Happy Halloween everyone. What is your biggest fear?
Kevin Walsh, Editor-in-Chief of Denmark’s Nordjyske, joins the podcast this week. In Kevin’s words: “What I fear the most: How far does it go before people actually understand how important journalism is. How far do we need to go? Do a lot of new brands need to die before people actually see that it’s important? Hopefully we can survive by rebranding.”
Moving from national news to leading a hyperlocal brand, Kevin shares an unfiltered look at the highs, lows, and surprises of connecting with his local audience in a digital world.
Want a sneak peek? 👀
⚡ “Give your audience a face.” – Kevin talks about the power of personal connection in journalism.
⚡ “Are we using journalism’s importance as an excuse not to engage?” – A tough question every newsroom should consider.
⚡ “We don’t need every data point – just the right data.” – Kevin dives into the metrics that matter in local media.
Curious about how journalists are adapting to become community voices, even marketers, while staying true to their mission? Don’t miss Kevin’s candid thoughts.
If you are too busy or not a big fan of watching recordings, here is a slightly edited transcript that you can browse through at your convenience:
Francesca (00:00)
Today I’ve got Kevin with me and I’m really excited to hear his opinions on engagement because he is from this fantastic area and have their own challenges that we might relate to. So first thing, – Hi Kevin. Thank you so much for giving me your time. Would you mind starting off with what you do and your experience, if you don’t mind?
Kevin (00:29)
Hi, Francesca. My name is Kevin Walsh. I’m editor-in-chief of a Danish local brand called Nordjyske. It will be difficult to pronounce for a lot of people. In a rural district in the north of Denmark.
I lived in Copenhagen a year ago working for a national brand, and we took the opportunity and decision as a family to move across the country to a new city and get a new role as head in chief which I landed a year ago now, quite precisely a year ago actually. And I’ve been trying to get my grip around what it means to be a local brand and figuring out how to work in a digital future.
Francesca (01:12)
How was the move for the family? I guess that is most important, because that is a big move.
Kevin (01:17)
It is a big move and I’ve been at the same company my entire grown-up working life. It was a new company, a new role. But as you said, most importantly, for the family also it was a big change. I’ve always lived within 15 kilometers district. So moving 400 kilometres across the country was a big move. But we got a house, we now have a garden. We lived in the centre of Copenhagen before. So there are lot of positives.
I would say the kids, they’re now nine and six – They adapted really quickly. Which is 75 % of everything. That was the important thing. Getting them settled which they did quickly. They met a lot of new friends, have a garden, really good.
Francesca (02:06)
Super resilient kids, aren’t they? We need to learn from their book, they’re doing something right.
My first question, which is always the hardest one. What does audience engagement mean to you?
Kevin (02:08)
That is a very good question. It is a very difficult question. And I kind of joked jokingly before the recording and said to you, a kind of philosophical question almost, which is what do you believe?
And I hate being the one trying to describe something by saying what it isn’t, but I would say that historically, I think media outlets have been very good at seeing engagement as: “We have something that could engage you. We want to give you something. We have channels, we have products, we have news, we have content”.
But I think in the last decade or so, it’s beginning to be a lot more obvious that engagement is actually also giving the public, the audience a voice, a way of being heard, being seen, really taking engagement to be what it means, which is a two-way thing, not just us doing something.
So for me, audience engagement is really to figure out how to, of course, engage people in what we do, but also really making sure that what we do is coming from where our audience are, and how they see the world. So it is a two-way thing to really try to get a grip of what they find relevant, what they do, what they find important, how they can be part of a conversation, how they can feel a media brand more than just us giving them news.
Francesca (03:52)
There’s a word that you said in there that I think resonated for me and it’s what the audience are feeling. I think we don’t necessarily talk enough about that. We talk about user needs, what people need, but that feeling piece, feeling included.
And your definition has changed clearly.
Could you give me an example maybe of how we do some of those things that you just said? Because that’s a bit of a tricky one.
Kevin (04:30)
Yeah, it is tricky. But if you go back where I was at my old job, in the national, where we had to make a reach, really good, really liked, we did a lot of things digital, really good at pushing our content, doing channels, going to a local brand where our demographics are smaller, we have a smaller group that we need to be relevant for. We have a geographically kind of area that we need to be with a certain kind of people.
And it was really obvious for me, when I say feeling, it’s just trying to be good at communicating with them.
Legacy brands, everybody knows them. I mean Nordjyske has existed for 250 years. Everybody knows the brand. We were part of writing the Danish constitution.
