2025 is about quality audiences, quality metrics

By Amalie Nash

INMA

Denver, Colorado, United States

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Thanks to those who have completed this survey to give me input and direction on the Newsroom Transformation Initiative this year. If you haven’t had a chance to fill it out, I’d love it if you did.

Among respondents so far, the top-rated topic to delve into is creating an audience-centric content strategy. That’s followed by setting KPIs or measures of success and how to know what to do more of and what to stop doing.

In this newsletter, we’ll talk more about audience editors, strategies, and more. You’ll find advice and takeaways from two leading experts in the field: Tess Jeffers, The Wall Street Journal’s director of audience analytics, and Fernanda Braune Brackenrich, U.S. editor for audience engagement at the Financial Times.

Read on, and we’ll tackle much more in future newsletters and programming. In the meantime, please keep the feedback coming: amalie.nash@inma.org

Amalie

Focus on quality audiences, says WSJ’s audience analytics director

News organisations are braced for many challenges this year. 

“Changes to search, in particular, will become a major grievance for a news industry that has already lost social traffic and fears a further decline in visibility as AI interfaces start to generate ‘story like’ answers to news queries,” according to the Reuters Institute

How should news leaders respond? Where should they dedicate resources?

I posted those questions to Tess Jeffers, The Wall Street Journal’s director of audience analytics. Jeffers leads a team of data scientists and data analysts responsible for content, product, and audience insights.

Here’s what she had to say:

Q: Where do you think audience editors should put their focus in 2025?

A: Focus on your audience! Audience editors are in a prime position to identify what audiences need and how your newsroom can best serve them. 

Q: With search and social declining, should audience teams still spend a lot of time on those efforts? What social platforms do you think have the most potential right now?

A: “Success” on search and social media won't look the same in 2025 as it did in 2021. Publishers might have had massive reach, but meaningful engagement was low and unsustainable, so I’d argue things weren’t quite as rosy as they appeared in the traffic report. 

In 2025, I believe search and social are still excellent platforms for reaching audiences, especially when you focus on quality audiences — those with an affinity for your brand and likely to become long-term subscribers. Any platform where we can find and engage with audiences interested in money, business, and power hold potential, including LinkedIn, Reddit, WhatsApp, or TikTok.  

Q: Where does AI fit into the audience conversation?

A: Talking about AI is essential. Two things are happening at the same time: No. 1, readers are overwhelmed (increasing numbers of readers identify as “news avoiders”) and No. 2, “content” is getting cheaper and easier to create, thanks to generative AI (pejoratively nicknamed “AI slop”). 

I’m bullish on how this plays out in the long term for trusted brands like The Wall Street Journal. Readers will need trusted, fair, and balanced brands and will seek out truly exclusive and distinctive journalism that they can’t get anywhere else. 

Q: How important do you think direct traffic is? What is your best advice for cultivating more direct relationships with readers?

A: GenAI threatens to further disintermediate news publishers and their audiences. But our customer survey data tells us that readers come to us for our editorial judgment and authority. That’s our direct audience.

One way we’re cultivating our direct relationship with readers is by upping the interest and appeal on our homepage and apps. Readers who come to us directly should always find something they want to engage with and come back for.  

Q: What are the key metrics you’re monitoring this year and why?

A: We’re focusing on the quality of our traffic, in addition to quantity. Key metrics for us include subscriber engagement and new subscriber conversion rates. 

What advice would you add to this? I’d love to hear it: amalie.nash@inma.org.

Get specific with data insights, says Financial Times audience engagement editor 

A not-insignificant part of audience work is ensuring newsrooms relate to and understand their audiences, Fernanda Braune Brackenrich, U.S. editor for audience engagement at the Financial Times, told Nieman Lab in a recent piece.

Another important thing for journalists to keep in mind, she said: “Journalists have assumptions about their readers. One of them that is very common is that they think their readers are as obsessed with the news cycle as they are. They cannot fathom why that explainer — with ‘such basic questions’ — did so well.”

With that in mind, here’s what she advised:

Q: Where do you think audience editors should put their focus in 2025?

A: The question I’ve been asking myself every day is: How can my team be the most useful to the newsroom and advocate for our readers needs? The answer to this is that we need to be very aware of live data insights and communicating them to the newsroom. 

