Amedia has some 800,000 subscribers across all of its titles in Norway. However, more than half of these subscribers – 405,000 – are over the age of 60. And 95,000 of them are older than 80, which is about the same as the total number of their subscribers young than 40.
This is not a new issue, and Amedia has been struggling with the situation since 2018.
The team led a number of pilot projects based on the new insights, “but after a while people kind of fell into old habits and went back to pleasing older readers,” said Amedia Editorial Developer Janne Rygh, who discussed a radical experiment publishing company tried with two of its newspapers during an Innovate Local webinar at the end of January.
See also: Norway’s Amedia finds success with bold experiment focusing only on young readers
After her presentation, Rygh answered several questions for us and the live webinar audience. Here’s a lightly edited version of the conversation.
WAN-IFRA Innovate Local: What has the reaction among journalists been? Are they happy with the new way of working?
Janne Rygh: At Romerikes Blad a lot of the journalists are quite young, so it’s been quite easy for the editor to make these changes. At Halden Arbeiderblad, I think only two out of the 10 journalists are under 40, and there were more questions around writing just for young people.
We’re not saying that we’re not supposed to write about old people’s homes or things like that, but we need to do it in a way that also resonates with young people. ‘How can I write this story in a way that also attracts younger readers?’ ‘How can I make this story that is important?’ because we need to be doing our job as journalists and we need to cover the entire community. So that’s been one of the most important challenges for these two newsrooms.”
Tell us a bit more about the newsroom workshops.
“The workshops were initially to determine what kinds of topics to focus on, based on analysis of the target group. After that, the journalists got to wish for which area they wanted to cover, if they had maybe had a previous beat which was no longer going to be covered as much. So, in a nutshell the newsroom redefined what they were covering and who was doing what.”
“In a second big workshop, journalists were challenged to ask themselves how they could reach more readers under 40 every day. Like; ‘I’m going to ask myself, why is this relevant to Anne, 35? And these are three of the changes I’m going to make compared to how I work today.
We then recently had a big workshop where we asked, out of all the things we said in September that we were going to do, what has been successful?’ So it’s about working around constant change in the newsroom.”
How important was it to change the KPIs on the dashboard?
“That’s a very good question. I think it’s possible to have growth in this age group without changing. But the fact that we did change now makes it a lot easier to see what young audience is really like and what they really want to read.”
“Also, it’s impossible to have green numbers if you don’t pay attention to what young people want to read. So I think at least during the period where newsrooms needed to work on changing the way they work, it was very important. I don’t know if it’s important to only focus on these numbers forever and ever.”
Would it make sense to just have part of the newsroom working on topics or working with a young reader focus and not all of it and so that others do other things? Or do you think it’s really about having a one, like you say, a North Star?
This is exactly what Romerikes Blad did for a couple of years before they started this project.
In other words, there was a group of four journalists working in the newsroom working specifically towards this target group. That worked to some degree.
But then to make all the front page editors, all the journalists in all the different fields and all the different departments actually focus on the same thing – that’s a different thing. I think to achieve real results, you need to actually make it a newsroom thing rather than just a two-three people thing.”
Did the average subscriber age go down in total / online? If so, by how much?
“My analytics colleague took a look at average ages of new subscribers after we started the project, and we see that it’s gone down slightly. They are not huge differences, since we’ve been good at selling to the under-40 for some time. The main challenge has rather been to get them to read enough to then keep running their subscription.”
Is the “younger content” also affecting advertising – e.g. turnover, types of advertisers, sales organisation, and which ad products sell best?
This is the answer from our VP Ad Sales: “Unfortunately, nothing has changed much commercially in the short term. In advertising, we’re ruled by the laws of large numbers. Even if Romerikes Blad is successful in attracting younger readers, the numbers are small in terms of Amedia as a whole. So for ad sales centrally we’re not seeing any effect from this project.”
Are there plans for building new services, beyond traditional content, for the new target group, e.g. workplace (ads and editorial) and real estate advertising / content?
“We’re continuously working to create new services for the new target group, and our entire development team are looking at new products, services and content that speaks even better to this group.
In addition, there are several newspapers now joining the project, which will hopefully mean we’ll learn even more about what they want and how they want to consume it.”
What are the Key Success Factors for someone wanting to copy your concept?
The most important thing is to have an editor-in-chief who really believes in the project and is able to generate enthusiasm in the team. That is essential in order to drive change in the organisation.
Also, the numbers are important in order to find out what young people want, since they are actually “deciding” which content we should prioritise, and, importantly, not prioritise.
To dare to live in the question: “How can we make this story / idea / concept relevant for our target group?” and make the choice based on new insights – not based on what has worked in the past.
WAN-IFRA Members can replay the webinar on our Knowledge Hub.
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