In 2003, Austrian publisher Styria came into Slovenia with a weekly, Zurnal. Its 12 journalists produced mediocre content and its management’s lack of strategy didn’t allow for Zurnal to tap into Slovenia’s advertising tolars.

4 years later, in 2007, Styria decided to shake things up. It launched a free daily, Zurnal24, combined with a real website, zurnal24.si, to conquer the young, urban markets – a strategy Schibsted successfully implemented in France with 20minutes and 20minutes.fr.

Zurnal media hired 110 journalists and other staff and moved its tenfold-bigger newsroom to a brand-new building in a modern Ljubljana suburb. This strong investment bore fruits, as the print edition met its Styria-imposed revenue targets on time despite the current environment, in January 2009.

More impressive is the online success of zurnal24.si. The website achieved its targets by mid-2008, 6 months early. 6 months after the launch, it had reached the readership level of delo.si, the country’s biggest newspaper. It is now the #3 newswebsite in Slovenia, behind the 2 biggest TV stations.

Financially speaking, the website rakes in €50,000 in monthly sales, 10% of Zurnal media’s total income.

How did Styria achieve this? As it did in Croatia with 24sata, it hired the most talented local managers. Online, this meant poaching Milena Kalacun Lapajne, whom I met in Ljubljana, and her team from the national broadcaster and online champion, rtvslo.si.

Concretely, zurnal24 experimented a lot. Although it failed often, most notably with a blog network that didn’t take off, some of the innovations succeeded.

First, a few months after the launch, they decided to mix print and web journalists, integrating the newsroom. Styria cleverly gave a green light and didn’t interfere in the locally-born plans. The offices being in a new, open-space building, the reshuffle cost only €3,000, mostly spent in desk-reorganization. The integration concerned only the editorial department, advertising remaining separate (meaning that online sales aren’t part of discounted bundles as is often the case elsewhere).

Second, zurnal24 ventured into games, so as to get a foot on the juicy in-game advertising market. They outsourced the development of 2 softwares, Ski Challenge and Football manager (the latter soon to be discontinued). 1 game costs about €45,000 to develop and brings back €90,000 in ad revenues, as it appeals to big-name TV players such as McDonald’s or Hyundai. Zurnal24 also embeds Miniclip games on the website, probably to increase pageviews (see Forum4editor’s piece on the subject).

This is all good, but it isn’t really connected to journalism. When asked if zurnal24 would develop news-oriented games (see Paul Bradshaw’s post on games and journalism), Milena plainly said no.

A new portal will be developed this summer, which will drop the failed blog network and replace it with more user-generated content. UGC is currently running slowly with an SMS/MMS service that receives around 5 items a day.

The current crisis shouldn’t be fatal to Zurnal24. Its position as a market leader with growing readership (at a time when the competition is nose-diving) should ensure that it will be the last outlet advertisers stop buying ad space in.

On top of that, the cross-platform approach benefited also to the original weekly. Zurnal gained 100,000 readers, about 30% of its readership (according to figures from Styria).

The moral is: if you want to achieve success, you have to invest massively and cleverly, while letting a local team run the show.