The Dagens Nyheter team plans its strategy as if print did not exist. Martin Jönsson, head of editorial development at the company, told INMA why at the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in February.

“We believe the digital applications suffered severely from adapting to the print distribution, which actually has nothing to do with journalism.”

Print is simply a production and delivery method, and trying to make that model work for digital is not the way to go, he said.

“We’re saying it’s journalism that matters,” Jönsson said. “We focus on when to publish, and whether we could optimise or maximise the reach about that story.”

The team looks at a lot of heat maps that tell them when users are logged in, as well as the highest traffic and engagement times on the Web site and app.

“When do we have the longest reading times? When do we get the most social traffic? And so on. And then we try to optimise the time,” Jönsson explained. “When should this be published?

For example, a story might run in the Sunday print newspaper, but publish online on Thursday evening.

“We’re trying to optimise the platforms and the content to make sure that we reach as many as possible, and make sure they engage as much as possible with the content. It was driven by getting a sustainable entity of the operation and not be dictated by print. Because print is packaging. Print is not what we do. Journalism is what we do.”

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