Our special guest, Markus Rask Jensen, Director of News at Amedia, shares their ‘digital-first’ transformation, giving us an insider’s perspective on shifting Amedia’s focus from simply ‘producing important journalism’ to ‘producing important journalism that people actually read and subscribe to’. His candid insight? “If we don’t engage with our audience, we are going to die”.
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:
Hi, Marcus. Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about engagement. As you know, I work at Contribly – we work with local, hyper local, B2B brands looking at what engagement means. We work with brands that are frustrated because most of their engagement might be happening on social media, or they’re struggling to convert readers into subscribers. Maybe looking at high levels of churn, or possibly unsure how to build relevance and trust in their brand. We solve this by looking specifically at community engagement.
As part of this work, we’re exploring the definition of what engagement means because in our industry, so many brands see it differently. Many people and individuals within teams define engagement in very different ways. We’re trying to define what engagement means, and part of that is exploring what people believe it is for them. You have amazing experience around this topic and you’re data driven as well. I’m really excited to hear more about that. Would you please start by sharing who you are, and where you work?
Markus
Thanks so much for having me. I’m the Director of News in Amedia in Norway, which is basically a publisher that owns about 109 local newspapers – which is the last I counted – our CEO tends to buy one or two from time to time! We’re spread all over Norway, which is a long country. So we’re quite decentralised in terms of newsrooms, but all supporting functions are located in Oslo, where I work. I’ve been Director of News for about a year. Before that I was an editor in two local newspapers in Northern Norway and a journalist.
I’m in charge of two things – editorial development and editorial product development. To put it simply, the first part of that is basically interactions with humans and the second part is interactions with technology and product development.
Francesca
Your experience is so relevant to this subject because I think on one side, engagement is definitely about people and on the other side, it is about the products that you use to do engagement. So you’re the perfect person to be talking to about this. My first question to you is, what does audience engagement mean to you?
Markus
I think at its core, audience engagement means how much value people extract out of the products they use or engage with. If I were to construct the perfect measure of audience engagement, that would be it. Obviously, that’s really difficult to measure. So our approach is basically how close we can get that’s also easy to understand on every level in our company, from CEO level all the way down to each journalist that goes to work every day to provide stories for the local communities.
Francesca
So would you say the definition should be the same from CEO all the way down to your local journalists in your experience?
Markus
Ideally it should be, but obviously the metrics you look at probably shouldn’t be the same. So our philosophy is simplifying the metrics and distilling them into something that’s the core of what drives engagement and use and thereby also drives the experience from the user’s perspective.
Francesca
How would you say your definition has changed? How has your definition of audience engagement evolved in the past few years?
Markus
I should explain my background as a journalist because when I started working as a journalist, I started in a print-only monthly magazine, which didn’t really have a website, – or at least one that was updated. So it wasn’t online. And we started an online newspaper as late as 2013. At first, that was a free-site model. Our way of measuring engagement or the use of our products was how many page views and how many unique users do Google Analytics tell us that we have.
So we were pretty much blind in terms of engagement and metrics at that point. And when you measure these kinds of short term statistics or when you measure engagement, in such a short-term way, you’re driven to make different choices and produce different journalism.
This became very clear when we decided to put our content behind the paywall. Overnight, the way we thought about producing content changed because the metrics we were driven by changed from flat page views to how many subscribers we had which in my humble opinion provided a better platform to make journalistic choices because the journalism that’s valuable enough for me to subscribe to is a different kind of journalism to the ‘free’ journalism I’m inclined to perhaps have a peek at now and again. So that was a really interesting experience to be a part of.
Francesca
Before we talk about measuring, what would you say the aims of audience engagement within the strategy are? What are they delivering on? What’s the end goal in your opinion?
Markus
The end goal is to ensure that you provide value for your customers. That should be the starting point. If not, I can’t really see the point in measuring audience engagement if that’s not your goal. Value can be several things. It depends on several factors, like your business models, or your content, or your profile. At its core, I think it’s how close can you get to measuring the actual value you provide for your customers – that is the gist of it.
Francesca
In a sense, I’m guessing you’re saying it’s ‘relevance’ in some way. That’s hard to measure.
Markus
Absolutely. And certainly in terms of news providers, I would say relevance is a really, really precise word to describe what you’re trying to achieve.
Francesca
And measuring that? What do you do at the moment to measure relevance?
