3 lessons from the latest news media innovation winners – Twipe

While there may be different unique contexts or local landscapes, the global news media industry faces many of the same challenges and opportunities. That is why it is so important for publishers to learn from one another, something we encourage in our community of international media executives. We are joined in that mission by INMA, who highlighted some of these strong ideas in their 2020 Global Media Awards ceremony this week. From 922 entires representing 44 countries, 185 were selected as finalists. Today we’re exploring some of these award winning innovations and exploring what broader lessons publishers can take from these ideas.

1. Create content for your die hards

Amedia, the second largest media company in Norway, won first place for their idea on growing digital readership. During last year’s “Norway Cup”, the world’s largest youth football tournament, the team came up with the idea to relaunch their sports vertical in order to attract new subscribers and engage existing subscribers. With this relaunch, their Direktesport vertical product expanded from covering 150 matches of the Norway Cup to 800 matches. To achieve this, they converted an old shipping container into their working station — something the team is proud of as they note the traditional broadcaster covering the tournament had to bring in a full bus as their working space. During the weeklong tournament, 2,864 new subscriptions were sold while 40-60k subscribers watched every day.

So what can we learn from this experience? While our tech team was happy to see one of Amedia’s key takeaways is to “love your developers“, there are broader learnings as well. We have seen before how powerful the sports vertical be in converting and retaining subscribers — it is one reason why The Athletic has been so successful. But this isn’t the only vertical that has die hard fans, publishers should explore what content has loyal audiences and create products for those readers specifically. For The New York Times, the crossword is one such vertical subscription product they offer. With over 500k crossword subscribers, more than 50% of those subscribers do not have a subscription, print or digital, to The Times itself.

2. Listen to your community

Tortoise Media was a finalist in the category for best use of an event to build a news brand, thanks to their “ThinkIns”. This relative new digital news startup was founded in the mindset of ‘slow news‘ with the goal of putting news out only when it was ready, not just as it happens. They have taken this innovative approach with their audience engagement strategy as well. Each ThinkIn is a live, completely unscripted conversation between Tortoise journalists, members, and invited guest speakers. With these conversations, the team is able to hear directly from members, as well as providing a forum for civilised disagreements on today’s important topics. In a previous conversation they have brought together the boss of a multinational oil company and Extinction Rebellion activists; in another, they brought an outspoken gender-critical feminist writer and a transgender academic together for conversation.

While the organisation is based in London, they’ve brought their ThinkIns to a wide array of other locations, including over to the US. In 12 months, they have held 281 events which saw 11,000 guests attend. Not only does this provide a great way for the team to better understand their audience, it has proven to be a strong acquisition player as well. 60% of their nearly 30,000 members were referred by another member. That’s why each member received 10 complimentary tickets to share with friends and family to encourage them to attend a ThinkIn and see for themselves the different Tortoise Media is making.

Tortoise Media takes the advice of ‘listen to your readers’ to a new level, but all publishers can benefit from this. In order to ensure you create content and products that are valuable for your audience, take a look at what your readers are telling you with their behaviour. One strong example of this is the Star Tribune, a successful local publisher in the US that recently hit 100k digital subscribers. To better serve their readers, they compared when they were publishing their stories versus when readers were actually consuming the stories.

One of the most amazing charts that we put together was: when are we posting stories and when are people coming to our site. We graphed these two against each other, and they are not at all synced up.

3. Think about churn holistically

While MittMedia (now Bonnier News Local) won the best use in data analytics for their ‘holistic approach to understanding churn‘, there were a few other interesting projects submitted on this topic as well. Dow Jones was a finalist for their “Habit Project” at The Wall Street Journal, and our team won 2nd place for our work with The Times and The Sunday Times on JAMES, Your Digital Butler. All of these projects had one tool in common in their fight against churn: data and analytics.

For MittMedia, this meant that after a year of reducing churn through various efforts, they were stagnating at a churn rate of 12%. So they decided to build churn models in order to understand where they were losing their subscribers. Some interesting insights came out of this work, such as readers that received 20 or more push notifications in a month were cancelling their subscriptions earlier than others. They also saw that women were churning proportionally more than men; in the first 100 days alone, they lost 10% more women than men. To correct this, they undertook an editorial initiative to understand how they were presenting gender in their articles, so they took actions to write in a more balanced way.

For The Wall Street Journal, the use of data in the fight against churn meant they mapped out all actions readers could take and the associated impact on churn. The result of mapping all these actions out was startling: there are many more actions that can improve retention, some even dramatically more, than just downloading the app or subscribing to a newsletter. These two actions had previously been seen as the primary focus points, but the project team was able to find many more ways they could engage readers. For example, they found that using puzzles increased retention significantly, but only a very small portion of the audience had played a puzzle. With a new marketing push focused on puzzles, they were able to see engagement rates grow. So they took this model to other lowly adopted features to increase awareness and ultimately retention. This work has helped to decrease member churn by 3 points. For more on “Project Habit”, make sure to see the interview with Anne Powell, director of member engagement, in our most recent research report “Habit Forming News Products“.

Finally, we were proud to receive 2nd place along with The Times for our work on JAMES Your Digital Butler. During the initial one year project, a team of 20 people from both of our organisations worked to develop an AI technology for the news industry that could increase reader engagement through personalisation. Through this work, The Times was able to observe a 49% reduction in churn. Now we are working to bring this personalisation technology to other publishers through our Launch Partner Programme. With Round 3 closing shortly, we are already live in production with another partner. We look forward to sharing these results with our community as well in the future.