Editors-in-chief of three newspapers brought an editorial perspective to the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in Amsterdam last week. During Chief editors panel: Leading newsrooms in a subscribers-first business, attendees heard how leaders at three publications are approaching their decisions. 

A mobile-first mindset 

Kamran Ullah of De Telegraaf in Netherlands explained that the 130-year-old print newspaper has a digitally oriented newsroom: “With all digital subscriptions, we saw declining numbers in the past. But since the pandemic we were growing again. So what did we change? We became mobile-first.”

While “we are still a print newsroom,” the stories are published online first, and then appear in the print newspaper. Focusing on a subscription model has transformed the newsroom into a digital company with a print product, Ullah said.

“When you’re writing a story, what do you have in mind? Is it the vision of the next day’s paper, page number three in your head, or is it more of an online article on a mobile phone? That’s the difference. We’re telling our reporters: don’t write articles anymore, but tell stories.”

In touch with the dashboard

Aligning journalists with the subscription mission can be challenging. However, Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland has achieved that, according to Aleksandra Sobczak, and she noted the importance of creating journalism instead of focusing on analytics.

“For years I’ve been spending at least an hour daily analysing data and it was fruitful. I needed to do it, but at some point, I realised that I’m losing my time, and it’s just not getting more fruitful,” she said.  “I’m losing the time that I need to work with journalists and editors on quality, on real journalism, on creating stories, on doing things that no AI will ever do for you.” 

Fernando Belzunce Gutirrez of Vocento in Spain agreed and said the story of his newsroom is similar: “Some years ago, we were more focused on algorithms than on readers, and this has happened in many media around the world,” he said. His view and approach have changed over time. “I think that the most important thing for our newsrooms is to be focused on quality, not on volume.” 

Sobczak said journalists who focus on the dashboard are not making better stories because of it: “It’s not that the most successful journalists really spend hours looking at the dashboard. They just want to know something. They check it, but then they go back to their real job, which is talking to people and bringing stories,” Sobczak said.

Using tools to improve engagement 

Marketing, branding, and engagement tools can play a role in helping newsrooms understand what readers want.

“What is better now is that you actually can see what your subscribers laugh at,” Sobczak said, noting that a print newspaper did not allow such insight. “Now you can see what keeps people with you.”

For Gutirrez, what’s missing is content marketing: “Maybe 10 years ago we were not working on the brand, and now we have started to do that in a very important way, but we lack the marketing of the content, for example. The way we produce the content, I think that we are very modest and we need to shout more.”

Gazeta Wyborcza has been doing just that. Sobczak said its mission of supporting democracy plays into revenue generation because its readers want the same thing. “The strongest core of [our readers] are very devoted to democracy. And democracy is something we are standing for,” she said.

“We thought it was a given that democracy is something that everybody has. But then we had a government for eight years that was demolishing democratic institutions and these were really hard times for us. But it brought our readers closer to us. They see that we share their values, and they are ready to support and fight for us.”

Ullah provided perspective from a country that, despite its right-wing government, has a relatively high trust in the media: “People are coming to us directly or via social media. So, I’m a bit more optimistic because, in the world of AI-generated content and misinformation, I think people will have to go to reliable sources more and more. We are the lucky ones because we are reliable news sources with trusted journalists. Real people making stories.”

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