Markus
We measure a lot of things and we get a lot of data and a lot of really well structured data. But what we measure and what we capture in terms of data is an entirely different thing to what we’re looking at when we’re evaluating performance. In our newsrooms we have a couple of key metrics. One of them is what you could call ‘top stories’, which are basically stories that reach a minimum threshold in terms of readership amongst our subscribers. That’s the way we’ve chosen to do that kind of metric. We are subscription driven and about 70 % of our economy is based on subscriptions, so that’s obviously why we’ve chosen that approach.
We also measure and follow really closely how much use do our subscribers get out of their subscription, both in terms of daily usage, which is the main KPI, but also a bit more sophisticated than that. For instance, we have a podcast platform where weekly usage is more relevant than daily usage and so forth. But basically, we’re trying to measure usage.
We also try to enrich those usage numbers with, for instance, not average reading time, but reader scores or reader metrics, which try to explain, ‘have you really read this article?’ or have you scrolled past it or through it? We try to enrich our data and our KPIs with metrics that tell us or get us a bit closer to really evaluate if you experience value out of what you consume, because consumption and engagement or consumption and satisfaction isn’t the same thing necessarily. At its core it’s those two things that we really focus on.
The reason for that is how closely linked that is with our churn numbers. So when we get users to return to our products, often they don’t churn. It’s pretty much as simple as that. So that’s our method of measuring what you would call ‘relevance’.
Francesca
So a massive focus on habit building with your readers. And obviously engagement isn’t easy. It’s not something that just comes to everyone. You have to work on it. What would you say are the biggest hurdles in your experience? What’s stopping brands from engaging better?
Markus
I think one of the things that’s been really difficult for the news industry at least is to split focus between the print operations and the digital operations because you don’t really have a sense of, or can’t measure precisely, the engagement in the print product, but suddenly you can measure it quite precisely in terms of digital products.
In our case it turned out that the content we produced didn’t really feel relevant in the digital world. So that’s been a big hurdle for us – trying to shift the culture in the way that the most important thing is building digital engagement, and not focusing on what was at the time the main contributor to our economy, which was print.
Now it’s turned around. Now we’ve got the 60-40 split in terms of digital revenue. By working really hard on that for 10 years. We’ve not ignored the print product, but it’s been a byproduct of what we do digitally. And we’ve shifted the entire focus from producing things for print to producing things digitally.
It sounds quite easy, but in terms of getting a newsroom to first of all, agree with that notion, and secondly, to actually follow through with it. It’s quite hard. And we’ve kept at it for years. And we’ve worked with a number of quite primitive measures. For instance, our CEO, who was an old editor in one of our biggest newspapers, actually blocked the access to the print operations desk where they put together the printed version of the newspaper. He did not allow the journalists to go in there. He put his desk in the way and basically stopped them physically, just to ensure that they didn’t run to the print desk to change the headline, or do some editing specifically for print.
So there’s been a combination of that kind of method as well as the method of measuring what you do really concisely and precisely and acting on what you find. For us I think the main reason why we managed to shift is that we could prove that it worked. So when we started doing this, we could measure it precisely. I think that’s another main hurdle that many stumble upon. They can’t really show the effect of the cultural shift they’re trying to achieve, which then makes it really difficult to enforce that message.
I think that’s the main barrier for a lot of brands.
Francesca
I absolutely love that example – a little physical change in the buildings that you’re in, as well as proving that the change that you’re trying to make is working. It makes so much sense. What would you say has proven the most effective way of engaging audiences so far?
Markus
It’s the simple notion that we managed to establish a company-wide goal that extends all the way down to the journalists in terms of what are you trying to achieve when you go to work. You don’t really have to tell a journalist why they go to work, right? They’ve got strong ideals and they’ve got quite strong ideas about why they do what they do. So you don’t really need to work on that side of the motivation.
What we’ve worked on is: ”Okay, your motivation as a journalist is to write important stories, I get that. Are they important if they don’t reach people?” I don’t think journalism that people don’t read is important. So we’ve shifted the objective from producing ‘important journalism’ to producing ‘important journalism, and to get people to actually consume it’, which is different from the first objective.
By doing that, we’ve made every journalist responsible for that part of the journalistic process – the editorial process. They can’t really fling a copy to the editor and say: “go ahead, try to work with this”. Every day our journalists receive reports in their inbox which show the metrics for the stories they’ve produced. They can closely follow how their content has performed. Not just in the paper they’re a part of, but even in other papers where that story has been published as well. So for journalists, it’s quite easy to understand. What are your objectives when you go to work? Well, I need to reach this threshold with the stories I produce. And if I don’t reach those thresholds, I need to perhaps have a rethink about which sources to interview, what’s my angle, what’s my approach to the story?
