omni
Omni represents a completely new way of working in a newsroom.
They do not generate their own journalism; instead, they curate
and enrich content they gather from various sources.
AN EVENTFUL YEAR
Omni was just six weeks old when the new year started.
But we saw the signs early. This was going to be an extraordinary year. By April, we had been named Europe’s
Best News Service by WAN-IFRA. Shortly afterwards,
the EU elections helped generate our first traffic
record – and confirmation for us that we were producing
a journalistic product of which we could be proud. No
other Swedish news service was as fast, or provided as
comprehensive coverage on the EU elections as Omni
did. Omni’s editorial team moved to Almedalen on the
island of Gotland for Sweden’s annual party political
conference week. There we discovered we had become
the new darling app for those interested in politics. One
after the other, Swedish parliamentarians and party
leaders announced themselves as Omni readers.
Around this time we rebooted our tech team to
further ramp up our development efforts. We changed
developers in Sweden, and added two new colleagues
in Gdansk. Since then, as well as improving our existing
apps, our new IT team has been working on laying the
foundations for a new generation of Omni apps to be
launched in 2015.
The Swedish gene ral election was also good for us:
on election day we dominated Swedish news media. On
election night, and the days following the election, we
proved to ourselves, and others, how robust the Omni
concept really is. While other Swedish editorial teams
had 130 journalists on duty on election day, we had two
editors in the morning and four in the evening. Yet we
feel that Omni still succeeded in providing the best news
experience and election coverage.
Omni was now clocking up 450,000 unique readers
on mobile every week. Ten months after launch we had
become Sweden’s fifth largest news service.
Given all this, we had every reason to celebrate our
first birthday in November – just as we reached our next
milestone: being named Sweden’s Best News Service at
Sweden’s Mobilgalan in Stockholm.
Our first year was momentous, but it’s nothing compared to what is to come. This year we are launching a
number of entirely new Omni apps – apps that I believe
are the next generation of news apps – and which we
hope other news services will be both inspired and challenged by.
We are designing and sketching at night, coding like
never before. The new apps have been built to be entirely
native for iOS and Android. This ensures, for instance,
a seamless transition between articles without loading
times. You can even read our news on aircraft without
an Internet connection. You will be able to monitor the
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Markus Gustafsson
Founder and Editor-in-chief
topics and news events you want – and then be pushnotified of the news that you think is most relevant. And
you can add new design and UX to that mix too.
We face the future humbly, but confident in our continued success because we are committed to developing
our offering through listening closely to our readers.
Ten months
after launch we had
become Sweden’s
fifth largest news
service.
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