Redefining Engagement – Gwyn Nissen, Editor-in-Chief at Der Nordschleswiger

Gwyn Nissen Redefining Engagement Blog cover pic

What is important when it comes to audience engagement? 



This week’s Redefining Engagement guest, Gwyn Nissen, editor-in-chief of Der Nordschleswiger, a media brand for the German minority in the southern part of Denmark,  reminds us that engagement is being close to your audience, understanding their needs and how they can actually benefit from engaging. 



Often when we think of engagement, we think about what we can have and not so much what the audience actually gets by contributing and engaging with us. 

 

 

If you are too busy or not a big fan of watching recordings, here is an AI edited transcript made so you can browse at your convenience:



Francesca (00:30) Hello, Gwyn, thank you so much for joining me today to have a little chat about engagement. How are you?



Gwyn (00:37) Pleasure, thank you. I’m very well. Winter’s knocking on its door at the moment but still okay.



Francesca (00:47) I feel the same way. I’ve got all the layers on. We’ve had our first snow for the year today.



Gwyn (00:52) They had their first day of snow somewhere in Denmark as well, but not just here in the south.



Francesca (00:58) Would you mind, Gwyn, introducing yourself and tell me a little bit about your experience so far.



Gwyn (01:05) My name is Gwyn Nissen. The surname is Danish with a traditional S-E-N at the end and my first name Gwyn is Welsh. So I’m from a put together family in Europe, which is very common in Europe. I’m the editor-in-chief of Der Nordschleswiger, which is the media for the German minority in the southern part of Denmark. We’re around 15,000 German speaking people that live on the Danish side of the border to Germany. Where Denmark ends and where Germany starts. We have our own schools, sports clubs, libraries, and yes, our own media as well.



Francesca (01:50) You work with a really interesting community. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m particularly looking forward to this chat because as someone who is also from a put together family, and I’m guessing most of your audiences potentially are from a put together family, we already have a lot in common.

 

Were you working in other kinds of media before you came into this role? How did you end up in this role in the first place?



Gwyn (02:16) Well, actually I started here just after my A levels, 40 years ago. And well, it goes even further back when I was 12, when I wrote my first article for the newspaper then. Later on, I studied at the newspaper, and I was with it for five years. Then I changed to a Danish media, big regional Danish media, which I was with for 21 years and then went into some transport media, European transport media, and then eventually returned back to my home base around 11 years ago.



Francesca (02:59) A beautiful cycle of circles going on there. So many different audiences as well to engage and I’m guessing very different.



Gwyn (03:01) In the end, even though the audience is different, I think some of the work to be done is the same.



Francesca (03:20) Well, that goes straight into my first question for you, which is, what does audience engagement mean to you?



Gwyn (03:30) For me it means being close to your audience and understanding their needs and how they can actually benefit from engaging with you. Very often the engagement is about what can we have, what can we get as a media and not so much what do the audience actually get by contributing and engaging with us.



Francesca (03:56) That’s an interesting one. Has your definition changed at all with time or has it always been like that?



Gwyn (04:04) We’ve always had a very close relationship to our readers because we are this very small community, as it says in minority. And there’s always been a standing joke saying if two people meet in the German minority, the third one is going to be a journalist from Der Nordschleswiger. So we turn up to everything.



But although we think we know our audience because we know many personally, we meet them all over the place within the minority in their roles as chairman or politicians for example. We’re friends with many of them. But what are their needs? On a personal basis? What do they think about the world? Where are they going to be in five years?



That we don’t really know. We meet them on this journalistic basis, but not very often on the personal where we really get to know our audience. So we think we know them, but we don’t really.



Francesca (05:10) That’s a really tough thing to do because you’re working around assumptions of what you already think you know about your audience, but actually I don’t even know what my mum wants half the time or needs. So imagine a much bigger audience that you’re already very close to.



Gwyn (05:21) I think it’s very typical. We’ve grown out of newspaper media. We were a newspaper until three years ago and now we’re digital completely. And you just get things you thought as a journalist, well, we know our readers and we know they like this and this. And you just find out when using data that what you thought as a journalist and our wise thoughts about the world and how it is doesn’t really match. And that’s what makes it necessary for us to just revise our sight on how much we really know about our readers.



