Resources & Tools

What can your organisation learn from Table Stakes? Whether or not you have participated in Table Stakes Europe, there are many valuable insights that you can learn from and apply to your company.

 

Report: Change agents: Using audience needs to unlock digital transformation

This report highlights 12 case studies based on the 2023 round of Table Stakes Europe. The first part of the report explores the strategies the companies used to make rapid progress with their transformation, win over colleagues, and spread new ways of working across their organisations. The second part looks at how the publishers realigned their journalism to meet the needs and interests of specific audiences, allowing them to build stronger relationships with their readers and engage targeted audience groups. 

Best Practice Showcase

 

A new online resource with case studies that highlight various topics around digital transformation and audience focused workflows. The Best Practice Showcase is available in English, French, German and Spanish and is searchable by geography, theme, or news product type. More cases will continue to be added throughout the year!

Report: Building and engaging specific audiences

This report is a collection of 15 case studies highlighting winning engagement strategies used when creating new editorial products for specific audience categories. Their stories include guidelines to any publisher thinking of embracing an audiences-first mindset: how to identify the most promising audience categories – some of whom are defined by geography, others by interests, and some by current life situation – and what products and methods work best to serve them. 

Report: Understanding your audience in a deeper way

The case studies from the second year of TSE show how publishers can start moving from covering general news to targeting specific audiences, what criteria they should use when selecting those audiences, how publishers should approach maintaining and updating newsroom skills and motivation that make change possible, and why it's crucial to keep your eyes on diversity when seeking new audiences.

Report: Becoming audiences first

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This is the story of 14 publishers who over 12 months built new skills and capabilities in putting audiences-first, focusing on reader revenue as the essential path to sustainability, adopting funnel discipline and embedding goals, metrics and analytics in newsrooms, publishing across the day, using newsletters to engage and convert customers, and a great deal more.

Get the report in your preferred language below!

 

 8 Tips for Publishing Companies 

from Table Stakes Coach Stéphane Mayoux

  1. Identify and appoint digital specialists/contact people in every team.

  2. Make sure your challenge is first supported by pioneers/people who volunteer to carry it out.

  3. Analyse successes and learnings before expanding them, and then share results widely.

  4. Invite mini-publisher teams to explain their project to other teams. Peer-to-peer works best. 

  5. Data teams must not be seen as suppliers only. They have to be treated as involved partners in digital transformation.

  6. Never give up. A good idea has three phases: first, it is rejected, then discussed, and finally accepted as obvious. 

  7. Always work across silos: communicate without prejudice, without criticism, and with resilience.

  8. Offering clear objectives, properly timed skill support and TRUST to front-line teams pays off.

 
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Additional Resources

 

Google News Initiative Toolbox

  • News Consumer Insights (NCI)

    • News Consumer Insights (NCI) helps publishers make data-driven business decisions that increase profitability and build deeper relationships with their readers. Through a data framework and decision engine designed exclusively for News Publishers, NCI provides key insights and actionable recommendations based on a publisher’s Google Analytics account to help grow Reader engagement and Reader revenue.

  • Subscribe with Google

    • Subscribe with Google is a platform designed to help publishers drive conversions and engage existing subscribers across Google and the web.

  • The Google News Initiative (GNI) Reader Revenue Playbook

    • The Google News Initiative (GNI) Reader Revenue Playbook and its accompanying exercises are meant to help news organisations address the strategic and tactical decisions required for building and strengthening a digital reader revenue model. The playbook, exercises, and workshops are in- formed by insights from more than 50 publishers around the world and represent their collective expertise, as well as that of the expert authors in the GNI team.

 
 

Table Stakes Europe Round 1 Interim Impact Report - July 2020

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This report, published halfway through the first round of the programme, highlights some of the great progress and success of a selection of teams involved in Round 1 of Table Stakes Europe. We have focused on five cases from four different countries: Germany, France, Spain, and UK.

 
 

betternews.org: A resource for news innovators to learn, plan & do.

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Better News is a project of the American Press Institute and the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It is designed to serve three purposes: (1) to collect, curate and operate as a central repository of best practices in the craft of journalism and the challenge of journalism sustainability; (2) to provide strategic guidance on the most important issues facing news organizations, particularly local, regional and metropolitan newspapers; and (3) to share important lessons from participants of the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative.

 

Table Stakes: A Manual for Getting in the Game of News Paperback 

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Paperback, November 2017

by Douglas K. Smith (Author), Quentin Hope (Author), Tim Griggs (Author)