How to measure engagement. Strategies for editorial metrics. A/B testing headlines. Delivering journalism that brings readers back. Those were among the themes most applicable to the Newsroom Transformation Initiative during an action-packed week in Amsterdam for INMA’s Media Subscriptions Summit.

The conference centered on strategies and tactics for growing and retaining subscribers, but speaker after speaker echoed the same theme: It comes down to the journalism we deliver.

So let’s dig into what we heard and how others can use these learnings.

As always, send me your thoughts, too: amalie.nash@inma.org. 

Amalie

Engagement is key to acquiring, retaining subscribers

During a stop on the two-day INMA study tour in Amsterdam, we took a deep dive into DPG Media’s editorial metrics — a sophisticated framework that involves measuring long- and short-term metrics and establishing engagement scores for content.

Pieter Verbeke, editorial insights and growth, later told me that DPG developed the KPI framework last year and has been implementing it since January. He said journalists are being trained by local editorial analysts, who are embedded in the newsroom.

The new KPIs, he told the study tour, are designed to be more actionable.

“Data in the newsroom can be overwhelming,” Verbeke said. “Insights need to be actionable and guide our editorial teams in making changes.”

Here’s how DPG now looks at content metrics:

This system ensures teams are analysing metrics live, daily, and longer term — and that metrics are paired with specific roles. I love this framework for a lot of reasons and chief among them is the ability to make metrics more actionable.

Verbeke offered an example: 60% of DPG’s users land on the homepage, but 25% of those users never click through to anything. 

“Context mix drives bounce rate,” Verbeke said. “To reduce the homepage bounce rate, we need to improve the context mix.”

Bounce rate improvement is a key operational goal for homepage editors. They’ve focused on reducing the bounce rate by adopting a broadcast schedule, guided by understanding which user needs perform better at which times of day, as well as other data points.

Verbeke said the editorial analysts are currently working on developing and improving dashboards to make them more role-specific. 

“Our team is co-responsible for setting goals for editorial teams and monitoring them subsequently,” he said. “We have been using goals in the newsroom for most metrics for a couple of years now: users, qualitative users, pageviews, article pageviews, video views, loyal readers, new paygate subscriptions … . What we are now trying to do is to create more focus by giving each role only two or three metrics to follow.”

DPG also has established engagement scores for content, understanding engagement is key to driving subscription sales and reducing churn. Anyone who has spent time with data analytics knows there’s no perfect engagement metric — so DPG crafted one of its own.

The engagement score is built upon nine underlying metrics under the categories of frequency of visits, volume per visiting day, and depth of product use. Understanding engagement allows the editorial teams to focus on strategies for improving it, Verbeke said.

Verbeke ended his talk by offering five pieces of advice for others:

1. Embrace data in the newsroom.

2. Create a framework for editorial metrics.

3. Pair metrics to different editorial roles.

4. Identify actionable, live metrics.

5. Improve these metrics to improve subscriptions.

I later asked Verbeke what advice he’d give to newsrooms that are looking to improve their editorial metrics. Here’s what he said:

“The first step is to look at all the metrics that are currently being reported and ask yourself the question: What’s the relationship between them? Are they leading or lagging? Should we look at it live or less frequently? And which roles have the most impact on the live leading metrics on a daily basis?”

How do you measure engagement? I’d love to know: amalie.nash@inma.org.

4 takeaways for newsrooms from the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit  

I’m still distilling all I heard at the Media Subscriptions Summit, but these lessons related to newsroom transformation resonated with me:

Create relationships with readers using newsletters.

Several media organisations touched on newsletters as a key product for reaching and engaging readers. 

I loved the example of The Edinburgh Minute, the brainchild of Michael MacLeod. Launched in May 2023, it has grown to more than 20,000 subscribers because MacLeod recognised a need in the community and is meeting it. 

“It’s all word of mouth, no marketing,” he said of the newsletter’s growth. “I wanted to make it easier for people to find local news.” 

MacLeod spends his days scouring hundreds of sites looking for links to offer his readers and sends it by 7 a.m. to ensure subscribers can get the news to start their days. “In the creator economy, we can all work together,” he said. 

Younger people care more about people than brands.

This quote came from Kamran Ullah, editor-in-chief of De Telegraaf, during the chief editors’ panel: “Our reporters are brands by themselves. We need to invest in new faces.” 

And build those brands, he said, by showcasing them on podcasts and daily news programmes broadcast on platforms like YouTube. 

De Telegraaf’s YouTube channel has 600K subscribers, and for many younger people, De Telegraaf isn’t a newspaper — it’s a news YouTube channel. Another sentiment from Ullah that stuck with me: “Reporters don’t write articles anymore — they tell stories.”

Archived content is a gold mine.

So many news brands have rich archives of content that are essentially sitting dormant now. It’s time to leverage those to drive subscriptions, said Darya Ushakova, chief marketing officer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

By making a concerted effort to paywall and market the archives, the Inquirer began generating 800 new starts monthly. 

“Do it, do it now,” Ushakova told the audience. “This is basically incremental.” 

She said it’s primarily a search play but an effective one. Another piece of great advice from Ushakova: “Don’t be shy about asking people to pay. Journalism is valuable.”

Negative headlines get more clicks, but less reading time.

Smartocto, an editorial analytics system, has been working with DPG Media to A/B test headlines to determine what can make them click-worthy.

What they found: Headlines with negative words tend to get more clicks than positive ones. However, those stories also tended to get less reading time. 

Another interesting finding: Adding the names of ordinary people to headlines led to more clicks. “You should always name people in the headline,” said Roy Wassink, insights manager at DPG Media.

What did you take away from the summit? Email me: amalie.nash@inma.org. 

Mark your calendars 

Upcoming INMA events that shouldn’t be missed:

• March 26: “Subscription Masters Series: Dow Jones,” presented by Sheryn Weiss, chief marketing officer, Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. Part of the Subscription Masters series from INMA’s Readers First Initiative. Register now.

• April 23: “Tracking Success: A Demo of Politiken’s Data Insights Dashboard,” presented by Troels Behrendt Jørgensen, digital director, and Mikkel Stampe Davidsen, developer/data scientist/analyst, Politiken. Part of the Newsroom Transformation Initiative. Register now.

• May 19-23: INMA’s World Congress of News Media in New York City. Join me for a workshop on user needs on May 23. 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.

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