In August 2019, Nerid Høiness (31) went to the island Koh Phangan in Thailand to work as an assistant yoga teacher. It was a step toward her dream of starting her own yoga centre in Norway. Her mother, Ellen Høiness, was in contact with her almost every day and was glad her daughter had found her path in life.

One day Nerid called her mother to tell her she had found the man of her dreams in Thailand: a Japanese man called Hiro. Shortly after that phone call, Nerid started to change. She stopped calling her mum. She stopped posting pictures on Instagram. She did not work. She did not come home for Christmas as planned.

In January 2020, Ellen got a phone call from the priest in her hometown and immediately understood what was about to hit her: Her only child, Nerid, was found dead in the Laotian jungle. The police believed she was murdered.

Two months later Hiro was officially wanted by Interpol.

VG’s goal

When we contacted Ellen Høiness for the first time, in October 2021, Nerid’s boyfriend was still wanted and on the run. After speaking to her, the journalistic goal became clear to us: Find Hiro and to figure out why Nerid suddenly changed the last months she was alive.

While working on the story, Hiro was arrested. We travelled to Thailand and talked to sources who knew Hiro well, and we discovered unpublished audio recordings of Nerid while she was still alive. That’s when we knew we had a unique story to tell.

Because our podcast documentaries are published on podme, a podcast app where you need to subscribe to listen to the content, we wanted to create a longread piece of content in addition to the podcast to make sure we were reaching as many people as possible with our journalism.

The challenge

The podcast, which was our main product, is a five-part documentary series lasting about two hours in total.

How could we convert the content to fit a totally different platform? And how could we still get people to subscribe to the podcast app even though we published the story open and free for everyone online?

Differentiating the published content

The key was to give the different audiences — the listeners and the readers — different content. The listeners got the “premium” edition of the story. If you listened to the podcast, you got a much more detailed description of the story. There are some scenes in the podcast that last for several minutes told with a few sentences in the longread.

We also deliberately excluded some of the characters in the podcast from the longread. In addition to giving the listeners something more than the readers, we also knew that listeners’ attention spans are much longer than the online readers.

Withholding information

As noted, we got hold of some unknown audio recordings of Nerid while working on this story. It was 30 minutes that Nerid herself recorded — only eight weeks before she was found dead — talking about her boyfriend, Hiro, and their relationship.

The recordings answered the main question in the podcast: What happened to Nerid?

To make sure VG’s consumers did not only read the article online, we withheld a lot of the content in these sound recordings. We only published a few sentences so that VG’s users still had an incentive to listen to the podcast. By giving the users some of the content, but not all, the written article also worked as a teaser to the podcast.

Using visuals

The one thing you cannot provide podcast listeners is something to look at. Therefore, we concentrated on giving the online readers a lot of visual information by using many pictures and videos to tell the story. We also wanted the online longread to complement the podcast so listeners could turn to this format for relevant maps, images, and videos.

From the beginning of our work, we made sure to collect visual material, even though we were not sure about how we would use it in the end.

After deciding to make a longread of the story we also actively referred to the visual material in the written article several times in the podcast. One example is when we were allowed inside the bungalow where Nerid and Hiro lived together. Nobody had been inside since they lived there, not even the police, but the owner tore down the door for us. This is an important scene in the podcast, and in the end we said, “If you want to look at pictures and videos inside the bungalow, go to vg.no/nerid.”

The results

We were concerned the article and podcast would cannibalise each other. But by concentrating on the benefits of each platform, we believe the two products ended up working together and gave consumers a really good story when combined.

“What happened to Nerid?” quickly became VGs most streamed podcast documentary and was a huge hit among podme subscribers. The online article about Nerid was read by 1.6 million viewers, making it one of the most read articles at VG this year.

By writing an online longread we reached a much larger audience and were able to offer subscribers the premium, in-depth podcast production.

Timing wise, we chose an audio-first strategy by initially releasing the first two podcast episodes. Then, five days later, we published the longread online. This introduced the story of Nerid to a larger audience, which significantly boosted the podcast figures.

What now?

We have not been in touch with Hiro directly. One of Hiros close friends showed us some messages that he sent in March 2020, two months after Nerid was found dead. In those messages, Hiro refuses to have anything to do with Nerid’s death.

In August 2022, the police in Laos confirmed the investigation is finished and Hiro is in custody. Nerid’s family is still waiting for a trial.

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