The history is great, but the problem is that’s where we are now. We are legacy. People don’t find us relevant. They don’t connect with us. They see us as their grandparents’ newspaper. Something old. So even having the dominance, having the relevance, having the reach didn’t give us enough that people actually wanted to engage in content, pay for the content, and be an ambassador and a subscriber because we didn’t connect with people. We just give them what they’ve always received and what they come around that we give them, which is just news content. We give them our content. We didn’t really connect with them. So we need to do that.
And to be honest, I haven’t found that silver bullet of doing it easy, but we’re doing some of the simple things, which is really trying to be good in our moderation, being active in conversations right now on social media, because that’s where there’s a lot of it.
We’re teaching a lot of our editors, trying to talk to them about being profiles, going out, being faces on the journalism.
We’re looking into, and we’ve done a couple, of events, but we want to do a lot more events that people can see physically.
That’s the funny thing about digital, being 100% digital, it goes into the physical world in events. Events are hot again.
Having events, that’s how you connect to people all of sudden.
And we thought that because we were being digital, we didn’t need events, but the events are so important to put faces on the journalists, to connect to your audience, to create the feeling of a community more than just a news outlet. So that’s what we are trying to do it now.
And then we’re trying to do a lot of content, which is really being good at listening to data and listening to what’s relevant for our target group, which is another target group than we’re actually connected to right now. And we love our readers right now, but they are plus 70. They love print. They love using a newspaper as an omnibus, one visit. You go there, you get all the news, you’re done. And that’s the position we have had for years and decades and centuries. And that’s been working really good for us. So there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I can see us going into the future with that business model and that understanding working.
So we need to find new ways of connecting to the audience.
Francesca (08:01)
I love the fact that your brands have such an amazing history. And if anything, that’s something that I feel should be drawn on so much more because yes, young people potentially see them as old, but they potentially don’t even really understand what they are doing when they’re engaging with those brands. There’s a whole branding piece there that is absolutely fantastic.
Kevin (08:23)
Yeah. And don’t get me wrong, Francesca, I’m proud of that legacy. I’m proud of the history. It’s not that, it just means that a lot of people also have, but that’s on us, because we have been good at branding ourselves well enough. It is just that it’s a bit dusted. It’s a bit old. It’s a bit, you know, for the new target, the new younger audience. And when I say younger audience, again, I’m not talking about the 18 year olds. I’m saying our age bracket between, let’s say, 30 and 55.
These are people that actually have a job, they’re active, they have families, they need information, they need news, but they’re not connecting properly with the legacy newspapers. We have the same issue and that’s kind of what we need to address, if we want to be relevant going forward. So I’m proud of the history, but we need to shake some of the dust off, and revitalise the brand.
Francesca (09:27)
And in your experience, what aims does this audience engagement strategy that you potentially putting together deliver on? Why should new news brands be doing more engagement?
Kevin (09:50)
So I am really data driven. I love KPIs. I wouldn’t do this without believing that it actually makes a difference for the business as well. But actually, we use this funnel in our journalism, a kind of funnel thinking.
We do something in top funnel, something for churn prevention.
Everything we do has a goal. We need to be aware of what we do because we can’t do stuff without knowing what we actually want to do with it.
And with audience engagement, I would say these things I’m talking about could be one of two things.
For sure, it addresses one of the biggest challenges we face, which is churn. So I mean, in print days, if you had a print subscriber, they’d stay there for life. So you had people phoning people because just one subscriber would be a lot of money. In a digital world where we go in and out of subscriptions like yesterday’s Sheppard’s Pie or something like that. We need to be really good at this.
And the connection gives a feeling of belonging, a connection to a brand that’s really effective when it comes to the payday each month. I would say that’s the key thing for me. But I will also say that at the top of the funnel, going out and making sure that you actually, you’re seen and a lot of new eyes on you.
doing stuff that’s new for us that we wouldn’t normally do and getting new people, new audiences in and seeing that we are not just what your grandparents used with something else.
So I say one of those two things would be where I see it. I don’t see it on traffic, on conversions right now. I see it really up a funnel, you know, reach and I see it churn prevention.
Francesca (11:22)
And how would you measure that? What are you looking at when you’re measuring this audience engagement that’s meeting this churn and this reach?
Kevin (11:56)
It would be different, it would vary from initiative to initiative. But it could be CLV, customer lifetime values. It could be going from a trial to a normal subscription, trying to figure out if you can see some kind of patterns that people that have been to an event or people that are active in our comment sections or people that more or less engage more.
But it could also just be people who have more newsletters, people who open more newsletters, who click more newsletters, who come more often. That’s more, I mean, that’s to be quite frank, that’s the level we’re looking to right now. It’s also just, when our products engage, does that mean that people would stay longer? I would say my hypothesis would be that that is what they do, but we need to make sure that we have the data to show us it is actually working. And that’s what we’re looking at to right now. So what are the right products at the right time to make sure that people stay as long as possible.
