September 4, 2024
Driving subscriber retention: How hands-on, in-person support to local newsrooms helps NTM achieve their north star goal
This is a case about how a Swedish local news group drew a straight line from their ambitious goal for digital subscriber growth to the daily work in the local newsrooms required to achieve it. NTM’s process involves everything from measuring how subscribers consume the content on site, to taking “friendly swat teams” on the road to help local newsrooms turn the findings into even better stories that keep readers coming back for more.​
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Presented by: Jens Pettersson, Head of Editorial Development, NTM
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By Cecilia Campbell
Editorial development – the bridge between strategy and daily work
The first question I asked Jens Pettersson as we were introducing the webinar was why he, who was the managing editor at one of NTM’s largest titles, Upsala Nya Tidning, at the time, decided to leave the excitement of daily newsroom work and instead head up editorial develop centrally. It was 2020, and media companies around the world were shifting to reader revenues – not least in Scandinavia. “My boss told me that digital subscriptions was our main focus and we talked a lot about it. But there was no real support for this strategy on the local level. We did not work together as a media group as well as we could have done, there was no analysis or link to the daily work. So, to be transparent, I switched jobs because I had a lot of frustration with this situation – which I made clear to my colleagues and bosses in the company.”
Before Jens took over as head of editorial development, the team had been focused on product development, CMS functionality and similarly technical aspects of editorial work. In 2020 there was a clear shift to a focus on the journalistic work – an area where the local newsrooms had until then worked in isolation. “We quickly realised that if we wanted to be successful in digital subscriptions and evolve our journalism to connect closer to our audience, we needed to help each newsroom out. Some of them are quite large, but some have just a handful of reporters – and in such small organisations it’s really hard to stay on top of everything.”
Jens pointed out there was a balancing act between implementing the strategy to achieve company wide goals and maintaining individual newsroom’s independence. “You need to set up goals and reach them – you need to have progress to be successful. But at the same time, you cannot be successful as a media group unless you have alignment and passion from everyone working in the company. You can't just set a fancy strategy and create nice PowerPoints and then just tell newsrooms to sort it out.”
“This is what I will be talking about today – how you can run a strategic change program at a central level, but doing it together with the newsrooms and actually take hand with them and help them out in a good way.”
NTM Group
NTM Group operating 17 local newsrooms in the north and east of Sweden. The group employs some 320 journalists, with the bigger newsrooms having as many as 40–50 reporters, and the smallest ones 4–5. The group has a total of 260,000 subscribers, 113,000 of whom are digital only. NTM titles reach 70% of people in their local geographies. The group has an annual turnover of €180 million.
Setting the scene: 2020–2023 – a focus on WHAT journalism to produce
In 2020, NTM set a north star goal for its reader revenue drive – to double its digital subscriber base from 55,000 to 110,000 in three years. The "Let's get ready to Double!" project was launched, and to get it off the ground, Jens and his team took inspiration from local media group Amedia in neighbouring Norway. Amedia had developed a methodology around measuring readers' engagement in relation to the type of content produced by local newsrooms. In other words, they had worked out the correlation between the topics covered and reader conversions.
NTM deployed Amedia's methodology, and after analysing content consumption across the group's news titles, identified seven topics that should be prioritised: Breaking news, Crime and legal punishment ,”What's happening in the city”, Real estate, Work life, Health and medical care and Family life. They developed what Jens referred to as a "simple journalistic strategy", with three basic components:
• Produce fewer but better stories
• Focus on the seven prioritised topics
• Focus on 30–50 year olds – what NTM considers a young audience
"And from the very beginning we had the mindset that strategic moves like these need to have a focus on creating change in the daily work between editor and reporter. We need to give newsroom editors tools and make sure they can have a proper conversation with reporters about the business of journalism and how to improve," said Jens. The tools included a check-list for how to cover a story as well as editorial dashboards which were open to everyone and included simple ways to translate the numbers into insights for reporters. For example, any story achieving a CTR of 50% or more in the desired 30–50 age group are marked with a green star.
Let's get ready to Double yielded strong results, particularly early on in the pandemic years. By the end of 2023 NTM had reached 102,000 digital subscribers, and the group hit the goal of 110,000 by March 2024. At which point it was time to decide on a new north star – 250,000 digital subscribers. And with the new goal came a shift in focus...
2024 – a focus on HOW the journalism is done, a k a Sharpening Daily Work
So how do you even begin a journey towards 250,000? As it turns out there was a fairly obvious starting place. When Jens and his team looked at the numbers for 2023, they saw that the group had indeed poured 104,687 digital subscribers into their subscription bucket. But over the same period they had lost 92,210 digital subscriptions. The focus thereby shifted: "We need to produce really good content in video, text and podcasts that actually engage the audience and makes them feel they get value for money. That is the focus for newsrooms, not driving conversions and finding new customers."
