At the start of this new year, I want to contribute something positive: a case and an idea that will hopefully inspire local newsrooms to — literally — start digging.

This is not a story about AI and automation. Rather, it’s about how you can use the time AI frees up in the newsroom to create lasting value for your readers and business.

This is a case of a small newsroom in the middle of Sweden that came back from the brink thanks to a creative take on investigative journalism.

Linda Eriksson Storbacka, editor-in-chief of Södra Dalarnes Tidning (aka Södran, part of Bonnier News Local [BNLO]) leads a newsroom where she’s one of five journalists covering two municipalities. The newspaper won the 2024 Swedish Investigative Journalism Award (“the Golden Shovel”). We’ll get to why, but let’s start at the beginning.

Back from the brink

In 2019, Bonnier News Local acquired Mittmedia, taking over the latter group’s local newspapers (around 20 publications), one of them being Södran. At that point Södran had no newsroom of its own, had lost half of its readers in the preceding 10 years, and was under threat of being shut down.

Storbacka had applied to be the editor of a larger BNLO title but was told she could either take on Södran or become a reporter at another newspaper 100 kilometers away. She decided to take the job as editor-in-chief, though she didn’t really want to be there.

As it turns out, neither did the four journalists assigned to work with her.

“No one was happy or particularly engaged in their work, and conflicts were common. I realised that if I wanted things to change, I would have to go all in to make that happen,” Storbacka said. “We had lots of meetings and progress was pretty slow, but I kept pushing them to answer the same questions: Who should we be? What are our goals?”

Suddenly one day, one of the reporters said, “we should become Sweden’s best newsroom.”

“It was a very ambitious goal, but now we had something to work towards,” Storbacka said.

Eyes on the goal

The newsroom set to work. Assisted by experts from BNLO, the team started analysing content consumption to identify what worked well and what generated little engagement.

“The stuff that performed really well we kept doing and the worst performing content we stopped producing,” Storbacka said.

For everything in between, the newsroom created a checklist to improve reporting and started focusing on the target group of 30- to 39-year-old readers. Engagement and reader numbers started to increase.

In 2023, the big breakthrough came. The newsroom was contacted about how the local council was using a new staffing agency to get staff for at-home care of the elderly. The newspaper started to unravel a scandal, but the council was unwilling to hand over documents it’s legally obliged to. That made it slow work for the reporters.

Storbacka had an idea. She set up an investigation blog (Grävdagboken, found here in Swedish) where she published all the reporters’ notes about the investigation, in diary form, outside the paywall. The diary was noticed and talked about in the community. It was ultimately the key to getting the answers.

One day, two readers walked into the newsroom with a plastic bag full of copies of all the documents the local council had failed to provide that the newsroom needed. They exposed the full extent of the scandal.

The investigation’s impact

In six months during the investigation, Södran achieved 45% increased engagement among logged-in readers (the investigation articles were behind the paywall) and 55% increased engagement among the target group.

“The investigation won us the Investigative Journalism Award. But more importantly, it really engaged local people, including younger readers, who started taking an interest in local decision-making and politics,” Storbacka said. “Investigative journalism is now an important part of our daily work, and we have exposed a number of stories with big local impact.”

And what about that very ambitious original goal to become Sweden’s best newsroom? In March 2025, Södra Dalarnes Tidning was named the country’s best newsroom at the Swedish Newspaper Awards.

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