That has had a really wide effect on the newsroom – getting people to start thinking in that way about the journalistic mission, so to speak.
Francesca
That one goal, the single mindedness, that’s impressive because I think that clarity helps teams definitely come together. The question around that is, at what point in the process of creating the news or within the newsroom are you considering the audience engagement aspect? How does that take shape day -to -day? What are the questions that people are asking themselves?
Markus
This is the part where the Editorial Development Team, set up in 2016, has played a vital role. This is an internal team of consultants travelling around the whole of Norway visiting newsrooms, putting on workshops, sparring with editors, everything you could imagine.
It’s like an internal consultant group. These people are former editors or journalists that are really motivated to develop journalism in itself. What we’ve tried to achieve is to make every newsroom responsible for putting audience engagement not just at a point in the journalistic process, but at the start, middle and end.
The ideal journalistic process in a lot of our newsrooms is that the first conversation you have with your editor when you’re pitching a story, ‘I want to write about this’. Okay, but how are you going to make that engaging? How are you going to get people to actually want to read this? Is this the right angle to achieve that? Do we think this can reach a younger audience, if that’s your goal? What might we change even before we start researching or doing interviews to ensure that we think this is going to hit the mark. And the nice thing about this is because we have so much historical data, our news editors are really good at identifying what a certain story needs in terms of other sources or other perspectives to engage with the audience. They know their audience really, really well. And that’s because we have precise and democratised data, which we’ve not only told them about, but we have integrated into their workflow as well.
Francesca
It’s a super user-centric model that you’re talking about where the users are at the forefront of everything. Have you got any examples of a time where that’s been really successful or one that you can remember where maybe even surprised you because it was slightly different to what you were expecting the outcome to be?
Markus
I suppose the single most effective change we made in terms of metrics and using metrics in a newsroom was when we established the Top Stories KPI. Because what we basically wanted to achieve was a KPI that every journalist could understand easily and work towards in their daily work. That also creates the effect that we want, which is that people use our products as often as possible. We found that the number of top stories in a given title correlated very very closely to daily usage numbers, which in turn drives the subscriptions numbers. So if you put those three graphs on top of each other, in our titles over the last seven or eight years, they would almost look like the exact same graph. So the more top or broad stories you produce each day, the more user engagement you get each day, then the users return. That way, you build digital subscriptions.
When you can prove that correlation, it becomes a really easy thing to sell to your editors and it gives them the tools to work with in their newsrooms. I think the most noticeable single change we did was finding that KPI and then using that everywhere. We’ve done that since 2019 and to this day, it’s still our most central KPI in newsrooms.
Francesca
You sound extremely advanced when it comes to that data side. Have you ever had a moment where something has surprised you in terms of engagement? Like maybe one of those top stories was something you weren’t expecting, but now that you’re measuring it, it looks different.
Markus
We’re trying to evolve and develop our metrics all the time to fit better with what we’re trying to achieve. For instance, at the moment we’re trying to find the right metrics to drive video engagement, which turns out to be quite a different thing to text -based articles.
We tried to do what I know a lot of other actors have implemented, which was a more advanced KPI to measure not just usage, but also satisfaction level or engagement level. We tried an engagement score, which was several things combined into one which we thought would be an easy one to follow for the journalists and the editors. But what actually happened was suddenly we broke the link to the journalists because they didn’t understand how their work could influence that metric. In terms of broad stories, that really is easy to understand. If I write one or two each day, we have one or two more broad stories every day. Quite easy to understand.
When we put together the engagement score, our journalists suddenly didn’t really understand how their stories influenced the KPI. So we broke that link. The production dropped in every newsroom. Instead of trying to write or provide a ‘mixed buffet’, so to speak, to the readers and as broad a perspective as possible with as many different stories as possible, the journalists started to write stories that were meant to keep hold of the readers as long as possible on an individual level. So we produced much longer articles and a lot fewer articles, which in turn then dropped our readership numbers and our engagement on an overall level for each title. That really surprised me because the metric itself was quite precise. It measured exactly what we wanted it to measure, but it influenced the way journalists worked in a way we didn’t anticipate. We had to backtrack on that, which was quite painful for a lot of people in my team who had worked closely with it.
