It's not only in Scandinavian countries. Many countries, such as Germany and the US adopted that policy at the end of the 1920s or beginning of 1930s. In the former it's still in place and Wikipedia tells me that more than half of the US states have a "Percent for Art" program which is essentially that.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Nothing in there about content having to be "news".
I'm a swede and I am constantly pleasantly surprised by public policy in our scandinavian countries.