Francesca (06:09) And it’s such a new transition as well, if you say that you’ve gone fully digital in the last three years. Do you have any specific examples of things that you thought you knew about them that ended up not necessarily matching the data that you were getting?



Gwyn (06:21) We’re in a very rural area so we did quite a lot on agriculture and then on the other hand you find out that you have a big readership that might live in the countryside but they have the other side of agriculture, the sort of the down part on it when it comes to nature reserve or environment. So we found out, well, we don’t only have this one part of the readership, we have both sides of the story.



Francesca (06:57) Interesting. There must have been a massive change in the way that you write your articles. And in your experience, we’ve talked a very little bit about the definition of audience engagement. But when you’re looking at strategy, for example, what do you think audience engagement is meant to deliver on? Why should brands be doing more audience engagement?



Gwyn (07:19) Well, I think we have to take this new approach as soon as you realize that you don’t really know as much as you thought. That’s the first stage of it really. And the next is to put it into a strategy, which we haven’t done yet. We just came through this realization phase and we’ve put it on our agenda for 2025.



Because we know it’s going to be important, we see and hear it all over the place where we go in Europe with, although we’re a small company with 25 people and 22 people making content. We really try to open our minds and find out what’s happening in the big world because we’re not so different.



Very often, very many of our journalists have thought we are something special and we are in many ways, but when it comes to how media are used, then we’re not that much different from the New York Times or TV2 in Denmark. We can learn a lot from small and big companies in the whole world.



Francesca (08:49) You’re on the start of a really exciting strategy journey, it sounds like. And obviously you’ve not got into it yet, but what do you think the biggest hurdles or challenges are going to be? What do you think is going to push you back in these conversations?



Gwyn (09:07) I think the media business has been thinking very traditionally. So we’ve had this output. People talk about our news. They might, now we’re online, interact with it or comment on it and share it. And this for a very long time has been enough for very many in the media. We did what we needed to build up this new site. And that was enough when we’re talking about joining our readers. But we didn’t really focus on the engagement part, not seeing our readers as an audience or as customers. And neither did we because we were seeing us all the time in the minority, for example.



On the other hand, we were just busy making news. I think for much of the media, we make news, but we just have to interact more and engage more with people on a personal level and not only when it comes to our products.



Francesca (10:20) It’s interesting that idea of focus because most businesses or most organizations say be good at one thing, focus on that one thing. And we’re going into a world where it’s so much more spread out. And what I’m hearing you’re saying is going deeper is actually what’s going to be harder.



Is there anything else that you’re thinking apart from going deeper or do you think that you might find challenges within your team? Are they technical challenges that stop you from going deeper? I’d love for you to elaborate more.



Gwyn (10:56) It’s more the mindset as well. Again, because the editors, me and my team, we’re sort of the bosses, we’ve had this focus. So of course, the employees have had their focus as well on the product, on the news, on the next headline. And they haven’t really thought about why we have to engage our audience. And it comes in with the people when you get your first sort of social media employees and things like that. You have these examples again where you want something from the public, you want something for your readers, but it might just not interest them. And if it doesn’t interest them, they won’t engage with you.



Francesca (11:54) Maybe we could mention measurements because at the moment, if you do successful engagement currently, what does that look like and how is it measured and how do you imagine once you’ve done this strategy, how could that look?



Gwyn (12:11) Well, at the moment, things are measured through data, such as likes and interactions. But this really doesn’t tell the whole story, does it? So I think we’ll have to look into other ways of measuring because the data as such can’t stand alone. So I couldn’t say what it would be. At the moment, maybe you need, apart from data, you need sort of the interviews on another level with people or just making studies or queries on what people actually think when they interact with you and engage with you.



Francesca (13:04) And maybe we can talk a tiny bit about strategies. I understand that you’ve got a plan for this big strategy coming up, but up until now, what has proven most effective when it comes to engaging your audiences and your experience?



Gwyn (13:21) From a media point, I think one of the important things we can do is actually bring people together, discuss, highlight topics and sort of take the research that we would usually keep in house and bring it out into the open, bring these thoughts, these questions into the open with the audience by either collecting people in a media outlet or doing it online, but being more transparent in our work as well, I think is one of the things that are possible. At the moment, we consider audience engagement in terms of social media, but that’s not enough. That’s one level, but we have to go live more than we do today.