Francesca (12:57)
You must have some good data analysts in there helping you with that…
Kevin (13:02)
We’re looking into it, let’s just say. We have good data analysts, but it is difficult and we are not as mature company as somebody else. So what we also learn in this, and there’s a lot of good use cases out there to be more intelligent, we don’t need, and this is the thing with data, you can have all the data in the world. We don’t need every data. We just need the right data and making sure that we can see the patterns. That’s what we’re working into right now. And hopefully when it’s up and running and really a good machine, it will be a lot more automated and just work out of the box.
Right now it’s manually and we’re just getting a lot more intelligent.
Francesca (13:36)
I think a lot of brands are doing that. They’re waiting to see what the bigger brands are doing or the ones that have potentially a little bit more money and then learn from that and then bring that into their teams as well. There’s a little bit of that going on. At least I feel there is.
Kevin (13:52)
I think we’re all looking for the silver bullet to find out what’s the real way to use the data. And you say data analysts, I think one of the learnings for me is that analysis of data is important, we are really, some of the really good people out there that do it, are the ones that understand journalism as well. They could put, it’s not just analysing data, it’s actually understanding behaviour, seeing patterns and go into, not just the statistical stuff, but actually seeing the patterns.
And understanding, the really good data analysts, are often, you know, old journalists who just love excel and just love spreadsheets and love seeing this.
For me, data is a lot of really, just turning data into actions and understanding. So I try to, I’m not succeeded yet, but I don’t want people to just look at data. I want them to see data when there’s an action or understanding on the other side.
Because data itself doesn’t really give you anything. It can give you a carrot or stick sometimes. It’d be great a ring, but it doesn’t really make you any wiser.
But if you have an action on a deeper understanding of your audience, that’s where you really see where you can make the change of what you do.
Francesca (15:10)
Matching those two together – this is our theory, is it true? That kind of conversation with your audience. Fascinating. We don’t talk enough about data on any of these. So maybe I’ll keep that one for…
Kevin (15:21)
Don’t get me started because we won’t be talking about anything else.
Francesca (15:26)
And in your opinion, what are the hurdles and challenges? What’s stopping news brands from engaging better?
Kevin (15:37)
I think even though I say we have 250 years of experience and the old brand I came from actually had 275 years. So it’s old brands with a lot of experience. I don’t know, if it’s just my theory that, especially legacy brands, we come from a world where we didn’t have to engage really.
We owned the information change. We owned the information structure. We had everything.
We never really, it’s not really in the organisation to be really good at it. Actually, even though you have 250, this is what we’re actually learning now, is to take all this engagement seriously and really understanding it.
And I mean, for legacy, what we come from, we are journalists, I call it a of contract understanding of journalism. We’re critical. We investigate.
We take, make, do all the great things we do with journalism. That’s what we stand on. That’s what we really believe in. That is so important. That’s not what I’m saying.
But on the other side of contract journalism, you have community journalism, like the understanding that it’s not just a one way. It’s not just us giving information. It means something for a community. You’re part of a community. And this community understanding is difficult to understand if you’ve been talking about the contract side of things for your entire life.
As I say, that’s what you do. And people get angry. What do you do? You say, we have the right to do this with journalists. And you do have the right. And we shouldn’t stop doing critical stuff. Shouldn’t stop being what we are. But we need to take into account that there is a community you’re a part of, and you need to be that. You can’t just take for granted that you’re part of community anymore. That’s what happens when you’re digital. We’re not just part of community.
As I say in this part of the country, there are too many people here who live a perfectly happy life without using Nordjyske. That’s an issue that they don’t find as relevant enough to be part of their everyday routine. We’re not important enough. We were that 40 years ago. We’re not that anymore. We need to kind of make ourselves desired in that realm again.
That actually we are important. What I fear the most is how far does it go before people actually understand how important journalism is. How far do we need to go? A lot of new brands need to die before people actually see that it’s important or hopefully we can by rebranding, by doing what we do, by telling our story, we can prove to people and show the audience why we are important.
But I do fear that with all the possibilities of spending time on anything else, the news media today, I do fear that we become obsolete before people will understand that we’re important.
And it’s down to public service outlets and nothing else. And that’s really something I fear. We need private, free media outlets that can do what we do with great journalism and free and independent, critical genes.
Francesca (19:03)
As an ex-teacher, and I know I bring this up a lot, but there is a whole education piece to that, in terms of getting people to understand why it’s so important. And I agree, we shouldn’t have to get to a point where a lot of them die off before people realise.
