Table Stakes Europe - Round 2 - Midpoint Update
By Doug Smith with input / review from the coaching team
Also available to read in French, German and Spanish.
It is inspiring to work with people and news organizations taking on the essential challenge of “getting into the game of 21st century news”. That is just what the participants in the Orange and Blue Table Stakes Europe cohorts are doing. So, let’s start this midpoint update with a big “thank you” to all of them.
We are halfway through this round of the program. All teams have articulated clear and compelling performance challenges for moving their news enterprises into the audienceS-first, digital realities of our contemporary world. Local news organizations – just like all enterprises and industries today – battle for the scarce time and attention of people who spend huge amounts of time on screens. Yes, there remains an important audience: folks (typically older) who prefer print. Local news enterprises must serve them just as they must serve other audienceS – but not at the expense of those other audienceS who prefer digital access over print.
Understanding why newsrooms are at the centre of everything
Unlike in the 20th century, audienceS have more choices than ever for how to spend time and where to get the news and information they need to navigate their lives. This shift has profound consequences for legacy news groups. In the 20th century, print revenues dependably flowed from the outstanding work of marketing, ad sales and circulation. Not today. News groups who cling to this approach die. Read that again. Die.
Any legacy news group failing to prevent their own demise also brings harm to others because, with their disappearance, a core foundation for democracy weakens and fades away. Avoiding that fate --- for our democracies, for our audienceS, and for our news enterprises -- demands a major and new recognition. Today, the newsroom itself is the business. Not circulation. Not marketing. Not ad sales. The newsroom.
Yes, marketing, ad sales, circulation – along with technology, product management, core partners and others – are essential to the best future of democracy, audienceS growth and retention, and the journalistic and financial sustainability of the news enterprise.
But make no mistake: unless and until the newsroom accepts the sacred responsibility to ‘be the business’, the demographic realities of the aging audience preferring print will grind ahead and down.
Challenging the status quo
Making this shift depends on the courage to change. It demands that the core editorial work of selecting, reporting, editing and publishing stories shift to earlier in the day and throughout the day – not just waiting for the ‘close’ of print to send stories out digitally. Le Quotidien Jurassien, Zeitungsverlag Waiblingen, and Saarbrucker Zeitung are making such changes, as are Baylis Media, who for example, have had the courage to shift from one weekly deadline to 21 - i.e. three per day -- morning, midday and night—in order to match the rhythm of publishing to the rhythm of their audienceS lives.
This crucial change also requires specificity and selection among the many different (although overlapping in many cases) audienceS to serve. Gone are the days of providing general news to the ‘general public’. That only produces undifferentiated, commodity content available from myriad sources.
Instead, newsrooms along with colleagues in marketing, tech and so forth must use criteria to choose audienceS. While each news enterprise has unique market conditions to inform particular criteria, all news enterprises can start with these: How big is this audience? What are their needs, interests and problems to be solved? Do we have the passion to serve them? Do we have – or can we soon develop – the skills to serve them?
The complex task of selecting audienceS
Les Echos, for example, have selected audienceS with an eye on the following: audience size and revenue potential; editorial expertise and desire to serve, competitive differentiation, brand equity potential, diversity and inclusion, and the opportunity for quick results to build on. Neue Pressegesellschaft, in contrast, have used audience attractiveness, passion to serve and actual people in the newsroom ready to go.
TSE Blue and Orange news enterprises such as Nordkurier, Le Point, La Voix du Nord, and Nordwest-Zeitung have used criteria to select a wide range of specific audienceS – and readers of this report are encouraged to contrast these with the legacy obstacle of ‘serving the general public’: local sports fans; women executives in their 30s/40s; teachers; media executives; local entrepreneurs; families; foodies; young parents; active seniors; people nostalgic for their rural, beautiful homeland; and, people seeking housing.
As Grupo Serra and other teams are discovering, journalists must master the skills required to put audienceS first. Whether by using headlines optimized for SEO, or switching from an institutional orientation (what is the city council doing) to an audience orientation (why does the audience care about what the city council is doing), or mixing different media – audio, text, graphics, video and more – or, as Baylis have done, publishing when the audience is there and where they are (different platforms such as FB, Instagram, and more), journalists must always ask and answer this essential question: What job(s) are we doing for this audience?