Francesca (14:21) Do you have any examples of stuff that you have done that has worked really well for you in your current way of working?



Gwyn (14:29) During the Covid pandemic, the border between Denmark and Germany was closed. There were some exceptions and some rulings and this was changed constantly on both sides of the border and on different governmental and authority levels. So you could visit your family but you couldn’t jump a generation. You could see your mother on the other side of the border, but you couldn’t see your grandmother and you couldn’t see your sister or brother. Although it said you could visit family. 



These sort of stories, when the petition said you can visit family, we asked what’s family? We’ll dive into that. So they had all these rulings on the border region, not really knowing what the border region and what borders are about because the borders are not only sort of stopping people from living together. And we had these two articles on how to pass the border, either working, meeting family or other exemptions and rulings changing all the time. So these two articles were updated sort of within the minutes of a new ruling.



And we were the only media doing it in the border region in this way. Fast and structured and not only telling, hey, there are some new rules, you can read them there. We’d actually take the new rules, we’d translate them and we translate them from Danish into German, but we’d also translate them, what does this mean? And in the first one and a half years of the pandemic, we had around a thousand people writing, calling us with their questions and suggestions. And this was actually without promoting it or telling people, phone here, write here. We just delivered better information than the authorities did. And that was something that people needed. They needed this information so they were interested in engaging.



Francesca (16:42) What a powerful example of delivering a USP that people clearly really want to engage with.



Gwyn (16:56) It was actually when the pandemic started when we went digital. It was a real boost to start on.



Francesca (17:09) That must have been pretty stressful at the time. I’m so curious if you could go back in time and find out these people were sending you this or sending you questions without being prompted. I’d love to know what it would have looked like if they were prompted and if that would be fascinating.



Gwyn (17:32) Looking back, it would also have been a lot because 1000 people were phoning us. They’d phone us Saturday evening, Sunday morning. We didn’t do anything, people found us or they found my telephone number and they would phone at any time. And you could see some numbers during this phase. I could see. Oh that’s him again. They’d phone several times and we’d pick up their stories or we’d be able to help them or advise them or could dig into other stories because if that’s his problem others would have the same problem and we could work on that. So I think if something is very important for you as a reader then you will find ways to interact, but honestly we could have done it much easier for them. As in, phone here, write here with your problems or whatever, but I honestly don’t think we could have coped with it if people would really have used it even more than they did.



Francesca (18:40) I guess you would have put different structures in place to be able to check and moderate that content. If anything, it just happened to happen, but you weren’t leading on it. It might have looked different. I would be freaked out if someone just called me on my phone, to be fair.



Gwyn (18:50) As a joke we said, we met some politicians now and then and we said, actually, you should pay us. We’re doing your work. We’re doing the work that you should do as an authority. We’re actually doing it for you. These two articles were read and said we come from a small newspaper where we had 1200 subscribers.



Francesca (19:09) What did they say?



Gwyn (19:19) So was a very small minority newspaper and these two articles were read half a million times. So obviously because they were updated, some of the people looked in on them again and again and I still meet people today, talking about engagement, I still meet people today who said, when you did that, I always used Der Nordschleswiger to find information of what was going on across the border during the COVID pandemic.



Francesca (19:54) That’s fascinating. You clearly built that relationship with that audience as they were coming to you directly clearly. How do you continue building that? Did you continue with anything to go from there?



Gwyn (20:15) One of the surprising things is, or two things, the first thing, we were not only talking to people from the minority, we were talking to people from Germany that had found us. We were also talking to people from Denmark, from the majority, that even though we write in German, many Danes understand German in our area and they would use us as information. So we were talking to this very wide group of people living in the area, going above sort of the minority. And this has held on really. So we still see that very many from the majority are some of our readers.



And we still get feedback from many of them. The second thing that was surprising, readers going back phone the editor. When newspaper readers phone the editor, it is usually to complain about something. Newspaper readers always complained. And what we experienced was that people actually called us to help us with our journalism. They’d say, hey, the new rules, this and that and which you also wrote in your article but at the end of chapter this and that in the article, you might have forgotten an update or is that still the old version, and you’d look into it and say hey thanks very much I’ll change it straight away.