Kevin (19:17)
And I was actually scared to that as an excuse or a branding, like that explanation, because I’ve seen the industry use that explanation as an excuse for not developing. They just stayed in the content. They stayed in what they did.
They said, we are important. We need to be here. We are democracy. We are everything.
So I’ve actually just learning to take that into account again. Like the democracy part of it, because it’s been used as a bad excuse of not changing.
But it is, as you just said, and which I agree, is something we need to educate, of course, as a society as a whole, but also as a news outlet, we need to explain why we’re important and show it and keep on showing, keep on explaining and not being afraid to go into hi hat and really say we are part of the well-working democracy.
We need to be here. If we’re not here, what then? So I’m coming back to that being a key thing, I say again and again, but I actually was a bit afraid of using that because I think the industry has used it as an excuse.
Francesca (20:28)
I think marketing even has become a dirty word in a sense, but we have a marketing problem. Any brand that you’re going to buy in the supermarket has absolutely no problem shouting out why it’s so important.
You need to be eating this because we’re really healthy for you in the same way. I don’t think we necessarily shout it out as much, because I don’t think people are that aware. And I don’t think students are that aware or young people.
That’s a completely different story.
We’re preaching to the choir, aren’t we? Because everybody in our industry totally knows we’re important.
But going back to what you were saying around the hurdles and challenges, you’ve basically said, if I’m repeating correctly – There are two audiences.
You’ve got your own newsroom and we need to create this cultural change in the newsroom for them to be open to engaging our second audience, which is the reader or the people we’re trying to provide this news to.
Kevin (20:57)
Here we are.
Francesca (21:25)
And I’d love to hear from your point of view, have you got any examples of how you are trying to overcome that challenge of that cultural challenge within your newsroom? Like what are you doing to get people, your journalists to engage better with your audiences?
Kevin (21:44)
Not enough. That’s just a simple question, but a simple answer. Again, we’re just starting and getting better. I think journalists as a whole just need to be better to understand there is another audience. Who are the audience? What are their needs, their feelings, trying to understand who you’re actually, I was going to say writing for, but of course it’s not only writing.
And so that’s a very simple thing to say, but it is actually difficult to culturally to get that, take that into account, that you’re actually doing something for someone and not just doing your journalist, whatever you think is interesting.
But that is when you change culture, even though it sounds simple, it is difficult, of course. And I think the other thing is just really teaching journalists that.
Understanding that you are a person with a face and identity and you can be active in a comment section, can be better at actually engaging the ones when people write to you, when people contact you, putting some faces on the journalists.
I think that’s a way of creating. They need to do more video. They need to be in audio. They need to maybe be at an event. They need to just go away from the old black text on a white background, there’s a lot more than that.
And going away from just the one way idea of my gut feeling says this is an important piece, so I do it. Now you need to understand why you’re doing it, for whom you’re doing it, what’s the effect you want with this.
And again, if you succeed or don’t, what can I learn? So as you’re taking the journalistic work chain, which in old days just, well, you go in, have an idea, do it, publish it, you go home.
Now this is where it starts, after you publish. So what is the idea? How do you get it? Where does the idea come from? When is it relevant? How do you do it?
How do you, before you publish it, how do you tell the story? Then after you publish it, how do you curate it? How do you keep it going? And when the analytics, again, back to data, when that comes back in, what does the data say? Should you do more? Should you do less? Should you do it another way? All of these things.
Even though we don’t like saying it, journalists are becoming small marketing people themselves. They are becoming a lot more commercially aware of what they do. They’re not commercial because they are journalists. It’s not that, I’m saying that we’re not journalists. The backbone of what journalism is hasn’t changed at all.
I would say even, it’s been even more important now than ever what the journalistic backbone is. But understanding how to curate, to publish, to do what you do. That is becoming a bit more commercially aware, a bit more data savvy, a bit more understanding the marketing side of what you do.
And I don’t know if every journalist does this, but those competences in a newsroom will continue to rise, the need of them.
Francesca (24:54)
It’s hard, isn’t it? Because we’ve got to do so much more and yet the expectation is huge on these poor journalists. But at the same time, if no one’s going to read your content, well, what’s the point in writing it? You could write the best story in the world. If no one actually reads it, then what was it for? And there’s a little bit of that.
Kevin (25:12)
Journalists say they hate data, a lot of them. And then, when they do something that’s really red, they love data. When it kind of underlines their story.
So I think it’s possible, but there are huge expectations. And again, we need to educate and help and show the way.
Francesca (25:22)
Like me with my Instagram posts every time I post online. Sorry.