Another thing we’re really good at measuring is the total production and comparing that to the number of stories where we’ve reached those thresholds. We talk a lot about whether we write stories that go over or below the threshold. Our percentage of stories below the threshold also exponentially increased because of this new KPI, because if you write one story a week, then it probably needs to be pretty good to get the same level of engagement from the same number of people as if you write five or six or seven stories a week. And if you miss on that one story a week, then your week is basically gone. We didn’t anticipate that effect.
We wanted to inspire the newsrooms to try to be a bit more ambitious with the journalism and it backfired.
Francesca
That’s a really interesting example. Not enough brands are potentially looking at it the way that you do. Your role is also product, and obviously the technology that you use to convey those messages to your journalists is very important. What kind of role do you see for AI in engagement? Is it mainly data focused? What does that look like on the product side?
Markus
Product is divided into two – the products that engage with our newsrooms and our employees and the products that engage with the users. If you’re asking about the first of those parts, then obviously we want to democratise our data, but we want to be really particular about what kind of data we show to our journalists.
We want to show them insights, not numbers. So we’ve got what we call the Pulse dashboard, which has all the central KPIs and it’s a way to show the daily reports that are running all the time. That’s on the news title level. There are also individual reports for each journalist, which centres around their content with some quite concise metrics like click -through rates and reader scores and those kinds of things. Our ‘North Star,’ or guiding light series is to try and make it as accessible and as easy as possible for a journalist to understand and also to build it into their workflow. So that’s the two principles we use for that.
Francesca
How do you deal with negative audience feedback when it’s coming back and it’s not working? Culturally, that must be quite difficult. How do you approach that to make your journalists feel like they can get to that next step?
Markus
One of the things we’ve experimented quite a lot with is what should the threshold for a broad story be? You could obviously put that threshold quite high and the journalist wouldn’t achieve it as often. I don’t think that would work really well. So we experiment quite a lot with that so that it’s an achievable threshold. So about 10 % of the subscribers in a given title is the threshold level approximately for most of our titles. That’s one way we’ve experimented. Another way we try to deal with this is to provide analysis about why it hasn’t worked.
In 2016, when we established the ED team, one of the first interesting findings was that stories about local culture were really low in terms of readership. And a simple conclusion to that would be to write less of it, which isn’t really what you want from a local newspaper. So instead, we try to delve into the stories that we did produce and find the kind of stories within that field that actually were well read and try to identify what are the main ingredients of the stories that do really well. We’ve done a lot of that kind of analysis, on a newspaper by newspaper level. It’s quite a typical request from our newspapers. Can you have a look at our sports content? It doesn’t really perform well. What can we do with it?
The nice thing is we’ve got 109 newsrooms which experiment a lot and try to solve all these problems, so there’s probably two or three or four that have met these problems before which they then can talk to. All of this drives this sharing culture between our newsrooms, which is one of the main reasons why I think it’s fun to work in our company because a lot of our newsrooms are competitors, but not directly in terms of their geographical location. There’s not really that kind of rivalry going on. It’s more, what can we learn from each other? And if someone has done anything clever, and for instance, now we’re focusing on video, then if one news title finds a solution and starts to perform well, then the others want to beat them. It’s healthy competition. When we’re not succeeding, we try to look at the problem more deeply and find out what we should be doing on a quite detailed level.
Francesca
If you have to measure the importance of engagement in your world, as you see it at the moment, one being the lowest of importance, ten being the highest, where would you rate engagement in the overall picture of what you do?
Markus
In a philosophical sense, I would say it’s existential. If we don’t engage with our audience, we’re going to die. It’s that simple. And Norway is one of the few countries that have really succeeded in shifting to a digital first strategy in the local news market. There’s a strong culture for supporting your local news titles in Norway, but you don’t really see the same kind of engagement from the younger generation. If we don’t succeed in engaging audiences, and engaging new audiences as well, then obviously we’re going to die because our philosophy is centred around the local newspaper being the glue that keeps a society together. If you don’t engage your customers and your audience, you’re going to lose that function. And if you lose that function, I think you’re losing your right to exist.
Francesca
The younger demographic is always something that comes up. What would you define as young people? Because there’s so many definitions of that for newsrooms.