You have this picture of people online being rude and harsh and we really experienced that people engaged with us that helped us without us asking. We could have written also in the paragraph, if you see anything that’s not correct, give us a tip or whatever. But they did that alone. They took the business of finding my phone number or sending an email, which we didn’t make easy for them. So that was really interesting.



Francesca (22:42) What you just said is really interesting because you’re actually not the first person in one of these interviews to talk about readers getting excited about helping the journalists.



It’s something that we probably don’t talk about enough, but it’s potentially giving readers a bit of insight into what is actually happening in a newsroom. And I don’t think that happens enough. It brings a bit of authenticity. You’ve clearly got quite an authentic relationship with so many of the readers that you’re interacting with. Apart from in this specific scenario, how do your readers engage with your editorial teams?



Gwyn (23:09) Well our core business is the minority and they were very, very close. Sometimes some people say we’re probably too close. But they work with us on a daily basis because on one hand, of course, we want to spread information in and about minority and what’s happening in the minority. So on this part we’re sort of part of the club, and then on the other hand, we want to make some journalism based on user needs being relevant news, important news, analysis backgrounds, and things like that. So we have sort of both parts. And then I think there’s also the part of sometimes your readers aren’t as stupid as you think. And on the other hand, the readers aren’t as wise as you think. So you have to bring them, you have to take them along all the time. And because we journalists, we sit with a story and we work on it and we know every detail, we forget actually that other people might only have read article number one and three and eight and nothing in between. So on that basis, we try to always remember to go back and bring all the updates, all the readers and bring them in. And that’s also a point which we haven’t done when it comes to minority because well, everybody knows everything about everybody. So we don’t have to write this.



But we actually do today because the minority isn’t just one audience. The minority in itself is also many audiences. We have seniors, we have families, we have sports people… So that’s also eye opening when it comes to audience and engagement. We’ve got more audiences, although there are only 15,000, they’re very different.



Francesca (25:42) It must be quite hard to personalise for those different audiences as well.



Gwyn (25:48) There are some things where we say, we sort of step up and say, well, this is important for you. This is important in general for the minority if you live in the minority, so that’s sort of the political side of it. But yeah, you have some small groups. And that’s when we come to data and look into data and say when some of my journalists ask, okay, when is a story good? How many clicks do we need on every story? And sometimes we just have to say, well, okay, if you reach 100 clicks in this area, then we’ll know every German speaking in this area has read the articles. Then you’ve got, with 100 clicks, you’ve got 100%. But on the other hand, if you only get 100 views somewhere else, that might not be so good, the potential is bigger. So yes it’s really a sort of diverse readership that we have.



Francesca (26:53) You’re in a bit of a different position to a lot of the brands that we talk to because you’re non-for-profit, correct?



Gwyn (27:00) We are funded state, state funded with around 2.8 million euros per year. We just have to make sure that we spend all the money and don’t spend too much or don’t spend too little. End the year with a zero every time. A privileged situation really.



Francesca (27:18) So what is your definition of success within your team in that scenario then?



Gwyn (27:31) We use data. We use something called Upscore, but we don’t use them in a structured or strategic way yet. We have the data. It’s not because we don’t believe in it or that we don’t want to use it, but we are this very small company with say 22 making content. And then there’s three on top and the three on top are some of the people that have to multitask on various things. And that is also on data, but it’s also on many other things. So really we wanted to be further than we are when it comes to using data. You want to be better to analyze it and use it. And probably AI will be able to help us. But we just haven’t come to the point where we’ve been looking into it yet.



Francesca (28:25) Tech is a massive piece of it, especially if you’ve had this big digital transformation. Where you’ve started on that transformation, I know AI isn’t there for everyone. And I know that data is obviously everyone’s collecting it, but not necessarily using it as their main piece. But when you started, what was your first focus? What was the first thing that you wanted to do well before you moved on to the next thing?



Gwyn (28:54) The most important thing for us was really to ensure that we get the people with us from the newspaper. Did you get them over into the digital world? That was the most important. And of course, the numbers collided or were lifted by the COVID pandemic. So we couldn’t really see, okay, are these our own readers or are they? So after the pandemic, we’ve been focusing more on that. So we have been using data. Where does our traffic come from? Because we’re mainly interested in that our traffic comes from this area where we’re in and everything else was nice to have. So even though we had Danes calling from Norway or from 300 kilometers from here saying, hey, I’ve got nothing to do with the minority, but I read your media. I said, great.