Kevin (25:42)
It’s not something everybody should do at the same time, but it is something that, to be honest, Francesca, if you look at the younger journalists coming in now, I mean, when they’re 20 years old, 25 years old, a lot of them have this competence. It’s natural to them.
Understanding social media, understand digital, understanding data, understanding the small marketing side of things. A lot of them do understand it. It is more natural to them. But of course, if you’ve been sitting in the same chair for 30 years and writing a story as you always did, it is a huge challenge.
It is difficult and different.
But I do believe that, again, everybody does want to be read. And as long as you’re open and you’re willing to listen and learn, everybody can develop.
Francesca (26:31)
Maybe let’s talk a little bit about strategies and best practices. Do you have any strategies that have proven effective so far in engaging your audiences? Have you done anything that, maybe a specific example of something that worked really well and you’re quite proud of, or potentially not even, not well at all, I don’t know?
Kevin (26:51)
I see a lot of good examples in the industry, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Settlent from Denmark, who is a purely digital brand.
Their comment section on their articles is almost creating new content every time, because people are engaging in the stories, stuff like that. I would love to do that a lot more.
So what we did to do that, we closed the comment section on Nordjyske. Which is kind of ironic, but it wasn’t working at that time. We’re definitely going to look into that, and make sure that the journalists bring more to the discussion when it is there.
But that’s a good example of how it should work.
We’re trying to do the events, and every time we have events where people are there, it’s always sold out, which is a good thing. We haven’t really succeeded in doing a big business thing yet, but really just feeling that connection when people are there physically, is something that it is just second to none the best way of creating connection.
And maybe you can only do it 100, 200 people at a time, but I mean, the connection there is unique and you can really feel the connections.
Kevin (28:47)
The event side is something we should be looking into a lot.
Francesca (28:52)
For both the audience and potentially the journalist, that must build so much loyalty. Going to an event and having had that moment and having all of that experience must be a fantastic way of building loyalty. In theory.
Kevin (29:06)
I mean, some journalists will also say it’s a bit, it’s nerve-racking actually meeting your readers.
And I would say myself, it is, being editor-in-chief, you get a lot of comments, a lot of good discussions, but I always feel just listening to what actually is being said, and actually answering them, not agreeing, but just answering, having a good discussion – Always works.
Francesca (29:32)
And on these events and on any of the audience engagement that you’re doing, at what point are you considering the audience engagement? Like even when you’re writing stories, how do you plan that out?
Kevin (29:48)
I will say what I really would like to be doing, because we’re not good at it yet. It’s something we do at the end, when it’s all done.
I mean, then we discuss what would be the right way of engaging our audience with this piece of content, probably made of text on a white background.
But it is like with anything else, we have the same discussion when we talk about platforms, video and audio. I mean, instead of just doing a piece. You should look at it from the beginning.
For example, what would be the most effective and the best way of telling a story, which is what we do.
And I haven’t actually heard this yet, but at some point, I hope some would say, well, this story would actually be best if we started it off as an event or as doing something where we started off engaging with a group on Facebook or whatever, but really trying to just see the audience engagement as part of the process, instead of just – where can we put this? At the end of the line.
I think we are okay at it when we look at sources and how to find sources, but actually doing this with audience engagement, we’re not really good at understanding what we can get out of it. How we can use them to get a better story and the right story even.
Right now we do the story, we look at it and sometimes it wasn’t the right story because it wasn’t relevant enough, it wasn’t really what the audience was feeling.
Maybe we should be better at asking, you know, when we get a story pitch, what difference will this make or why?
I mean, what would the audience say to this and how will you involve the audience that should be as part of the process as we ask what are the good headlines? What are the good platforms? How should we tell this story? In a more traditional way? We should be better at asking how can the audience be part of the story.
Francesca (31:59)
Do you have any fears around that? I’m really appreciating the honesty. I wish we were doing more of this. What do you think has stopped you so far?
Kevin (32:18)
I think the fear is that you can also go in too deep with the community and really, sometimes there are some really important stories out there that we should be doing.
Whether people are cheating or whatever they’re doing, lying or whatever, there are stories that have to be told, and we need to be better at telling them so they are relevant. But if you start only looking at community, there will be stories there that we miss.
So I think it is for me, it’s a joint venture between these two sides of journalism. I call them contracting community. There are probably a lot of other ways of seeing them.
I think the fear is, if you forget the contract side, so you don’t do these stories, you just do the constructive, feeling good, you know, which are really important, but you need to do both sides of the spectrum.
And also from my chair as editor-in-chief, we need to be aware of why we’re doing it and really understanding instead of just doing it a bit, if we just do things a bit, it won’t manifest itself.
