The background to Sanoma’s recent digital success may surprise the news industry: We found the key to the future when we looked at our past.

No, we didn’t shift back to a print operation. But we learned how to organise our work to be as customer-focused as possible — and we learned how to talk about our stories.

In the old days, we had a shared language in the newsroom: people knew what a brief, a spread, or a monster package was. And importantly, they knew what kind of effort each story needed from writers, editors, photographers, graphic designers, etc. They also knew how those stories should be prioritised.

Then our readers shifted online, and we went there with them.

We had new ways of storytelling to play with and real-time analytics to guide us. Our audience seemed to love our big, engaging, flashy stories. And you couldn’t fill up the Internet no matter how hard you tried.

So the reasonable conclusion for our editors was to commission more of those stories. What those big, paywalled articles did well was convert casual readers into subscribers.

But as time passed, we noticed that the top of our funnel was drying up. We didn’t have enough new non-subscribers to convert. Also, our perceived value as a news source was going down, according to studies.

We needed to:

• Expand our coverage.
• Do it with our existing resources.
• Improve conversion.

It became obvious we needed to understand where our resources were used and how well our stories performed in relation to the effort we put into them.

That is, we had to ask ourselves: “Where do we get the most bang for the buck?”

Creating a new metric

The solution was to categorise our output — by length, photo and graphics effort, lead time, and so on. And most importantly, by customer demand.

We learned how well small news articles performed compared to big feature stories. We saw where most of our audience stopped reading if a text was too long.

And by looking back to our print past, we understood that our newsroom needed a common language.

The result was SML, or the standardised content categories Small, Medium and Large (later also XL and XXL). The letters are used throughout the news operation, from morning meetings to our content delivery system and analytics.

Now, everyone in the newsroom knows the basic requirements for an S, M, or L story. By commissioning more S stories, we’ve offered broader and quicker news coverage without needing more resources.

On the other hand, XL and XXL stories — and the corresponding effort — are carefully pitched. Editors pick them with a clear goal of reaching conversion targets. We’ve reduced the amount of waste — the term from lean philosophy used here to mean poorly performing but resource-intensive stories.

Changing conversations

The editorial discussion has changed as well. As before, we talk about journalism and what we should cover. But much more clearly than before, we can see if supply met demand and if our efforts served our audience well.

Can we cover new beats, even with short articles? Do we have subjects that our readers want us to cover with more attention and deeper stories?

The biggest realisation we’ve had is simple but quite surprising: the value of plain news.

Even if a single, simple piece of news doesn’t top our charts, the combined value of our news coverage has been made visible by SML. Small articles are our most important source of site visits and the key to filling the subscription funnel.

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