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.

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.

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