Markus
So I’m glad to report that I’m certainly in the young age group in terms of how we measure it. So for us, it’s under 40. The main audience we’re trying to work directly towards at the moment is people that have just had kids and settled down a place and are starting to engage with their local communities.
Those are the kinds of people we are focusing on in terms of converting or having as subscribers and customers. But we have growing concerns about the position of the newspaper. Not just in terms of an economical sense, but when I grew up, for instance, the newspaper was a part of my going home and finding it on the kitchen table. I had sort of a relationship with it, even though I probably didn’t read much. I’m not so sure that relationship in the digital world is going to keep us strong if we do nothing. So we’ve tried to experiment quite a lot with that. I think one of the things that we are going to venture into, and that’s going to be key, is to accept that we probably need to give away a lot more of our content to the younger generation than we have been doing before. We’re currently exploring the possibility of giving access to younger audiences for a very cheap sum of money, or no money at all in some instances, which I think is a step towards this. It’s not going to be enough in itself because we’re not really a natural destination for the growing generation as we have been in the past. We need to provide a reason for the upcoming generations to start to forge that relationship with us.
There’s some light at the end of this tunnel. I think a role we could play in the digital world of today is providing a safe place to engage with other people in a community. That role is never going to be taken by TikTok or Facebook or other kinds of platforms. They’re not going to do that.
So perhaps there’s a space where we could create a more pleasant place to spend time as a young reader of content or young consumer of content.
Francesca
I am so on the same page with you with that. I think our audience don’t necessarily see the difference between social media and the news, whereas we can see a massive difference. So it’s aligning our product for them to understand that it is something different. And potentially being that safe space, I’m definitely in agreement with that.
You’ve responded to my next question already – where do you see audience engagement heading in the next five to 10 years? Would you like to add anything to what you’ve just said?
Markus
Yes, I think a challenge for everyone who’s going to consume content in the next decade is going to be to understand what is real content and what’s not in terms of the opportunities opening up now with artificial intelligence and the challenges that come with that. I think a really important position for us as a news business to take is to be the guardians of truth and I think a smart thing to do would be to shift focus from competing in terms of amount of content more towards competing in terms of the amount of truthful and verified, validated content. That is going to be something that the younger audiences will have a really active relationship with. That’s an important position for us to take.
Francesca
In this new world of AI, a lot of things are going to change. And a lot of it is potentially a branding piece that we need to work on as publishers and as news brands. What about the impact this increased engagement that you’ve created, this new data-centric, user-centric model – how has that impacted your organisation’s bottom line or brand loyalty?
Markus
Well, the bottom line is, I could show you a couple of graphs. When we started this project in 2014, the user engagement project, which we called it, the print products were basically dying. We cut, I think, half a billion Norwegian kroner in costs. Quite a substantial amount of money. I think we cut about 500 journalists from our then 60 or so newspapers out of necessity. That was also a real trigger to doing something different. At the time we had no digital subscribers. We had basically print subscribers, we had print revenue and we had some digital revenue which we realised was never going to make up for the loss of print revenue. Since then, we have gone from zero digital subscribers to about 750,000 at the time of speaking, which is quite a lot in a country of five and a half million people.
And as I said, 60 % of our revenue is digital. In terms of our profits, we have returned profits the last five or six years of about 12 -13 percent, so we’re in a really healthy place. We’ve got no debts now, which also is nice. We’re owned by a foundation, which is probably an important part of the story because their purpose is to protect journalism. It’s not to earn money for shareholders. We have been allowed to earn money and then reinvest it into our products and our company. The main driving factor behind this change is our relation to data and our consciousness about using data. That’s the main thing that has really driven this change. Without that, it wouldn’t be possible.
Francesca
If you were going to offer one piece of advice to other hyperlocal news brands if they were starting on a similar journey to yours, what would that be?
Markus
Find a way to get your audience logged into your products. Find an incentive for them to log in and provide you with a direct relation to them. You remember BuzzFeed, which wasn’t a pleasant story. We’ve not seen that many stories that are that extreme, but we’ve seen similar, even in Norway, which is quite a media-friendly market to operate in, we’ve seen publishers go all-in on third -party distribution without control, without really knowing your audience. So the first advice I would say is find a way to get to know your audience even better. And as I alluded to earlier in the interview, I don’t really think Google Analytics does the trick. You need to be slightly more direct in your relationship than that.
Francesca
Absolutely love that, I can’t agree more. Thank you so much for your time Marcus. That was super insightful and I really appreciate all you have shared with us!