Hi there.

Last week I was in Helsinki for INMA’s Media Innovation Week. So much was packed into such a short time that it’s hard to even start telling you the big takeaways, but I want to try. 

Before I do that, I want to say how nice it was to meet some of you in person. Working remotely, I spend a lot of time on Zoom, so getting to spend a few days hearing your stories, challenges, and seeing you in the flesh felt like a treat. Thank you to those who said hi and spent some time with me. I appreciate it. 

In today’s newsletter. I’ll take you through the big themes of the conference, as presented by INMA’s Robert Whitehead, with some product and tech context. I also want to share a little of the presentation I made on missing audiences, which pulls from some of the work we did at the CEO offsite in Vail in August. 

As always, please shout if you have feedback, stories, or just want to chat. You can get me at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org.

Thanks, Jodie

The big lessons from Media Innovation Week in Helsinki

It’s so hard to summarise numerous presentation, case studies, and deep discussions but Robert Whitehead, our Digital Platforms Initiate head and all around event INMA superstar, pulled some exceptionally important lessons. I’ve taken his big themes and added some context from a product and tech perspective. Here goes …

Brand, brand, brand. This keeps coming up time and time again. It’s highly correlated to the next point but needs to stand alone because we need to invest in our brand experience and continue to do so. This means what our brand looks like, communicating our purpose, what our journalism delivers, why we can be trusted, and, essential to you, excellent product and tech.

Direct, direct, direct. I will wax lyrical about this as long as you will listen. The changes coming with AI give consumers many many more reasons to stay within tech’s walled gardens. The experiences there excel. It’s easy and fast for consumers to get what they want, and AI puts this on steroids. We must focus now to build direct audiences (not traffic). I believe this is so vitally important, I am putting together a virtual master class on this topic early next year. Keep an eye out for details soon.

Me, me, me. Me being the customer. Our users expect personalisation, and we really need to give it to them. This is not about maximising for conversions or clicks. This is about engagement. They will not do the work to find the content they are interested in. See point above. This is essential. And if you need inspiration, check out this article from Karl Oskar Teien on what they have learned in their personalisation journey at Aftenposten in Norway. 

People, people, people. Internally, we need to bring everyone onto the same page. We need goals that we can all articulate, understand, and work towards. If you need help getting your newsroom on board, talk to my brilliant colleague Amalie Nash, who lives and breathes this for the INMA Newsroom Transformation Initiative. 

Them, them, them. You know your audience, but do you know who is missing? Two groups feature highly in that category: Gen Z and news outsiders. There will be others because you can’t be all things to all people. But you can adapt your content or create new products/brands. Below are some ways to understand who they are and to reach them.

Us, us, us. I come away from every INMA conference thrilled by how much we talk and share best practices. We need to take it one step further to meet the AI wave that is coming. That means alliances, working with third parties (for technology, ad sales, bundling, Big Tech laws). I’ll be spending some time looking at how we can do that with LLMs. Keep an eye out for an upcoming piece on the AI middle men that are trying to find the solution to permission, attribution, and monetisation of our content through LLMs.

Date for the dairy: Executive study tour October 21-25

While I truly love speaking to colleagues in the news industry about the above, we can’t only look within. The news industry is not at the cutting edge of innovation, so we need to look to those who are for lessons learnt. That is why I have put together an exceptional programme to go deep into different formats for engagement, how to best use AI, work with LLMs, and a glimpse into the new hardware that is taking California by storm. 

Check out the agenda here. This is a small group so we can have detailed closed-door discussions, but we have a couple of places left so if you are interested, get in touch.

Frameworks for reaching your “missing” audiences

At the Media Innovation Week in Helsinki, I gave a presentation on missing audiences. We often talk about reaching young audiences, with good reason, but it’s more than that. 

Just go back to this Webinar on the work IN/LAB in Norway is doing to reach news outsiders (not the same as news avoiders). I brainstormed this with some colleagues at INMA, and we realised we had some good resources at hand, one of which I will go deep on today.

To meet new audiences, we can look to Ansoff’s Market Diversification model, which we have adapted for the media industry. If you want to reach new audiences, you can effectively do one of two things: Repurpose exciting products or create new products.

Take a look at the chart below, which gives more information:

The second thing we can do is look at the user needs model pioneers by Smartocto. We talk about this a lot so I won’t go into detail. The one thing to note here is that we are often great at “update me” but missing that audiences often have other needs such as “inspire me” and “divert me.” See below for more:

The third thing is to look at the value drivers that bring our audience to our products. And that’s what I want to dive into in more detail here. 

In August at our CEO roundtable, we asked a group of executives to look at the main value drivers for news: Why do readers visit us? The answers were pretty much as you would expect with trust, quality, and unique journalism ranking highly. 

We asked a different group to imagine that they were TikTok executives and asked them why users came to them.

You can see the results plotted on the charts below. Note the value drivers for TikTok (which we are using as a proxy for all social media) are entirely different. At the top are the things I suspect you, assuming you are a product and/or tech person, likely look at: UX, personalisation, and (perhaps leaning more towards the newsroom) personal relevance.

Now if we map traditional news against the social media experience, you’ll note that there are huge gaps. I will take the liberty of suggesting social media is better overall at meeting user needs. Which means that we have some gaps to close — some significant gaps. 

These speak to many of the things I have mentioned above: personalisation, relevance, clear UX.

By focusing on these value drivers, it may just help us bring in audiences we are currently missing.  

One last note, which is related but something we haven’t talked about much in this initiative: creators/influencers. These people are highly successful at engaging audiences on one or more platforms. If you look at stats from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, you’ll see many consumers get their news from these creators. On some platforms and in some age groups, consumers get more of their news from them. 

Maybe it’s time we look at working together. Is there a way we can bring them into our stable, offering frameworks and financial rewards or sharing while giving them creative licence in the same way record labels manage talent?

I would have thought it feasible: Give them freedom to be creative while working behind the scenes to promote them, pair them up with the right people, and provide the right support. It’s certainly something to consider.

About this newsletter 

Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product and Tech Initiative. Jodie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global news media product.

This newsletter is a public face of the Product and Tech Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.

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