CoFounder, a quarterly magazine claiming to be the first in Europe dedicated solely on startups, was recently launched at the biggest startup conference in the Nordic area, Slush, in Helsinki. The magazine covers the European startup landscape, business angels and investors.
Compared with blogs, which are mostly news-oriented, CoFounder provides deeper content, analysing the startup scene through surveys, pursuing openness and providing real facts for investors.
With a print edition, the magazine has a challenging task of breaking into the old media industry, which has started to change. While most of the media today is moving towards shorter and lighter stories, the founders of CoFounder, Tarmo Virki (the former Reuters European technology correspondent) and Jari Peltola (the former editor in chief of several Finnish IT magazines), believe it’s worth to keep analytical stories based on true facts and experiences.
“We see the industry booming in Europe’s hottest startup capitals – London, Berlin, Paris, Helsinki, Stockholm, Tallinn, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, but what has been missing in the industry was an analytical media publication. The initial feedback from readers at Slush was extremely positive – there is definitely a clear demand for a serious magazine covering the startup landscape,” Virki said.
CoFounder was established together with one of the biggest Nordic startup blogs, ArcticStartup. In the first edition, there are contributors from London, Norway and Finland, as well as from Estonia. The goal of the founders is to grow CoFounder quickly into a pan-European publication that would reach all the startup capitals in Europe.
Although it has been launched in print, the CoFounder magazine is also available as an iPhone app.
I predict they won’t even last a year. Print is dead and the frequency of issue does not work well in a fast-changing industry.
And strangely no web version…
So far very deliberately. Testing the case for paper – it still has something special to offer vs web. And if you are on the other side of the world iPad/iPhone app is there for you. From next issue also on Android.
We don’t try to cover all the changes. There is enough outlets on the web doing that. For telling stories and digging deeper quarterly should be perfect, but of course we will see – if need arises we can change the schedule.