Here’s a bold idea: How do you restructure your newsroom to get double-digit growth in subscriptions? How about handing responsibility for the goal to your editor-in-chief?

New Zealand Media and Entertainment wanted “double-digit revenue and volume growth year on year” and was puzzling over how to achieve that, Carolyn Adams, NZME’s general manager for subscriber revenue, told attendees at the recent INMA Media Subscriptions Summit. 

The news brand had a cross-functional team from marketing, editorial, engineering, and product working on subscriptions growth, but there was no single point of decision making. So, they started examining how the ownership of digital subscriptions was managed within the business and considering alternatives.

They decided that, “well, actually if the product is the journalism, then the newsroom should own it. They should own digital subs,” Adams said.

That meant a mind shift — and also a physical shift. 

“I sit in the middle of the newsroom, next to all of the managing editors,” Adams said. “We took my team out of digital into the newsroom. We took brand marketing out of the marketing division into the newsroom.

“We created this new newsroom that has editorial, digital subscription growth teams, and brand marketing,” who own the subscriptions strategy, she said, with the product engineering and data teams enabling the strategy. 

How does this translate into action, in practice? 

The newsroom used to send her team a daily e-mail listing all the stories that are coming. Now, Adams attends editorial leadership meetings. 

“Ultimately, it’s given us some speed and flexibility because there is just so much more knowledge because you are right there and you are part of the conversations.” 

NZME also had its most successful sales campaign for Black Friday at the end of last year, Adams said. 

“We would talk about the numbers every morning. We had the percentage of the goal that we were at. We were able to make some really quick decisions about things that we wanted to do, stories that were going really well, and then we could just move them on the homepage and put them in a curated spot.” 

This previously would have entailed chains of e-mails and a process of obtaining newsroom buy-in, she said. “But (now), it’s a one-minute conversation on something we can try because (the editor) is sitting right next to me.” 

The restructuring has also led to faster experimentation. 

“Once, we saw some of our evergreen content working really well. It’s a quick conversation in the morning of, oh, did you see how many conversions you got off that article? Oh yeah, let’s do that. Oh I’ll just republish it now … and five minutes later it’s republished. So, it’s just the speed to market.”

The ⁠desk gets a bonus for hitting monthly subscription targets.

“Ultimately, it is about finding that double-digit revenue growth and double-digit volume growth for the year,” she said.

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