Newsrooms use KPIs to create change — to understand their audiences and make decisions about their journalism so they can evolve in the right direction.

But if your strategy is fully focused on attracting a younger audience, can you rely on the data from your audience as a whole? Or, is there a risk you will listen to the wrong people?

These thoughts troubled me a year ago when we were about to relaunch our editorial strategy for our local newsrooms at NTM in Sweden. We were hoping to reach a younger audience for some years, but we did not see the acceleration in change we needed. Even though the strategy was clear, people offered advice, and we held workshops, we did not grow as fast as we wanted to.

At the same time, just west of Sweden in Norway, the same kind of thoughts had been on the minds of the management team at Amedia. This is also a local news conglomerate but of a much bigger size. It is also well known for driving digital change at the forefront of the industry.

The team struggled with the same challenges of reaching the next generation of subscribers. It had more subscribers older than 80 versus younger than 40 despite many years of strategic initiatives. Amedia’s solution for speeding up the change in 2024 was to test a new data-related approach.

“If we are to succeed in truly reaching younger audiences, at a time when competition for their time is brutally tough, we must dare to be innovative and try things that may be far-fetched for some. And, we must dare to have a relentless target group focus,” said Markus Rask Jensen, director of news at Amedia.

Amedia chose to solely track audience engagement from subscribers under 40 years of age. This was to give the newsrooms a clearer picture on the target group’s interests and create focus, all aligned with the idea that you become what you measure.

“This experiment is one of several projects where we are trying to do just that,” Jensen said. “The results have been so promising that we are now further developing and building on the pilot project.”

Amedia is now scaling up and expanding the test to more newsrooms. “The test has been performed at two newsrooms but we have developed this further, and plan to offer a variant for all our titles now,” Jensen said.

At NTM, we spent late 2024 creating alignment within the local newsrooms’ management teams with the idea of getting a younger audience into sharper focus.

We rolled out our refreshed editorial strategy based upon three pillars:

• Put a super focus on the “young” age group of 30-39 years old.
• Look at seven prioritised topics distilled through a deep analysis of 85,000 articles.
• Implement the user needs model to ensure value creation for the paying subscriber.

We had deep discussions with editors-in-chief and local newsroom management on how to measure engagement and ended up with this model we are implementing now.

We decided to have only two main KPIs the newsrooms need to focus on:

1. The number of digital subscriptions within the younger audience.
2. An engagement KPI of “article views within the target group.”

These are simple and based upon the good old pageview metric, but:

• This is stripped down to only measuring pageviews from subscribers below the age of 50.
• It only counts articles with longer reading time than five seconds to eliminate non-valued articles that make the audience bounce.
• It solely measures their own production, so it doesn’t take into account engagement with news agencies articles.

Also, when setting goals for the newsroom as a whole on this KPI, we are not including front-page traffic but solely engagement in articles.

All this distillation of metrics is just to make sure we actually measure and steer the editorial strategy toward what it aims to achieve: creating value for the younger, local audience driven by our own journalism.

Of course, one big challenge with this kind of maneuver is that your numbers become significantly smaller. That is a problem, especially for smaller newsrooms with a smaller number of young subscribers.

To track engagement in real time, we had to change the time setting in our dashboards for “real time” to the last 30 minutes. This is not optimal when it comes to decision making regarding headlines and presentation of the front page, but it is necessary to get numbers high enough to navigate from at this moment.

All in all, the low numbers of engagement are, of course, hurtful when you are used to larger volumes. However, it’s also a much-needed wake-up call to start focusing solely on the target group.

If you’ve read this far, you probably have one thought on your mind: How on earth do they get hold of the first-party data on age to separate the different user IDs in the data?

The simple answer is we actually demand the social security number when signing up for a paid subscription. Luckily for us, the Swedes are used to accepting that kind of sign-up process. If your country’s citizens are not used to that, this way of setting up KPIs is a challenge, of course.

But, if so, it’s probably a good idea to begin these discussions within your company’s leadership team on how to implement this kind of information collection as a part of your data strategy over time. Just keep on listening to all those grumpy old men and women collected in your audience data will not help you grow your younger subscriber base over time.

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