Going back in time five years and hearing you can get COVID from touching a newspaper changed a lot for media companies.

At that point, Nation Publishers Limited in Malawi had been putting their content on their Web site for about 20 years. But it had simply been an exact digital version of their print newspaper with all the same stories, ads, everything. 

When NPL began seeing major changes in consumer behaviours and preferences, they knew they too had to change.

“What happened at that time was most of our readers subscribed to the e-paper,” Alfred Ntonga, deputy CEO, told attendees of INMA’s recent Africa Newsroom Transformation Summit.

Post-pandemic changes in audience behaviour

Before COVID, their primary source of revenue came from street sales of the newspaper in three major cities. 

“But after COVID, our No. 1 channel is subscription,” Ntonga said. “People are subscribing, and very few copies are sold on the street.”

NPL wasn’t just feeling the crunch from COVID, but they were also experiencing a challenging economic climate. The economy in Malawi was growing less than 2% a year even when their population was growing more than 2%.

Younger generations also were not reading the physical newspaper, instead consuming news through their phones. 

Historically, their print publication accounted for 95% of their revenue and 5% came from digital, but this was rapidly changing. More than 60% of the population was under 35, and they weren’t interested in reading the printed newspaper. On top of that, ink and other materials were going up in price.

“So all that makes now the need to think differently and reach our audiences differently,” Ntonga said.

The newsroom goes digital-first

NPL started thinking digital-first but with one big caveat: The company had to use the same team that produces the printed newspapers to generate content for digital.

“Our concept or idea of digital first was that every reporter when they are covering a function, first of all they should contribute to the digital platform,” Ntonga said. “It became a bit challenging in the sense that the same reporter was being asked to follow different stories for the hard copy.”

The digital world got tricky when they quickly learned that once a story ran online, it needed constant updating. So the digital-first mentality started to mean that a digital story needed to simply cover the who, what, where, when, why and how. 

“We said, ‘Do it quickly and post it on the digital platforms,’” Ntonga said.

Then if a reporter needed to report on that same story for print, they had to find a new angle, give the story richer context, and give good background information. When appropriate, they would include things like expert commentary or feedback from their audience.

“So in other words, the story that we are going to see the following day should be analytical, interpretive, or investigative,” Ntonga said. “You have to use advanced, journalistic skills to enrich your story.”

This “news you can use” concept included stories like how to manage working from home and ensure productivity doesn’t suffer. They then applied that logic for most stories they published to the paper.

“The whole idea is it’s not just informing you what is happening around the world, but we are trying to give you something else that can help you live your day-to-day lives better,” Ntonga said.

Building the journalism team to meet the need

This structure worked but posed a challenge with creating digital content. NPL only had a small reach in three of Malawi’s 28 districts. The number of reporters in the newsroom was dictating how many stories they could generate online.

“We felt that was not good enough, but how could we increase content within our means?” Ntonga said.

They took an unconventional approach that made a lot of sense to something that was unique to Malawi. NPL had a deep pool of journalists who had trained through a popular local journalism course. Many of them don’t end up working on newspapers or in radio but become teachers or engage in other professions. They asked these journalists to become correspondents from their locations.

“The whole idea was to increase our presence online,” Ntonga said. 

And it worked. They quickly grew to cover 14 of 28 districts. NPL is pushing that number further this election year to get correspondents in all districts.

“We would like to believe that all the districts are interested to have their story told,” Ntonga said.

Changes and 3 priorities

This transformation has brought many changes:

• NPL is now looking at their digital growth and determining how to capitalise on digital advertising opportunities and ways to monetise social media.

• The demand from their audience for real-time news is providing new opportunities for them to look at sponsoring posts and building brand partnerships on platforms like X. 

• Digital ads are proving more valuable in targeting specific demos. NPL is seeing that despite women making up the majority of Malawi’s population, men are a vast majority on their digital platform. “The opportunity here is to come up with content that attracts more women,” Ntonga said. 

• The e-paper is bringing in good revenue with its 33,000+ subscribers. 

• NPL also has monetised their Web site with sidebar ads and rate specials for advertisers.

• The news company also recently bought equipment to live stream special events and is looking next to use it for sponsored content. 

• They plan to monetise the QR code that sends people to their Web site and are looking at ways to incorporate their advertisers.

• They see their user base building on their YouTube channel and see it as a host site for documentaries in the future. 

• They are in the beginning stages of developing an AI policy. “We thought such kind of change has to come in a manner that we can control and not in a manner that can overcome us,” Ntonga said.

The publisher’s three main priorities for the moment though are:

1. Prioritising revenue streams based on audience insights. 

2. Strengthening partnerships with advertisers, brands, and local influencers.

3. Leveraging AI and data analytics for targeted advertising.

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