We’re very happy about that, but that’s not our core group. So what we’ve been looking into is really what’s our core audience and what’s important for us. And that’s again where the engagement and the audience engagement comes in, because we engage with these people that are around us here in this area and not so much with people around the world (the nice to have users).



Francesca (30:18) And what are some of the possible challenges and pitfalls that you’ve experienced in these audience engagement initiatives that you’ve already had? Because I think we always talk about the successes, but we don’t always talk about the failures as much. And it’s something that I always like talking about because hopefully someone will save them a lot of time in the future if they think about it. Have you had any audience engagement initiatives where you’ve gone, well, that, just didn’t work, maybe?



Gwyn (30:30) I think it’s very often when we use these social media possibilities to reach out and get people to tell us something or give us something and we ask for this interaction and engagement. But if the cause isn’t important enough for the people, they won’t engage.

They’ve got Facebook or they’ve got Instagram or other social media where they share their life already. So why should they share with us on top, unless it’s something that’s very important. So they don’t, they don’t really need us for this kind of interaction on social media. That’s where social media plays its role. And we try to okay obviously a story an article a news sometimes gets comments and what on but that that’s not the kind of interaction that engages you with the community and that that sort of creates a loyalty between you and and your audience for that you need another kind of of engagement than just posting things on social media.



Francesca (32:10) It sounds like it’s a bit around relevance. There are different reasons that content or engagement is relevant to different users. But I always find that fascinating that you would do something and it doesn’t work because that also teaches so much, doesn’t it, when you try out and realize, this is not what they’re getting from this.



Gwyn (32:29) And then on the other hand, we lack this critical mass. Of course, if the Daily Mail goes out and says, hey, send us your holiday pictures, and then they get two or 300 pictures and say, wow, okay, but they’ve got millions of readers. And if we go out to our 25 to 30,000 readers that we have weekly, and say, hey, send us your holiday pictures, and we might get two or three. So no success. And in the big pictures, it was okay. was what you could suspect, expect to get back. Just meaning that that was not the way to engage. So instead we try to, where we do try to engage already is live, going out to people, being there when there are various big arrangements within the minority and that’s where we’ll meet people. They see us all the time so they’ve already got a picture of us and now we just want to get there to learn them a little better than we do today.



Francesca (33:41) And maybe we could talk a bit about the future of audience engagement and where you see it going. You’re obviously in a privileged yet difficult position having such a small minority, but also focusing on, you know, luckily you’ve got some funding, but at the same time, you know, you’ve got a much smaller group to get to know.



How do you think AI engagement, social media is going forward? Where do you see the future of audience engagement in the next three, two, five years maybe?



Gwyn (34:14) I don’t know if I see AI in the engagement wheel because if I look into what we want to do in the next two or three years, it’s not because we want to engage much more digital with the people than we do. I think what I see at the moment and what we’d like to do is to step up on the role that we as media have in society and democracy, sort of bring people together, and explain. And that’s what I’d like to do more of. And that’s been a time issue as well. Again, focusing on changing the business and the focus has been very much internally when it comes to developing things and then on the product and not as much on the engaging of our users, audience.



Francesca (35:22) That’s fascinating. So you’re talking about going from an internal point of view to like opening it up and not necessarily focusing just on the digital side. Are you hinting at being in person more as well or is it very much just opening up those forms of communication?



Gwyn (35:40) It’s in person, it’s communication, but it’s also, I think we need more knowledge in-house and more expertise also when it comes to engagement. We’ve got it on the social media level with the people we have, but I think we also need to focus on it from the editorial side, not only from my point of view but also for getting the journalists to actually think about how do we engage and how do we engage people to come in, how do we go out and meet people.



Francesca (36:27) You’re actually hinting at my next question by responding in that way, which was to look at the skills that media professionals need in this new audience engagement future. What kind of skills are you thinking your editorial teams need so that you can do this engagement better?



