As Finland’s leading regional and local publisher with over 75 news titles, Media Group Keskisuomalainen has long prioritised mobile-first strategies to enhance customer experience and engagement.

However, ensuring consistent quality across multiple titles, each with its own strong brand, becomes increasingly challenging in terms of maintaining a consistent user experience and technical management.

To overcome this challenge, we set ambitious goals for our mobile application project in 2024. Our primary aim was to deliver high-quality content to the readers of our most popular newspapers through easily accessible mobile apps, while simplifying the technical management.

How could this goal be achieved?

Getting everyone involved

As a first step, we wanted everyone in our company to get involved in the project. We arranged internal workshops with key stakeholders (journalists as well as B2B and B2C sales), launched early MVP versions for testing and gathered feedback, and tried to crystallise each newspaper’s visual identity for mobile.

With these practices, we were able to define our primary goals for our new mobile applications. They included:

• Combining news streams, rich story formats, ads, and e-paper into one app for both iOS and Android.
• Seamless user experience and efficient performance across different devices.
• Strengthening customer retention.
• Fostering a digital reading routine for subscribers.
• Attracting younger audiences with a competitive product.
• Accelerating the growth of digital subscriptions.
• Providing a premium advertising environment.
• Cross-publishing capabilities: We wanted to make sure that any story could be published on another app.

We quickly learned the key requirement for us was finding a platform that would give us an opportunity to offer the same capabilities to all our news brands. We decided to explore Flutter, a UI toolkit from Google.

It promised a more streamlined development process for both iOS and Android platforms. With its single codebase and rich set of pre-designed widgets, Flutter offered significant advantages in terms of speed, maintenance, and consistency.

Project execution

After we found the right tools for the job, the results exceeded our expectations. Within the first three months of 2024, the team launched a total of 19 news apps, and by the end of the year, a total of 22 apps were available. There were 367,000 app downloads during 2024.

One year later, we have published 40 apps on both iOS and Android. Despite the rapid expansion, a lean maintenance team of only two individuals manage the apps efficiently.

We were impressed by the key KPIs, which showed that the new apps were warmly welcomed by our subscribers: Time spent in apps increased by 20%, and the average number of articles read on apps improved by 17% compared to the Web site.

Crucially, we have also been able to preserve each newspaper’s unique brand identity in these mobile applications. The strategic use of innovative technology helped optimise resource allocation, while user-friendly design and functionality were key drivers of rapid adoption.

From our perspective, the key recommendation for other media companies is that it is always better for strategic goals to drive technological choices rather than the other way around. With the right choices, the speed of development has supported both maintaining the journalistic standards of our local media titles and our business operations.

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