So we need to do it properly, not wait until it’s perfect, because then you never start. So you need to start experimenting, but we need to be a bit more mature in understanding what is it we want to achieve with this side of journalism.
And then, we have habits, we have ways of working that we’ve been doing for many, many years, and it’s difficult to change that.
And that sounds very harsh towards the journalists. It is also editorial. And leadership. And the rest of the organisation. It’s not just the journalists. It’s the entire organisation that are really accustomed to this.
And marketing is not close enough to the product we do. So even just saying, yeah, we need to do more marketing of what we do, but what are we marketing? It’s not just the product, it’s something else. It’s not only the journalists fault, it is an industry, it is legacy, habits from all of us. So we all need to really take this into account.
And I think we need to take it one step at a time, and make sure that we kind of know what we’re doing and then start experimenting. If we try to do everything a bit, it won’t manifest.
Francesca (35:31)
The habits makes so much sense. I’ve been trying to join the gym for at least 10 years. So if I can’t do that, and I am one person! And I actually want to do it, obviously…
Kevin (35:42)
Imagine if you do it for 250 years…
Francesca (36:46)
Let’s have a little talk about technology. I see it as an enhancer of strategy, but what role do you see tech, like AI or data analytics play with your audience engagement efforts?
Kevin (37:13)
I mean, you said it yourself that we have high demands for journalists. We want them to be everything. I think one of the ways this is possible is that you use technology to enhance whatever you do.
So you use technology to help you be best at what you actually should be best at. So you use AI or tech or optimisation or all kinds of, you know, technology to actually get a lot of the work that’s repetitive, more easy, not really value creation, but you need to do it.
Get all of that off the books and make sure that you actually focus on the key value proposition that you do as a journalist, which is telling the right story.
Versions of stories. It’s been a huge discussion for years and years in the industry. And for my leadership, you always say, will you make a short version of it? Will you make a longer version, a bullet point, an audio version? And you say, you have the content. It only takes five minutes. It never takes five minutes. It takes a lot more than five minutes.
Actually, with AI now, you can say, tell the story in the way you actually found most fitting, and AI will help you make versions of it.
So we had a discussion. You know, you have audio articles where the articles are read out loud. So we also look into stopping doing it in the normal way, where we just read the articles.
And we have AI turn the articles into kind of a more podcast kind of version, only with one, still with one person, but more as, you know, if you read something written, it doesn’t give the same flow, but actually making it into a podcast, making it as a manuscript in some ways is good.
And going forward, maybe you start with the podcast. You say, this is for audio only. And you can have AI help you to make an article out of it, to make social media content, to make newsletters, to make whatever you want to.
And suddenly I’m asking you, Francesca, you need to make a newsletter and a podcast, article, a short form, all of these things. And if I told you 10 years ago, it’d take you a week to do, but now with AI and the right training, although you would actually still have to proofread and have the editor in the loop to make sure what comes out is actually good enough, but it saves you a lot of time.
And in the same way, technology can help us be journalists and be good at what we do. And then with regards to audience engagement, technology can help you talk a lot about relevance and really help you be more more relevant, make sure that we get the content out in the right form at the right time for the right people. Personalisation, optimisation…
It is something that would help us be more relevant for everyone. One size fits all – that’s not how it works. And you said at some point, one thing is ‘it’d be good for your business’, but actually the audience now expects it. We are beyond that point that it’d be good for us.
It will hurt us if we’re not able to be relevant the right way, because people are used to being seen in a product. These are your articles. This is something that’s specific to you.
Of course, we need to be able to nail that and get the right articles, but people more and more expect it. We need to, I mean, tech will really help us get there.
Make some things really easy and then make other things really complex. The complex things will make us more relevant.
Francesca (41:04)
I love that podcast example. Is this something that you have done or you’re working on or?
Kevin (41:14)
We have an article that we make into a podcast.
We haven’t done this part yet, but my example for them was that they might as well start as a podcast and then, work the other way around, instead starting through text.
We already start through text. That’s our habit. That’s what we always do.
And we need the text because we have newspapers. We have platforms. We need to put something in. So I can’t just say to everybody – go make podcasts. That would be very difficult for us right now. We still do have a newspaper. We still do have other platforms that were podcasts for itself. It won’t work yet.
So this was just an example of how you can think podcasts first, think audio first and then create articles from it. So we were doing it from an article to a podcast, and testing that.
So they are small tests, but right now the click through is really nice.
The final test is, you know, a format that you can go for a run with, do the dishes with whatever you do when you hear a podcast. And then actually, it worked and we had some editors us that, you know, 30 minutes in a box and their voices on our clone.