Gwyn (36:49) It’s difficult because really hitting on an issue where we’re going from being a newspaper to going digital is learning a whole bunch of new skills. And we’ve been working on this change for six years. We had three years before we knew we were going over and now we’ve been in it for three, three and a half years. And one, it’s time consuming. Two, it’s necessary to give journalists new tools and new insights. Three, it’s very hard. It’s very tiring and trying for them. Because it’s really a challenge because there’s so many new things coming on top, coming on top, coming on top. And it’s not because we’re still saying to our journalists, well, hey, you’ve got your working week of 37 hours. So it’s not a matter of the things doing on top being more hours. But if I just look into the fact that we work with something like between 55 and 60 various apps and systems and programs in our very small company, the journalists have theirs, the graphics and the finance people and so on, from Microsoft Word and 365 to slack and anything in between, it just shows the amount. If you go back they needed a typewriter and they needed a pen and something to write on and that’s what they needed and today there are so many other things work and now on top comes AI and when I say on top I mean on top in learning how to use this new tool because eventually and hopefully some AI is going to be our our best assistant within the next few years.



Francesca (38:58) That is a lot of tools. You may be tired just thinking about doing all of the courses for each tool to make sure you’re doing it properly as well. And even for such a small team, that must be expensive as well.



Gwyn (39:07) Publishing a newspaper is expensive. It’s really expensive, it’s not for free going digital, not at all. We’ve needed planning tools because going back earlier in the newspaper days, the journalists would fill his or her page for the day.



And you didn’t need much planning because nobody else needed to know what was going on the page. But today it has to go down the same funnel and you have to make sort of a plan, we’re not gonna throw out 20 articles at three o’clock. And then we’ve got nothing in the morning and nothing tomorrow afternoon. So sorting up plans and using planning tools like that costs about 10,000 euro a year. And there are many cheap systems.



Say if you take Chat GPT for companies, look at the amount and say well it’s not many those aren’t many dollars per journalist but when you say it’s times 20 and then it’s times 12 on top of the monthly fee and then suddenly when it comes to Chat GPT others well that’s another 8 000 euro a year and it just just amounts up to to quite a lot of money yeah.



Francesca (40:38) It is so different to the olden days where you’d buy Word and you’d pay it once and then you’d use that same document 100 times.



Gwyn (40:45) As a newspaper, you paid one printing plant for printing a newspaper and then you paid the post to bring out the newspaper and that was the two sort of basic costs that you had in the house.



Francesca (41:01) We always joke about how digital is going to make it cheaper, but it’s just not true.



Gwyn (41:06) It is cheaper and and the reach is better than as I said we’re a newspaper for 1200 people within the minority, maybe even less within the minority, because there are also others subscribing it and and now we reach something like 25 to 30 000 people which is about double of what the minority is. So that’s quite good.



Francesca (41:36) The scalability is there, that’s for sure. And last question for you. If you were to start engaging again, or what would be one hack that you would give to a brand that’s starting their engagement journey from scratch, from your experience?



Gwyn (41:54) Well, I prefer to receive hacks. Much, much easier than the position we’re at the moment! 



But I think user engagement or audience engagement doesn’t come by itself, you need the focus and you need to work in a structured and continuous way. 



I can pass on the hack that we’re going to try to copy somehow. We heard it for the first time from Het Nieuwsblad in the Netherlands and now also from a local TV station here in our area, TV Syd (South) learning more about your readers by visiting them, listening to them.



It is not the traditional interview situation that we would usually have. So when we’ve thought about this initially, we’d go out, we can go out and talk to people and you typically have this interview situation. But what TV Syd has made is they’ve made sort of conversation cards. So when they go out, they actually have these cards and say, okay, where are you going to be in five years? What do you think about that? So it’s not the journalist that decides what they’re going to talk about. It’s actually the cards that they work through. And the experience at TV Syd has, and they’ve had it monitorized by university as well, is the same as we expect. We actually don’t really know our readers as well as we thought we knew them. That’s one thing.

But the other thing is then really knowing them. What is it that makes them engage? What is it that really interests them? What do they need?



Francesca (43:57) I can’t wait to hear how that goes.



Gwyn (43:59) I’ll be phoning again next year on tour. 



Francesca (44:03) Yeah, I want to know what all the cards say and what is the most surprising response that you get. Well, thank you so much, Gwyn, for this great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I love how special your audience is and I can’t wait to have another conversation soon. Thank you so much!



Gwyn (44:09) It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Francesca!

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