Overview of this campaign
For decades, the South China Morning Post’s youth paper, Young Post, has evolved with Hong Kong’s children and teens. Responding to the shifting digital habits of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, we launched a platform that makes the news interactive and helps youth build meaningful reading habits.
Young Post Club http://youngpostclub.com is a website and app merging our three print publications: Young Post, Young Post Spark and Posties.
As a trusted product in Hong Kong's schools, we are setting a precedent for how educators and parents can harness innovation to help youth engage with current events and develop critical thinking skills. We focused on three objectives.
1. A gamified platform to help readers dive deeper
Young Post Club's reading streaks, quizzes and badges incentivise deeper engagement with the news.
Users set a weekly article-reading goal; meeting it increases their streak and puts them on the leaderboard while building their habit of reading the news. To earn points, they can answer quizzes that ensure they do not just mindlessly scroll through our articles. Digital badges also reward students for completing quizzes and writing submissions that get published in our paper.
2. Personalised learning
Our research highlighted wide disparities in English literacy among Hong Kong's students. By combining our three newspapers into the Young Post Club, we offer online users more freedom to choose the reading level that suits their proficiency. With our vocabulary tool, readers save words from feature stories into a bank for later review. Our team hand-picks and translates each term into Chinese to make our stories more accessible to those building their English fluency.
3. A community, not just a publication
A streamlined submission platform allows users to easily submit their work and notifies them when their writing is published. This makes it more accessible and engaging for readers to debate hot topics, respond to current events and answer creative prompts. This is key in transforming passive consumers into active community members.
Results for this campaign
Young Post Club has helped us reach milestones in engagement, user growth and educational utility, effectively evolving our relationship with Hong Kong’s youth.
This is most apparent in our 10 per cent growth in student subscriptions, despite a somewhat saturated market.
But our new digital features tell a deeper story about how users are interacting with our content. Over 5,000 users have worked on their weekly article-reading goals. Since we launched our streamlined submission tool, about 800 readers have sent us their writing and responses to the news. About 2,000 users have answered our quiz questions, which test their understanding of the articles. Almost 1,000 readers have used our vocabulary tools to understand the news, with the average user saving nine terms for further review. Our features gamify news literacy, motivating students to read regularly and think deeply.
Our connection with youth is also evident in the surge of users submitting their writing to be published. Our new portal transformed what was previously a fluctuating trickle of writers into a consistent stream of over 300 student submissions every week. Our platform is not just a news source; it is also an inclusive space empowering students to share their thoughts.
Working with teachers has also been key to engaging the next generation. A panel of teachers advised us throughout the process of developing Young Post Club. They responded enthusiastically to our new platform because it makes assigned readings feel less like a chore for their students. This has cemented our market dominance as we now cover approximately 70 per cent of Hong Kong's local schools.
The success of our approach has extended beyond the website itself as our Instagram community has grown by nearly 20 per cent compared to last year.
Students have written about how our articles have shifted perspectives or taught something new about the world – showing on a personal level how our new tools are bringing youth closer to the stories that matter.