So it’s, it’s our own regional accent, dialect. And a couple of our editors voices we’re using. It’s a lot of fun.
Francesca (43:10)
I love that. And have you heard back from your audience? Have you had any feedback from them directly about how that is?
Kevin (43:16)
We have a qualitative interview in a couple of weeks. So we only have the data side, which is, I would say, especially the listen through rate is interesting because putting a box there with a big play button doesn’t, I mean, if people are not accustomed to it being there, it’s a bit, you know, what is this? But people actually listening to the audio file, which is really interesting.
And again, it’s the next generation of newsreaders – they expect to have news and audio, have relevance.
It’s not a fun fact that we use data to say, we want more. We want people to click more. We want them to read more. We want them to visit us more often. We want more, more, more. Actually, if you ask them, the audience that we want to engage with, what’s the most important thing for you? It’s saving time. It’s time they’re missing.
And the only thing we are actually measuring is how much time do they use? So that’s something that we need to learn.
We’re not using the data in the right way and giving the value that we need. So it’s okay, you don’t have to come to us every hour. If you can come once a day and feel that you get the product you need to be able to work in this part of Denmark. And you will pay for that because it gives you value. So we also need to make sure that we look into the right data.
Francesca (44:48)
I do think that a lot of people are measuring time spent on pages, which is our biggest thing. And yet sometimes, you get the value without having to spend the entire time on the page.
Kevin (44:57)
And we’re still doing it. I’m still doing it. It’s just an edit. We can also see in data that the more you use the product, the better your CLV will be, the better you’re more likely to convert. You’re more likely to stay. So of course, there’s something there. But it’s still funny. If you ask people and you get a qualitative answers, they want to save time. What they are missing is time.
These are people working with kids. They have busy lives. People are really busy. There’s a lot of studies of these things now that are interesting that actually people have, it was an American study last year, they have like 32 hours on a day because they have a lot of split screening and they can listen while doing something else.
So that’s why you need to tap in. And if we only do text, it’s going to be difficult because you need to put everything else aside and only focus on the text. Can we be audio? Can we be video? Can we be relevant in another way?
There will be an upside down actually gaining people’s time instead of just as we see now, people going to Facebook or going to other places to spend their time. Netflix.
Francesca (46:14)
And what about, what about any pitfalls or challenges that have come up in that audience engagement? Have you tried anything that hasn’t gone the way you’d expect, that was a bit of a fail potentially?
In our world, I don’t feel like we talk enough about our failures. I think we’re so good at saying, we did this really well. We can say the failures of the industry, but not necessarily anything that we’ve done wrong. Have you got any challenges to share with me on that?
Kevin (46:48)
Well, we’ve done loads. We’ve done loads wrong. I do believe in general, I believe in experimenting. So I really want to create a culture where it’s okay to fail because I think that’s what we need.
It’s not a failure yet, but it didn’t have the reaction. We had an expert on relationships and sex start to write for us. People could write in with questions. And this part of the moral part of Denmark we’re in now, people really don’t like to talk about feelings.
But I thought maybe, you do it anonymously. And we had this expert who was a therapist. So she was talking to these people about feelings, which I just thought was a really fun dilemma and tried to kind of create a platform on Instagram where we could get a conversation around feelings, relationships, sex up and running.
It hasn’t really panned out because people don’t like to talk about feelings and sex and relationships. So that’s for sure. I wouldn’t say a failure yet. We’re still trying, but that was a bit more difficult than I hoped.
I came in with a lot of data inside for my old job, and I just thought that I could plug and play. Local journalism is different from national journalism.
It’s another community, other people, the other feelings I was talking about. So there’s a lot of stories, a lot of ways of doing things which haven’t worked out.
So topics, ways of writing stories, telling stories that just failed and haven’t had the readership that I would expect.
And it’s just because I didn’t understand my readers well enough and thought I could mechanically take the learnings from my old job and just say, we can just do this and it will work.
Some of it did, but a lot of it didn’t. So that’s a lot of failures, a lot of mistakes, a lot of things. But again, they’re not mistakes. It just didn’t work, do something else.
So for me, the important thing is that we don’t wait and use half a year to invest and then see like a big epiphany.
If that fails, then you have a big issue. I want to experiment all the time and really want to create that culture where people know it’s okay to fail as long as they learn. I agree so much with you.
I hope we can be better at sharing the failures or the mistakes or the things we wish we’d been doing differently. We both love conferences. I think it’s one of our biggest issues with these conferences, is that people go up and use half an hour to explain why they’re so brilliant.
