Like many legacy media brands, Norway’s Aftenposten has been challenged in recent years by the stagnating growth of its digital subscriptions.

During a recent Webinar presented by INMA’s Newsroom Transformation Initiative, Kristin Kornberg, Aftenposten’s head of insight and content development, explained how the company began reevaluating its measurement of journalistic success and created a new approach for attracting users.  

“For years, we relied heavily on our reputation and gut feeling to define journalistic success,” Kornberg explained.  “We really believed that we produced excellent journalism. But if so, why did subscriptions and usage stall?”

The leadership team realised a lack of clear goals and consistent metrics was a significant part of the problem. Different departments used different measures of success, and with numerous parameters available, any journalist could find a data point to justify the value of their story.

So two years ago, Aftenposten set out to change that.

Engagement as a new North Star

The newspaper introduced a single, overarching goal for the entire newsroom: increase the number of daily engaged subscribers.

“We emphasised that increased usage leads to increased loyalty,” said Kornberg, “and so creating high-quality journalism that engages more subscribers needed to be our main focus.”

To introduce this new goal, the newsroom implemented a framework that set clear expectations. Each department and team received weekly targets for how many stories should surpass a specific engagement threshold — defined as being read by more than 15,000 subscribers.

This metric was chosen because stories that met that level of readership consistently performed well across Aftenposten’s target audience.

Importantly, Aftenposten didn’t just count clicks. To avoid the trap of clickbait journalism, Kornberg said the engagement metric required readers to consume at least 20% of an article. Supporting metrics tracked how many people read most of the article — or exited early —  which provided valuable insights into reader interest and content quality.

Engaging the right audience

At the same time, the newsroom refined its understanding of who it was writing for.

A new target audience was defined: well-educated men and women between the ages of 30 and 55. Analysis showed clear patterns in this group’s preferences. For example, while both men and women in this demographic paid attention to major news stories, there were distinct differences in how deeply they engaged with certain topics.

“Few women are deeply interested in all stories about Trump,” Kornberg explained. “They want a quick overview, but many are interested in human stories. So if we try to explain Trump through the lens of people they can identify with — like his female voters — that resonates better with younger women.”

Such an insight prompted a shift in editorial perspective. Departments worked to balance their article offerings and tailor storytelling techniques to better engage women in their target age group. Every team could now track how their stories performed across audience segments, making it easier to evaluate what was working — and what wasn’t.

“Our concern is that if we fail to reach a broad population, we fail our societal mission. And if we fail to connect with our entire target group, we reduce our chances of growth,” Kornberg said.

Departments can now track how stories are performing across different segments of the target audience, and Kornberg said that 15,000 is a sort of magic number for them: “If a story is read by that many, it usually has a good CTR in all segments of the target audience.”

After two years of working on this, Aftenposten is seeing results, Kornberg said: “We have increased the number of daily engaged subscribers and our private market subscriptions, and we are also engaging more of our subscribers that come to our site.”

About one year ago, only 74% of young female visitors found something they wanted to read or listen to on Aftenposten’s sites, she said; today that number has grown to 80%.

More than just numbers

Despite the new focus on engagement data, Aftenposten never abandoned its journalistic soul. “Just talking about numbers — that’s not very inspiring,” Kornberg admitted.

Every department was still expected to set journalistic goals, such as including investigative or agenda-setting stories. Teams were encouraged to experiment with formats and storytelling techniques that resonated with their key audience segments, especially young women.

Newsroom leaders started asking new types of questions: Do we have a person who can carry this story? Is there something surprising or unexpected here?

“If we can have these kinds of conversations, we don’t need to focus on whether the story will reach 15,000 readers or not,” Kornberg said. “These discussions teach us that if we solve the storytelling, we’ll find the right angle.”  

Even stories about seemingly low-engagement topics — like the Climate Summit in Baku or the exploitation of women in Nigeria — managed to break past the 15,000-reader threshold, thanks to compelling narratives and thoughtful angles, she said.

The work isn’t finished; Aftenposten is now exploring the use of language models to classify stories and better understand how they connect with readers. The goal is to continually evolve — to create journalism that not only informs but also resonates deeply with the people it aims to serve.

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