Capital Brief is a new breed of news site in Australia that is unashamedly built on lessons from the new generation of American news businesses, growing from highly focused and high-quality journalism rather than reach and a click-based dependency on advertising.

Its co-founder, INMA member Chris Janz, has a resume that spans a couple of decades of trends from mass-reach advertising-drive sites where, as the book said, “information wants to be free” to attempts by major media organisations to reinvent themselves as digital-first.

He seems almost relieved that it has become media business logic to think of the journalism first and expect users to pay for it — and want to pay for it.

“It really comes back to my belief in the business of journalism,” Janz told me from Sydney. “You hear about the death of journalism and that media is a really tough business. I genuinely believe there’s never been a more exciting time to be in the business of journalism.”

Janz happily acknowledges the debt his start-up Scire and its first product, Capital Brief, owe to that breed of American sites that have carved out new models based on niches where readers are prepared to pay for the right reporting in a reader-revenue-first and journalism-first model. He mentions Jessica Lessin’s The Information, Jim VandeiHei’s Axios, and Ben Smith and Justin Smith’s Semafor as inspirations which he believes have proven the model.

“There’s been a wave of new publications in the States over the last couple of years. If you cast your mind back 15 years ago, the wave of digital journalism publications, then, the likes of Huffington Post and BuzzFeed were all built around scale from search and social, and they did well at their time. They built massive audiences. The world has moved on. Over the last couple of years, we've seen a rise of a whole host of new editorial models that all have slightly different businesses and very different audiences. The one thing they’ve all got in common is that they’re built off the back of quality journalism, quite sharp journalism.”

That is almost exactly the premise of Ben Smith’s book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, which exposes the money lost and damage to journalism the headline rush for reach and dependence on tech and social media caused.

A veteran of those times with senior roles at Nine Entertainment, News Corporation in Australia, and earlier start-ups and ventures, Janz probably could have written the same book and has certainly read Traffic. More importantly, however, he knows those lessons instinctively and has the scars.

“I lived and breathed that period,” he said “I have held the belief for quite some time that media has moved on from handing over control of your platform and your journalism to someone else, whether it’s a search engine or a social platform. I’m a big believer in quality and that’s what we’re doing.”

Capital Brief, which launched in August, is the first project from what Janz and colleagues hope becomes an umbrella holding company for a range of services, Scire – Latin for “to know.” Funded by its principles — Janz and his business partner fellow media veteran David Eisman — and the Australian venture capital firm Shearwater, Scire plans to create Australian media sites with what Janz happily calls “elements from a whole bunch of models that we’ve seen, tried and tested elsewhere, with a bit of a twist.”

Capital Brief is aimed at business people who invest their capital — hence the name to a large extent — and gives them actionable financial, business, and political news in a country where the federal capital (another reason for the title) has a big say in regulation and the economy.

“If I were to describe the recipe, it's 80% the capital — as in how money works and how businesses work — and 20% the politics and regulation,” Janz said. “It’s very intentionally the intersection … we were looking for a masthead that almost said what it says on the tin.”

Capital Brief already has a staff of around 20 journalists led by one of the country’s most experienced business editors, John McDuling. The site is a mix of free and behind-registration and subscription but started right away with a subscription model based on identity — not passwords — given the experience of the way passwords tend to get widely shared. 

Capital Brief is A$29 (US$18.50) a month and A$19 if you pay for a full year. Janz reckons Scire will focus solely on Capital Brief for maybe six months before considering its next move and that he has about three years of financial runway from now.

He’s clearly excited: “Oh, it’s so much fun.”

Looking at the Capital Brief site on any given day, there’s a heavy emphasis on politics — sensible in a country where the finance minister, central bank, and regulators hold huge sway — as well as sharp takes with a knowing edge on business leaders and corporations.

There’s a strong emphasis on newsletters and some clever design with strong signals of freshness. I’m intrigued that they have used the dot.com suffix too — not com.au — perhaps hinting at international ambitions. I will check in with Chris Janz in a few months to see how Capital Brief and Scire are going so we will stay tuned on this story.

Full disclosure of course: Janz has been a director of INMA in the past.

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