In my last newsletter, I highlighted the ways The New York Times and The Washington Post are putting audience at the center of their elections coverage. Underpinning that discussion was the central role of the audience team.

I wanted to spend more time on audience teams today, delving into how they’re organised at The Times and The Post, what makes them successful and what others can learn from them.   

Audience teams, especially initially, were often thought of as a service desk: They’re the ones who optimise a story with links, add a search-friendly headline and chatter, and distribute that story across social channels and the homepage. 

But the audience team is at the core of any successful newsroom. They understand readers and trends, they have expertise on data, they’re key to the organisation’s off-platform strategy, and so much more. Without an effective audience team, it’s hard to know what your readers want and how to reach them.

So let’s get into the work of audience teams. And tell me about yours: amalie.nash@inma.org. 

Amalie

P.S.: Have you downloaded my report Strategies for Continuously Transforming Your Newsroom? It focuses on how to position your newsroom for the future and how to instill the concept of transformation into the muscle memory of your organisation.

More than just “the promotion team”

Candace Mitchell, assignment editor for SEO at The Washington Post, said she sees the audience team’s role in two ways:

“The more traditional way that folks look at audience editors is helping to optimise coverage, helping to frame coverage, and then helping to distribute stories on platform to reach the widest audience possible and meeting them where they are. But for me, the other half — and perhaps the most important half — is being researchers and the eyes and ears of the audience.”

At both The New York Times and The Washington Post, the audience teams are embedded in the various desks of the newsroom.

Hannah Poferl, assistant managing editor, chief data officer, and head of audience at The Times, said its audience team includes a multitude of roles, including editorial search, technical search, social, community, social visuals, data science, and platform partnerships. 

“All of this work is happening at the center of the newsroom,” Poferl said.     

The New York Times audience team has a five-pronged approach:

• Platforms and products: Continue to use the largest platforms and its own product portfolio to drive readers to news.

• C2C: Cultivate the existing audience as a channel to bring in new readers.

• Coverage: Find opportunities to expand coverage that aligns with The Times’ mission and meets new reader needs.

• Access rules: Allow newer readers to sample coverage while increasing success at the point of conversion.

• Direct relationships: Drive anonymous reader registration to build their habit and propensity to subscribe.

“We put a lot of effort into trying to understand our subscribers and non-subscribers,” Poferl said. “We try to encourage and cultivate behaviours like sharing content.”

Mitchell, of The Post, said she wants her audience team focused on the front-end of story planning, not just when stories are ready to be distributed.

“We have the ability to make content extremely accessible,” she said. 

Poferl said her audience team spends the bulk of its time at the center of the Venn diagram below:

An audience editor’s responsibilities include, according to Poferl:

• Supply the desk with the most important performance each day, week, and month.

• Suggest stories and formats to the desk that better meet reader demand.

• Interpret data and signals to shape how to frame and present stories both on and off platforms.

• Partner with product to find ways to build features that bolster reach.

As for metrics, Poferl shared: “We’ve studied what metrics matter and found that the metric menu is large for all of our segments. We look at a combination of off-platform reach and rank, trending topics, share rates, active days, active time, total time, return and more.”

Poferl also said the audience team focuses on contextualising data. For her, that often means looking at the “floor” — the bottom percentile and how it’s shifting over time — more than the top or “ceiling.”

The floor is calculated by looking at users and pageviews aggregated by channel and over time — daily, weekly, monthly — and then zeroing in on the bottom 25th percentile. 

“We look to see if it’s moving over time,” Poferl said. “When Meta moved away from news, for example, we saw the floor drop. It was not huge for us, but it was meaningful and it’s where we started to see the change.”

Poferl attributes The Times’ audience success to numerous factors, including the way the team is organised in the newsroom to its shared mission with the newsroom desks.

Do you have audience team success stories? E-mail me: amalie.nash@inma.org.

5 lessons on building audience from The Fix

Emma Löfgren, editor at The Local and contributor at The Fix, just published five key  insights she learned when interviewing leading experts for her limited-run course on how newsrooms can build, grow, and serve their audience.

It’s great advice for audience teams and newsrooms as a whole:

1. You can’t build without tools. 

To leverage the power of your audience, your newsroom needs the equipment to handle it. That goes for your staff structure as well as work processes and content management systems. 

Löfgren interviewed Dmitry Shishkin, CEO of Ringier Media International, whose advice was, “If you have 10 people and one of them resigns, hire an audience person.” 

He also made the same point audience experts on my recent Webinar made, which is that newsrooms need audience experts who are fluent in both data and journalism. It won’t work if you simply hire someone who is deeply knowledgeable in metrics if they don’t also understand editorial processes.

2. Social media doesn’t have to change your journalism.

Listening to your audience and responding to its needs is far more important than what app or platform you use. 

Löfgren talked to Johanna Rüdiger, who manages social media strategy for Deutsche Welle’s culture and documentary department, and was reminded that social media platforms are a means, not an end. And by focusing on how to best serve your audience, you’ll be less constricted and reliant upon social media channels as your delivery mechanisms.

3. Learn about the audience you don’t have.

It’s not enough to simply understand your current audience and why people are reading your content — what do you know about people who don’t? 

Trusting News founder Joy Mayer told Löfgren she wishes journalists would more regularly sit down with audiences they don’t reach to ask why those people don’t feel well-served by their journalism. Here’s a good piece from the Local Media Association on the power of a listening tour.

4. Service does not equal subservience.

Changing the way you conduct your journalism by listening to and taking your audience seriously helps build trust. But changing your fundamental editorial values to pander to the mood of individual members of the audience isn’t trustworthy. 

Löfgren gleaned that insight from Julia Agha, CEO of Alkompis, Sweden’s largest news site for Arabic-speakers. Löfgren said that’s the tough part about audience-building we don’t talk about enough.

5. Don’t skimp. 

If you’re going to do something, don’t do it half-heartedly. 

Tav Klitgaard, CEO of Danish scale-up Zetland, told Löfgren too many media entrepreneurs start small and try to keep their budget low — and end up with a product that isn’t as good as it could be or doesn’t consider the full package of the news experience. 

“If you want to create a habit among people, you can’t do that with a Substack newsletter that comes once a month,” he told her. 

What resonates with you in these lessons? E-mail me: amalie.nash@inma.org. 

Mark your calendars 

Upcoming INMA events that shouldn’t be missed:

• August 28: My next Webinar, Newsroom Transformation Success Stories: Learn How Two Companies Made Lasting Change, features Liv Solli Okkenhaug, head of breaking news at Bergens Tidende, and Catherine Vieira, executive editor at Valor Econômico. They’ll talk about how they changed their cultures and improved results when they enacted audience growth initiatives. Register now.

• September 23-27: INMA’s next in-person event, Media Innovation Week, takes place in Helsinki, Finland. I’ll be there! And we’ll talk about future-proofing sustainable news brands in the sustainability capital of Europe. Learn more and register.

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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