Amalie Nash, lead of the INMA Newsroom Transformation Initiative, often hears news companies talk about transformation simply as becoming more digital first. 

She sees it differently: “I really think of it as how do we become more relevant with readers?”

Leading a discussion of several news media leaders during the Newsroom Transformation Workshop on the final day of the INMA World Congress of News Media in London, Nash shared the seven lessons she thinks media companies should focus on when thinking about newsroom transformation:

1. Instilling transformation into the newsroom culture.

2. Building data-driven newsrooms.

3. Going beyond metrics to understand news audiences.

4. Adapting journalism to what the audience wants.

5. Reorganising newsrooms regularly to position them for the future.

6. Focusing lesson print.

7. Getting newsrooms into the business of news.

She invited newsroom executives to share their experiences on the topic with workshop attendees:

The Times and The Sunday Times

Edward Roussel, head of digital at The Times and The Sunday Times, finds the word transformation “problematic.”

The newsroom is undergoing significant changes in the next few months.

“Our goal is not newsroom transformation,” Roussel said. “The goal we’re trying to solve is discoverability. We create 1,250 stories a week. How do we make the variety of content we produce feel discoverable? So when I talk newsroom transformation, it’s really in the context of how we solve a very specific problem for customers.”

The five “discovery challenges” Roussel and his team made were: 

• How to improve search: The goal is to make an infinite scroll a finite scroll.

• How to surface topics readers love: Balance, Roussel said. “Reuters study shows people are shutting off from news — 40% of adults are curbing their consumption of news. Our journalism can’t just be outrage and fury. It’s also got to be inspiration and fantasy.”

• How to display their best journalism: “Homepages for news companies are problematic, really really wrong,” he said. He believes homepages should feature top stories with a high degree of customisation for other content. 

• How to serve two reader types: “There are people who have come to digital from print and some people who have never had to use paper in their life. How do we reconcile? I think you have to learn one way or the other.” Their choice: learning toward digital natives.

• How to expand internationally: Half of digital readers are outside the UK.

The team will measure success in two categories: how good a job they’re doing in bringing in new readers and how good a job they’re doing at engaging subscribers.

Newsday 

Rochelle Bishop Sheets, managing editor at Newsday in the United States, is big on conducting content audits, she told workshop attendees. And she prefers the word “evolve” over “transformation.”

In addition to regular content audits, her team takes an annual look at initiatives that will help growth. A recent such look led to the creation of seven new positions in the newsroom: two reporters and an editor on the Long Island new desk, two members of the investigations team, one reporter covering the state capital, and one covering regional travel.

How do they get newsroom buy-in on changes?

“One good day: Prove what you’re saying is true,” Sheets said. “We added a person to real estate coverage and grew 53% more conversions in year-on-year growth. We present that every time we talk to editors about initiatives — we are growing and here’s why.”

In addition, they have a data-fluent newsroom focused on just two KPIs: paths to conversion and overall index score. 

“The matrix for news gives our editors and reporters story scoring. This is the wow factor. They get a really clear understanding of how their stories are performing.”

Grupo RBS

This “very traditional newspaper” — with a strong radio brand — is celebrating its 60th anniversary this month. And its biggest recent initiative has been to consolidate into one Web site and one newsroom, integrating 200 people.

“We’ve learned a lot,” said Rodrigo Muzell, the Brazilian media company’s digital journalist manager. “You must have full transparency for the editorial team. Journalists have to understand the business strategy.”

Two recent transformation projects are prioritising short videos and livestreaming.

“We’re doing more short videos than we thought we would — more than 2,000 on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube is hitting 17 million views per month,” Muzell said. “That’s 99% more than before our project, and it’s profitable so far. 

The team has learned a lot from these projects: that exclusive teams are essential, that content — not the channel — is key, and to pay attention to revenue.

“We don’t do projects that don’t generate revenue,” he said.

FT Strategies

Two years ago, FT Strategies undertook a project with the Knight Lab called Next Generation News. The team’s mission was to look at what the news business will look like in 2030 and undercovered emerging trends from 18- to 24-year-olds, spending a few hours in the homes of this young audience in Nigeria, India, and the United States.

They found four distinct audience behaviours: they can transition to dissimilar tasks while on their phones, they seek sources of information from people or influencers they know, they rely on the personal opinions of others to understand the news, they have sophisticated digital search skills to help them manage information overload.

From these four behaviours, the team examined the gap between what Financial Times is providing this audience and what they want.

“Their ideal news experience is a trusted source they know and they can trust,” Lambertini said. “Sadly, this doesn’t mean a reputable brand. It can mean a creator, a podcast, a community in WhatsApp. The definition of trusted source has greatly expanded. They prefer humans rather than brands.”

This age group also wants actionability with their news content — ”something they can do with the news,” Lambertini said. Their desired storytelling format is convenient, information dense, informal, with multiple formats they can passively consume.

This information should help news companies think about where they may be over- or under-indexing, he said. For example, young people like to listen or talk about a new product or experience, often on WhatsApp or in semin-private communities.

“We’re not suggesting news products throw everything they have away. We are suggesting they experiment.”

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