And we would all learn a lot more if people went on stage and used half an hour to tell what they did wrong. That’s where a lot of learning would be. But I also understand the mechanics. I’ve been doing the conference as well, been on the stage, and I did the same thing. Double standards.
Francesca (49:43)
I want to celebrate your failure though. Well, I say failure, it’s not failed yet, but I want to celebrate it because to be fair, that’s the kind of thing that I probably would think would work as well.
But obviously hyperlocal, I love this difference, this experience that you have from working with a national brand to going into a much smaller place and working with a hyperlocal and the differences that you’re finding because we do go to these conferences and we do hear about all of these success stories that other people are doing. And here we are, learning it completely differently.
And I guess, it’s the audience engagement that also teaches us if this is going to be relevant to our audience, because every audience, every community is slightly different. Everyone’s expecting something slightly differently. And so I’m celebrating your failure.
Kevin (50:48)
But again, for local, one of the things that I also still believe, is the right thing we’re doing, but it is different, is that people expect local journalism. I call it kind of a postcode journalism where you do stories just because it happened somewhere.
It’s not necessarily a good story, a relevant story or even an interesting story, but you do it because it happened down the road. And I think that kind of journalism is going to be very difficult in the long run to create enough. It can be too hyper local but it still needs to be relevant stories that people actually find interesting, and I think we need to develop there.
And the letterbox example is just, if you only go after postcodes, it’s difficult to talk about relationships because that’s something completely different.
But looking at 30 to 55 year olds, who want to be more engaged in our journalism.
I mean, they are parents, they work, they are in a relationship or not, divorced or whatever.
These things are huge for them and for us. And not being able to tap into that those kind of stories just because we’re local, I think that’s wrong.
We need to make sure it’s done in a way that connects with our community. done in a way that’s, yeah, that’s more, see eye to eye with them and not just generically, which could be done anywhere in the country or the world. So that’s what we’re, I’m trying to get to work. And then we’re still doing local politics, local sports, a lot of other things.
Kevin (52:46)
So it’s only just a small fraction of what we do, but we’ve never been doing it. It’s difficult to do because it’s not natural for local news brand to do that. But I think it’s part of being relevant.
Francesca (53:01)
I like that. And last questions really, what impact has any of your audience engagement efforts had so far on the organisation’s bottom line, or is that still something that you’re playing with?
Kevin (53:19)
We’re still playing with it. We see the bottom line is more the disconnect to the audience, to be honest. And that’s where I can say whatever we do with journalism, and we can keep on doing a lot of journalistic choices every day, but the disconnect is really important that we find a connection.
There’s a disconnect right now between the audience and I would say news brands in general, but also with us as a local brand and that connection we need to find out what is in a digital world and in a world of the 21st century, what is the connection?
It’s not just that we have a newspaper that can bring you information. It’s something more and more profound than that. And really figuring out what is that connection.
I think I agree with you there. That connection cannot be copy pasted. That is a connection you need to find out with your audience where you are. There’s probably a lot of strategies around it that we can help each other with.
What is it that makes us stand out? And that’s the other side of the story. What works? That’s one thing. That’s the relevance. And then what stands out is what makes us gives us the differentiation that we actually are important, that we’re not just another news brand and we are something special.
And that connection should be possible for a local brand because it’s kind of in the DNA that we are local and something for our local region.
But we need to be better at doing it, showing it, marketing it. Walk the walk instead of just talking the talk as we’re doing now.
Francesca (55:27)
Well, it’s exciting to do walking. You can only go up. I’m an eternal optimist. I actually think that the situation that we’re in at the moment, yes, is dire in a lot of senses but it’s an exciting moment to revamp.
Kevin (55:47)
It is.
And we need to keep some things. I mean, the business model has died. That doesn’t mean that the same story is for journalism. I mean, need to not, the dire is that we don’t have money right now. Our revenue is declining, it’s difficult, so we need to do something else with the journalism to figure out what is the future business model. But just saying because the business model is dead, that there’s no hope for journalism. Maybe I’m a bit of an optimist as well there, but I don’t believe that you can say that. It doesn’t mean that it’s not difficult and business model dying can be really serious for companies, of course, if you’re not able to develop.
But saying that journalism has died because the business model has, that’s wrong. This journalism is more more important and maybe more important than ever because the amount, you said technology, the amount of information that’s out there, fake news. The need for trustworthy independent media outlets has never been more important.
We just need to maintain, make sure that we are trustworthy and keep keeping that and then market ourselves and show that we are important.
Francesca (57:24)
I love that. And I think I’ll finish on that one there. Two eternal optimists talking about how important journalism is. Thank you so much for your time, Kevin. It was fantastic.