Meeting the needs of audiences, growing the base of brand lovers
Depending on the specific audience – e.g., the foodies that 24 heures and GA Bonn have selected versus the young parents selected by L’Avenir or teachers for Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, there are five possible jobs to be done:
1. Help me/us (i.e., the audience from the audience’s perspective, not the journalist’s) be an informed person in the place that I/we live
2. Help me/us have the confidence that you – my/our news enterprise – are holding the powerful accountable in the place that I/we live (including, more than ever before, the powerful in the private sector)
3. Help me/us solve the necessities of my/our lives in the place that I/we live (necessities such as housing, transportation, health (COVID!!), jobs and more)
4. Help me/us enhance the quality of my/our lives in the place that I/we live (food, drink, sport, outdoor enjoyment/exploration and so much more)
5. Help me/we work with one another in the place we live together to make that place better
Once audienceS are chosen, there are tools such as design thinking that Schwäbisch Media and Nordkurier have used to put the audience at the center of their work. And, then, as is happening now at Diario de Navarra and Kölner Stadt Anzeiger, journalists and editors can (and must) practice audienceS-first storytelling through using checklists and templated formats that remind the newsroom to make sure each piece of content is clear about (1) what audience is this for and what jobs are we doing for them; (2) have we made the best use of different media (e.g., photo, video, audio, text, graphics) for this particular story and audience; and, (3) have we chosen which platforms and time of day are best to distribute the story.
With clarity about when, where and how to serve selected audienceS, TS Europe teams move beyond the language and habits of print. For example, Vocento reshaped their approach to Vivir by moving away from a print section “addressing topics of general interest” to reimagining Vivir as a “meeting point for improving the day-to-day life of our readers”. To make that vision of a daily ‘meeting point’ come alive, Vocento’s Vivir team have shifted away from a print-centric organization to digital-first production based on daily topic/story briefings that use data to inspire the story selections needed to connect audiences to one another.
Building dashboards, building funnels
With these actions, TSE participants position themselves to take advantage of the funnel needed to convert random visitors into habitual – and paying – loyalists. Some TSE teams, like the Irish Examiner, Tiroler Tageszeitung, and mediotejo.net, are launching digital subscriptions and membership offerings. Mediotejo negotiated benefits such as discounts with local companies to enhance their membership offering. All, though, must build and deliver value to different audienceS so that those readers/users move down the funnel, subscribe and – because of how new subs are onboarded and continue to experience real value – stay as subscribers. The journey, then, is defined by ‘get them to come’, ‘get them to stay’, ‘get them to pay’, and ‘get them to stay paying’. SMK Petit Press for example, have revamped their newsletter strategy through the kind of engagement that gets readers to stay and increases the odds of getting them to pay. Meanwhile, Tiroler Tageszeitung have challenged their newsroom to create quizzes that increase audience engagement while also using a newsletter about food to the same purpose.
Successfully guiding users through this journey requires the newsroom to have – and use – data. Just as in Round 1 of TSEurope, the Round 2 Blue and Orange teams are discovering that the data in the newsroom needs to be simple to understand and use. Yes, news enterprises also need more complex data for skilled analysts. But complicated data – no matter how filled with insights – go unused in newsrooms.
Our TSE partner Google News Initiative’s News Consumer Insights can help any newsroom get started with data right now. Then, each news group can tailor and adjust to fit their own unique market contexts and chosen audienceS. Google also has created a Reader Revenue Playbook rich with practical insights and advice. Taking advantage of it, though, demands the new skills, workflows, funnels and data – it demands actual change in behaviors and skills. Which is why TSE teams are lucky to have both the challenge-centric design of Table Stakes combined with these powerful aids from GNI.
Among other things, by the way, Google’s News Consumer Insights reinforce the good news from audience and digital transformation: empirical evidence that the value of a digital subscriber far outweighs the value of advertising from random visitors. Local news does not scale. That means local news – even across a multi-local enterprise such as NOZ – cannot sustain themselves through an ad-driven revenue model.
In addition to having the courage to make these changes, legacy news enterprises must find the time and resources required. The single best path to do so is identifying and stopping activities that simply do not have the value required for journalistic and financial sustainability. Habits, after all, are long standing affairs. And the habits of print-centric approaches are filled with resource-wasting activities to be stopped and replaced with the audienceS-first, digital efforts required for success. Zeitungsverlag Waiblingen quickly found – and stopped – a range of print-centric work steps so that they could redirect the freed-up resources to serving audienceS in better ways.
Performance is the primary objective of change, not change. TSE teams set specific, measurable, aggressive yet achievable, relevant and time bound goals that answer, “What would success look like for the challenges at hand?” They then identify near term goals (“early wins”) to build energy and momentum because folks throughout the news enterprise from the C-suite to the front lines gain confidence and enthusiasm when they see better results in such things as the number of newsletter sign ups, greater time of engagement, digital subscriptions, new revenue, lower churn, and new skills, workflows and actionable data.
These hallmark successes inspire everyone in Table Stakes Europe – and, importantly, the teams share and encourage their colleagues to replicate what each are doing and learning. With the addition of the Blue and Orange groups to the inaugural Green group from Round 1 of TSE, a community has emerged – a community of folks and news enterprises who are making the best future for audienceS and journalism happen together right now.