concept of collaborating with local media does not. The expectations are too different. Originally, the plan was to develop only a technical infrastructure. But by November 2023, it becomes clear: this isn’t working. Since AI is very effective at reading and analyzing websites, the team builds an agent-based tool to gather local content.

Phase 4: Taking Off On May 23, 2024, Spatz launches its first in-house publication in Alttoggenburg - a region that hasn’t had a local newspaper for ten years. Alttoggenburg News becomes the prototype: the product and features are only developed technically once real user data confirms demand. Until then, everything is done manually. In the new publication, Spatz combines everything it has learned, and it still works this way today: AI helps gather local information from the web, a chatbot assists users in submitting articles, a human reviews and selects all content - and the newspaper is distributed via email and WhatsApp.

Phase 5: Scaling From August 2024 to August 2025, Spatz learns to establish the product in other locations and develop the local community. The website spatz.news does not feature news itself, but only provides access to the regions where Spatz actively delivers news. Citizens can suggest towns or regions to be added as distribution areas. Spatz publishes weekly via email and WhatsApp. The guiding principle is: A village newspaper must be able to be produced by one person in four hours per week – a 10% position. This is supported by a platform that centrally manages software development and publishing tasks. Spatz calculates production costs of CHF 20,000 per year per newspaper.

Phase 6: Develop a Business Model It turns out that user enthusiasm, as measured by open rates and user numbers, is comparable everywhere - and this at about five percent of the cost of a weekly village newspaper from the print era. Now the revenue side is being developed. The team tests various hypotheses regarding public-interest-oriented revenue streams. It learns to calculate "unit economics," "customer acquisition cost," and "lifetime value" and realizes that covering the costs is feasible. As its profile grows, Spatz also becomes attractive to advertisers. With three to four ads per month, the team can cover the salary of a moderator. By March 2026, there will be 16 editions covering 44 Swiss municipalities.

Phase 7: Internationalization and Quality Spatz plans to operate at least 20 digital village newspapers in the DACH region by the end of 2026. This growth is part of the funding provided by Media Forward Fund. Regions can either nominate themselves or are selected based on data analysis. A stable funding mix of memberships and tapping into local advertising markets is intended to make Spatz financially sustainable in the long term. Journalistic quality is also set to improve. In each location, there will be in-depth local reports once or twice a year that people in the communities will talk about - in the spirit of fostering a sense of community.

How the organization is structured

Spatz is organized as a nonprofit association that reviews all major decisions. Grassegger is the managing director but no longer serves on the association’s board, to which he is accountable. The platform team has between four and five hybrid-working employees and coordinates via a weekly meeting. Local moderators meet once a month, with communication taking place via Slack in between.

How Spatz measures its success

Success is measured using a data dashboard that the team – like the non-profit media company Andererseits, another grantee of Media Forward Fund – developed with consultant Anja Noster (see Practical Tip). The key KPIs are the open rate of the newsletters, user submissions, referrals, and monetization KPIs. In each region, between several hundred and around 1,000 people have subscribed to a "Spatz." Once 200 subscribers are reached, the service is launched. The goal is for 80 percent of users to open the product.

Journalistic principles

Spatz is about gathering facts. The "What happened?" is important, not the evaluation. Commentary and context are captured through reader submissions. Spatz supports participation and provides tools for this. Anyone who contributes is provided with AI tools. Local journalism works differently than national journalism. "In local journalism, the two-source principle cannot be applied," says Grassegger. Instead, the dual-review principle applies: At each location, an editor approves content, after which the content undergoes a formal review at the platform level. The "Spatzen" refrain from taking political positions: "We try to reflect the breadth of the spectrum within legal limits." Spatz adheres to the Swiss Press Code and has guidelines for letters to the editor that, for example, reject discrimination and require sources as evidence for submissions.

How Spatz decides on products

At Spatz, the lean principle applies: products are developed when there is demand – so far, there is only one. The effort must remain manageable. Spatz tries to build on existing user habits, in this case: checking WhatsApp messages and scanning the email inbox. There are no costly gimmicks or labor-intensive products, because the focus is on scaling at the lowest possible cost. Spatz is the MVP of journalism, says Grassegger. MVP stands for "Minimum Viable Product."

Lessons learned from successes and mistakes

Here’s what Hannes Grassegger says:

• It is essential to listen to people and develop products from the user’s perspective. "People are very active, smart, and media-savvy."
• Speed is crucial. It’s about learning quickly from the user base. This includes rapidly expanding that user base. The users also include the investors.
• You have to constantly kill all kinds of darlings which doesn’t always please everyone.
• Many assumptions on which the media industry is built cannot be verified, as they are shaped by the publisher’s perspective. What Spatz has discovered: People are quite willing to pay for journalism. They aren’t afraid of algorithms if they serve them. The breaking-news business helps the media, but not the public; it only increases panic in society.
• "Low-tech" solutions are often superior. Using existing infrastructure like email is more effective and cheaper than building an expensive app that requires significant marketing effort.
• You have to ask customers for money from the start, rather than delivering first and asking later once users have already gotten used to free access. The key is not to confuse the audience: a "call to action" – that is, a simple message – is enough.
• Even faster scaling is crucial. Once Spatz covers all of Switzerland, it will also become attractive to national clients as an advertising partner.
• The pace of tech development far outstrips that of journalistic development. The goal is to move faster than others who are using and expanding similar infrastructures for their own interests.

What he would do differently next time

Team building is difficult and absolutely requires guidance. Very few founders have HR skills – especially those coming from journalism.

Most important advice for other founders

When building a company, you have to think outside the box and not let either the media industry or the tech industry dictate solutions to you.

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Author: Alexandra Borchardt, independent media researcher, journalist, and strategy consultant
Photo: Media Forward Fund / Ivo von Mühlenen
Film: Sympathiefilm

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Last updated: March 27, 2026