What does the newsroom at a 116-year-old news brand know about being digital first?

Our study tour group as part of the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in Toronto got a look inside Le Devoir, which has been charging for digital content since 1997 and gets two-thirds of its revenue from subscribers and donations.

“We used to say digital first, digital first. And then we switched the language and I started to say print last. And when you say print last, print at the end of the run, print at the last of our reflection, then digital will come first,” CEO Brian Myles told our group.

But it was not as easy as simply uttering those words, as Le Devoir Director of Marketing and Business Intelligence Marianne Gélinas pointed out. The data and analytics team had to ensure the newsroom saw them as trusted counsellors who could point the way forward.

“We had to gain trust,” Gélinas said. “We didn’t want to change how the journalists perceive themselves. We didn’t want to impose any subject or way of covering the stories for them. We wanted to give them tools to optimise their work. So this takes time. And this is what we achieved many, many years later.

“Let’s say three years ago it was not like that. It was really just, ‘How did your story perform?’ This is your data and that’s it. We were able to evolve from how you performed to how you could have performed better. And now we’re at, ‘This is what you should do in order to speak to your relevant audience and really make sure that it resonates with them.’” 

A key step was sharing the three-year strategic plan with all employees to create clear and common objectives with the newsroom. KPI reports are now shared regularly — as visually appealing graphics.

“There’s nothing more boring than a spreadsheet,” Myles said. 

Gélinas added: “What I learned is if I just send a report with beautiful graphs, people still won’t understand the depth of it and won’t really understand what it means for them. So, at least on a monthly basis, I meet with everyone in the newsroom and I explain what happened last month, what are the prospects for next month, and what are the main goals for the month. And then we have super long Q and A’s. We always try to have this conversation face to face and to understand what would mitigate the newsroom’s intent to follow these rules and these recommendations.”

Reporters want to be read and they want to matter, so they pay attention to metrics, Myles said. “The key takeaways are: If you want to onboard a newsroom, of course, listen to the fears, the concerns that they might have. But be bold! Don’t back down! Double down! Go for it!” 

One interesting outcome: Le Devoir discovered shorter content generally created stronger engagement with its audience.

“In a quality paper, reporters tend to associate quality with quantity. The more words in the story, the better the story is, right?” Myles said. “And when you tell them that people have an average attention time of 30-60 seconds, they want to die.”

But “we didn’t come up to the newsroom and say, now all of your texts are going to be this number of characters. No, no, no,” Gélinas said. Instead, content was analysed according to categories such as topics, beats, hard news, soft news, general information, and inspirational information.

“We still see a lot of potential in long reads. And we have adapted our mobile app to add a tab to put our long reads on them because they do deserve a space and they are read.”

What about journalists who insist digital metrics don’t apply to print? 

“Don’t let them tell you it’s different for print,” Myles said. “We don’t have metrics for print. But, when we look at it and when we do surveys from time to time, we discover that there is not much of a difference between the interest of the print and the digital reader.”

Print subscribers are far more loyal than digital subscribers, so they tend to evolve with your publication, especially as attention spans grow shorter, Gélinas said.

What is Le Devoir focused on now? 

“In June 2023, we decided that every single one of our strategies would be directed toward one goal: Optimise direct traffic,” Gélinas said. 

“We cannot do anything about algorithms. We don’t control them. We don’t control distribution. We don’t control the habits that are changing heavily. One thing we do control is relationships. Distribution can change overnight, but relationships don’t.”

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Banner photo: Adobe Stock By KanawatTH.

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