Like many news organisations across the world, Aftenposten focused too much of its attention and resources on optimising for just the highly engaged minority, said Karl Oskar Teien, director of product and UX for Aftenposten.

While that may keep current subscribers happy, it won’t lead to growth.

So Aftenposten embarked on an organisation-wide effort to better understand and segment its audience groups. The four key user needs they aimed to solve for:

1. Give me new insights.

2. Help me understand why things happen and how events are connected.

3. Give me a quick overview of the news.

4. Help me understand what is important and what is not.

Eirik Hammersmark Winsnes, commercial director, said data scientists crunched internal data and found clusters of similarities in the total user base. That led to qualitative interviews, which the newsroom took part in. “I strongly recommend that,” he said. “There were a lot of lightbulb moments.”

From that, four distinct audience segments were developed: 

• The analyst: These are more mature men who take a macro view of the news and enjoy deep dives. Their need: Help me get an understanding of how societal questions are connected, both nationally and internationally. 

• The surfer: This is a younger man who surfs between pages, platforms, and brands. He prefers video; efficiency is key. His need: Help me continuously be aware of what’s happening in the world and society. I don’t want to miss out. 

• The empath: These are more mature women who want to be engaged by the news and understand different stories through human experiences. Their need: Help me understand different perspectives and spark my emotions by showing how news events affect people and communities. 

• The sporadic: This is a younger woman who wants the broader view and to understand how she can contribute. She prefers audio and is also looking for advice to make her life better. Her need: Help me with an overview of the most important news so I can contribute with my own reflections in social settings. Also help me make good life decisions. 

“These readers are critical, curious, and knowledgeable,” said Johanne Barman-Jenssen, brand manager for Aftenposten. “Men really want to understand the bigger picture, but women want stories through communities and shared interests.”

Barman-Jenssen said giving the segments names helps team members think about what readers need day-to-day. 

“You have to be in sync with the newsroom,” Teien said. “Systematically put the newsroom as part of the process. Bring editorial judgement into the processes.”

I later asked Teien whether it was easy to get newsroom buy-in. His answer: 

“Our ambition from the very beginning was to share a company-wide understanding of our readers and their needs. The way we made it relevant to everyone, including our journalists, was that we started measuring content performance — quality reads, video/audio completion rates, etc. — in a segmented way, capturing how our journalism resonated with not just the average readers but also with minority reader segments that are key to our growth. 

“Although defining our target audience segments in terms of age and gender at first might seem simplistic, we found that it helped us have a much more informed conversation about how we best ensure that we reach new audiences in ways that fit with their needs and habits.”

The organisation now meets regularly to evaluate the numbers and the extent to which they’ve successfully engaged the four audience segments with any given story, Teien said. He noted the newsroom has changed the way it writes about certain topics, like war and conflict, to make them relevant to audiences other than the older male “analyst.” Typically, they do that by focusing on how war affects families and their daily lives, and less on troop movements and war strategy, Teien said.

New products have been introduced — in conjunction with the newsrooms — to reach the reader segments:

• Morning briefing for “Surfers” with FOMO.

• A substantially strengthened podcast offering and text-to-speech functionality to engage lighter and younger users.

Teien later told me that the new formats tend to be more popular with new readers than with those with established news habits. 

“Perhaps that should not surprise us, but it tends to be the case whether we’re talking about a morning briefing or AI-assisted article versioning ... that we see much higher engagement with those new formats among new subscribers than among those who have well-established ways of consuming the news,” he said.

“So when we evaluate the success of new formats, we focus less on engagement among our existing core users and more on our ability to engage trialists and users with fewer daily visits and articles read.”

Aftenposten also is adjusting its resource allocation in the newsroom to better serve the needs that will help it grow. 

Their advice for other organisations considering focusing on reader segments?

• Know why you are working on defining your target audience and how you will put it to use.

• Redefining a target audience will only lead to growth if you act on your newfound insights.

• For substantial effect, you must dare to change the heart of the engine: production and distribution of your journalism.

“Create definitions that help you classify and quantify content performance and audience reach consistently, and ensure that it becomes a lens of analysis available to all departments across the organisation [not something only used in product, commercial, or newsroom],” Teien told me, adding: “We must acknowledge that we increasingly have to earn readers’ time and attention, not the other way around.”

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