This year, my team will focus more on communicating specific data insights to individual news desks instead of giving general insights to the whole newsroom. The more targeted we are, the more impactful we can be.  

Audience teams should make sure that:

  • They have access to the data they need.

  • They are trained to find this data.

  • They are communicating it effectively to whoever needs to hear it.

Q: With search and social declining, should audience teams still spend a lot of time on those efforts? What social platforms do you think have the most potential right now?

A: At the FT, we havent seen a decline in search traffic, so we still spend a considerable amount of time focusing on SEO. With social media, we have seen a decline in traffic, but engagement on the channels remains high, and we think of them as a window into the best of the FT. 

In terms of social channels with great potential, I would highlight Bluesky. It’s still early stages, but we’ve seen substantial follower growth on the FT channel since the U.S. election, and some of our posts there have performed even better for engagement (reactions) than on X. So this is a space we are watching with some excitement.

And there is also LinkedIn, which has been somewhat underutilised by publishers, but at the FT it has become one of the biggest drivers of traffic from the channels.

Q: How important do you think direct traffic is? What is your best advice for cultivating more direct relationships with readers?

A: There are several ways to cultivate a direct relationship with readers:

  • Read the comments section. The FT has a very dynamic comment section, and the audience engagement team constantly observes these discussions to understand what readers care about.

  • Data. Looking at the numbers — weekly, monthly, annually — can give you a really good snapshot of what readers are thinking and what’s attracting them and why.

  • Q&As. At the FT, we host Q&As on ft.com and on social media. The idea here is to gather questions about topics we already know our readers care about and get our journalists to answer them.

Q: What do you see as the role of an audience team member this year?

A: Our role is to make sure that our readers are finding the content that will empower them to live their lives. Here at the FT, I believe that we have this content, so the team is constantly working to make sure that readers find our stories and at the same time we can produce stories that readers will think are useful and important. 

Q: What are the key metrics you’re monitoring this year and why?

A: I’m looking at a combination of metrics: pageviews, quality reads, and time on page, percentage of traffic from search engines and push notifications, ranking of stories on the homepage. It depends on the story and the expectations for it. 

Q: Any other thoughts or advice?

A: I think it’s an exciting time to be in audience engagement. We are experiencing this moment in which readers want more quality content, and they are rewarding the newsrooms that are more in tune with their needs.

Its a time for experimentation and creativity, especially given the advance of AI technologies, and an opportunity to take a step back and evaluate how to better serve our readers. 

What resonates with you in this advice? Let me know: amalie.nash@inma.org.

Mark your calendars

Upcoming INMA events that shouldn’t be missed: 

  • January 29: “Creating a Brand Identity to Stand Out,” an INMA Webinar featuring James Stephens, executive vice president/brand, Monks. How to create a brand identity across news products to stand out amid a sea of diverse content is the focus of this INMA Product & Tech Initiative Webinar. Register now.

  • February 5: “The Playbook for GenAI in the News Media Business,” an INMA Webinar hosted by the Generative AI Initiative. Justin Kosslyn and Lukas Görög, AI consultants, will look at how best to harness this technology, common mistakes made, and insights from working on GenAI solutions worldwide. Register now.

  • February 12: “The Future of Fact-Checking in News Organisations,” an INMA Webinar presented by Aaron Sharockman, executive director at Politifact, and Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. Moderated by me. Register now.

  • February 19: “Subscription Masters,” an INMA Webinar with Robbie Kellman Baxter, author of Forever Transaction, presented by the INMA Readers First Initiative. Register now.

  • March 10-14: INMA Media Subscription Summit Week, an in-person event from March 10-14 in Amsterdam. Discover the subscription windmill to power your media in 2025 through content, product, marketing, and data. Register now

About this newsletter

Today’s newsletter is written by Amalie Nash, based in Denver, Colorado, United States, and lead for the INMA Newsroom Transformation Initiative. Amalie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of bringing newsrooms into the business of news.

This newsletter is a public face of the Newsroom Transformation Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Amalie at amalie.nash@inma.org or connect with her on INMA’s Slack channel with thoughts, suggestions, and questions.

About Amalie Nash

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