"And in order to really create value for customers and to make subscribers feel that they get good journalism, we initiated an initiative called Sharpen Daily Work – and it's very simple for us. We have done so much talking over recent years about WHAT to do and setting the strategies clear. But we have realized that we also need to have conversations about HOW it should be done – and help newsrooms evaluate their work and do better."
​To this end, the NTM editorial development team developed the idea of Friendly SWAT teams to support each of the newsrooms with the particular opportunities and challenges they face.
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The Process
1. The process starts with an on-site meeting between members of Jens' team and the editor-in-chief at the local title, asking questions like "What do you lack today?" "What do you need help with?" "What are your challenges?" and "What do you need from us?"
2. The editorial development team then does an editorial audit; a deep dive into one week of production.
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3. The audit insights are brought into a 24 hour physical meeting with the local editorial team, where the teams together do a situation overview and analysis. "We do workshops, talk a lot and identify problems as well as the good stuff. It's very important that we have a balanced kind of feedback loop in this."
4. The outcome of the 24 hour workshop is a joint action plan including at least three action points to boost the title. The action plan is different for every newsroom, and the relevant expertise is brought in from the editorial development team depending on the needs of the particular title.
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5. Each newsroom goes through a fairly intense three month period of meetings, evaluations and workshops, see below example:
"We always begin with analysis and a situational overview in order to make sure that we are all on the same page regarding how this newsroom actually performs right now. Some newsrooms think they are really good and for them some of the conclusions could be disappointing . Some people have low self-esteem and some newsrooms really need a boost which they get if they see in the numbers that they actually compare well to some of the bigger titles."
Workshops to sharpen daily work
As I noted, each newsroom goes through workshops aligned with its particular needs. Jens described some of the topics of conversation.
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Back to Basics – Why are Quotes Important
"It's important for our reporters to meet ordinary people. Do not just get stuck with those authority representatives that give the official view. Bring ordinary people into the conversation on your websites. It's also important for our journalists to bear in mind that there are no compulsory jobs that the have to do. You actually have the choice to decide what you as a reporter fill your frame with.".
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"If you have a good quote, we can promote the work more easily on the front page and better engage our users."
​Capturing Scrollers on the Home Page
80% of NTM's readers consume the content on mobile. "They will only click and read the article if you catch their eye. We need to get closer. This workshop is focused on how do you actually drive click-through rate. You need to be very thorough on having emotions, clarity, angle, details, and drama."
Central team and editors getting closers and other bonuses for the group
Jens talked about the bonuses the Sharpen Daily Work has produced so far:
• It reduces the distance between NTM and the local editors. "We get closer to managers and employees, which facilitates contact and coaching."
• There is no unclear "You have to go digital" strategy. "Our feedback is concrete because we do the audit from the editor's own content."
• The different newsrooms tend to have the same challenges. "It helps us direct our work so that we get the best hits on efforts that help the titles to maximize the journalism and thus the business."
• The physical meetings help identify hidden culture in the work place. "There may be existing culture and work practices that are not measurable but make it difficult for editorial staff to succeed. And we can help them manage that."
• A playbook for good local journalism. "We acquire a lot of best practice. We get many examples of working methods and situations that other titles can copy."
Results and next steps
The Sharpen Daily Work initiative is already showing positive results. The image below shows pageviews: The dark green are subscriber pageviews this year, the light green is the same KPI for 2023 (blue is pageviews from users that are not logged-in).
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"We started out this spring and we see positive development in all these newsrooms on the KPIs that we follow. So that gives us the courage and strength to proceed with this effort. And it helps us particularly when visiting the larger newsrooms to have this kind of documented validity or value of the process and to show them that it's meaningful to have this kind of conversation," said Jens.
Next up for the NTM editorial development team is to take the next logical step from the HOW of journalism, as the team starts the work to implement the user needs model, as developed by the BBC a few years back. "Creating value for customers – that's the main part of our strategy at the moment. That is the most important take-away I send with you today."
And as far as the newsroom goes, the take-away from the NTM case is that in order to implement strategy and achieve goals, you need to focus on creating change in the actual daily work between editor and reporter. If you don't do that, then all the editorial development work in the world will be of little use.
Useful links and contact information
The webinar slide deck can be downloaded here.
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Presenter Jens Pettersson can be reached on Jens.Pettersson@ntmmedia.se
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NTM's corporate website is here
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Links to a couple of the NTM local news sites:
Upsala Nya Tidning
Corren
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Feel free to contact the Innovate Local team with questions or tips of other cases on editorial development: Cecilia Campbell c.campbell@wan-ifra.org and Niklas Jonason, n.jonason@wan-ifra.org