5 case studies on navigating sustained newsroom transformation

Change must be an ongoing process, and perhaps the biggest mistake you can make is to get stuck in the old ways. Publishers need to learn new ways of actively experimenting – and learning from those experiments – to find new, effective ways of engaging audiences, improving workflows and creating relevant products for new and existing readers.

This is where WAN-IFRA‘s Table Stakes Europe program comes in to equip publishers with audiences-first tools and strategies that help them adopt new practices and develop new products.

From their latest report, this article highlights 5 case studies on European publishers successfully navigating sustained newsroom transformation, from building a B2B product and attracting a younger, female audience to launching a Swiftie newsletter.

Neue Westfälische, Germany: Reshaping workflows and editorial strategies with a focus on audiences and AI

Publisher profile:
Based in Bielefeld, Zeitungsverlag Neue Westfälische covers Ostwestfalen-Lippe, a German region with 2 million people in 800,000 households. In 2023, working with Table Stakes Europe, they'd grown their digital subscribers to 40,000 and were focused on improving their digital products, their newsletter strategy and attracting new audiences and advertising.

The goal: Increase digital subscriptions to 47,000 by the end of 2024

How did they plan to do this?

Put user needs at the heart of their content strategy to increase media time and decrease the amount of underperforming content
Integrate AI into their workflows to optimize engagement and retain customers who are willing to pay.

1. User needs:

“We focus on our audience as well as on specific user needs. To meet these needs, we have introduced new functional roles to help us implement this approach,” says Andrea Rolfes, Deputy Editor-in-Chief at NW.

Restructuring the newsroom and more data-driven approaches
Introducing new workflows and sprints. This resulted in faster implementation of new content and/or products. Team efficiency also improved with 80 percent of sprints taking place in a timely way, up from 50 percent
Introducing a topic planning tool with a user and audiences needs approach. By October, overall time spent on site had increased by 10 percent and all news conferences were centerd on audiences needs
Introducing a quality manager to run breaking news stories. Reader satisfaction, measured by surveys, increased
Launching an automated newsletter for foodies, which exceeded its initial goal of 1,400 subscribers, reaching more than 1,800 users a week and with a 47% open rate

2. AI tools

Another step change this year was the introduction of AI-Buddy, a powerful tool used in all departments, including editorial, connecting different data and services.

In particular, it helps NW to:

Generate topic ideas, analysis and monitoring
Plan content to meet the needs of audiences
Save time. For example, by creating a WhatsApp post in five minutes instead of up to 30
Create new prompts: improvement of at least five per month through working groups

One of the biggest takeaways for the team: with all of this transformation, one of the keys to bringing staff along with them was communication. They held regular information events and targeted training cours- es to promote understanding, including talks between senior management and mini-publishing team (MPT) managers.

> How AI helped a local newsroom in Argentina boost its reach, innovation and sustainability

Rheinische Post, Germany: From Swifties to subscribers – A superstar-focused newsletter becomes a game-changer

Rheinische Post Media Group is a large regional media group, which includes four newspapers in the west of Germany. The group’s flagship newspaper, the Rheinische Post, boasts 260,000 subscribers, including 75,000 digital subscribers.

Seizing the opportunity: With Taylor Swift soon arriving in Germany, the idea of “Waiting for Taylor” was born, a free newsletter that was launched 10 weeks before the first concert, intending to provide information for Swifties, explain the Taylor Swift phenomenon to everyone else and connect with younger audiences.

Getting the word out: “a deliberately large funnel and a personalized approach”

“Waiting for Taylor” was advertised on Instagram, Facebook and in the newspaper, and had banner ads on our homepage and other sites.
The newsletter was automatically mentioned in all sub-editorials such as Music, Streaming, Television and Panorama/People.
A sponsor was found for the newsletter.
A mini-publishing team from several publishing departments met regularly to drive the project forward.
The metered paywall was switched off for all Taylor articles, except for the concert review from the first evening, which was placed behind the paywall.

The results:

Went from 3,300 subscribers, ending up with about 5,000
An open rate of between 21 and 25 percent among our newsletter recipients
With Swift content, they reached 2,450,000 page impressions and six conversions. The share of direct traffic was also very high (71.4 percent)

What next?

“Very quickly – already during the Taylor newsletter – we realized we didn’t want to give up on this audience (female, younger, interested in music and cultural con- tent) and so we developed a follow-up newsletter.” shares Martina Stöcker, Head of News Management

“Here & Wow” was already announced to the Swift readers, and when the Taylor train moved on, the new newsletter was launched.

Almost all subscribers remained loyal – only 50 cancellations so far
The new service is aimed at younger women every fortnight
Topics include music, streaming, Booktok, reports on celebrities, but also topics from politics, society or health with a female perspective
A slightly different concept, with more links and reading recommendations, and of course the newsletter now also includes articles behind the paywall or metered paywall.

More recently, the publisher has also began to focus on other new audiences such as gastronomy, the Netherlands, young families and local sport.

The Irish Times, Ireland: ‘For You’ – Redefining focus on key demographics

Publisher profile: 
Founded in 1859,The Irish Times is Ire- land’s leading newspaper, serving the 1.8 million households in the country as well as the international Irish diaspora. It is the only independently owned news media in Ireland and has been owned by The Irish Times Trust since 1974. The publisher has a newsroom staff of 190. Digital subscrip- tions were launched in 2015.

The goal: Double the proportion of readers under 45 to 20%, particularly females

What’s needed to reach this target? Combining data-driven insights with qualitative feedback to create content that resonates with its readers’ lives and priorities.

A new “For You” tag for female readers aged 30-45 was created, ensuring they’d always be able to see themselves somewhere in the content – in the themes, headlines, writers and imagery.
This meant commissioning opinion pieces from writers within that age group on themes that research had shown would be likely to resonate with the target audience: parenting and fertility; education; audience-focused opinion articles on big themes like climate and politics; fitness, health and mental wellbeing; moving personal essays and human-interest stories about well known people.
The dedicated tag meant content performance could easily be measured.

The results: Overall page views for these pieces went up 50 percent on average compared to other Opinion articles, and subscription rates were up by 50 to 60 percent.

Initially, the team didn’t know who was reading or subscribing but in June 2024, thanks to a breakthrough from the data team in assigning a gender to existing sub- scribers, they were able to report a 95 percent increase in female subscribers reading the “For You” Opinion articles over other Opinion content.

Audience-centric journalism: Through this project, the team gained a better understanding of what audience-centric journalism looks like, that they’ll be able to apply to other demographics.

To share this across the editorial teams, and make their learnings usable, they created a checklist to be applied to production:

The Irish Times' checklist for being audience-first

Gremi Media, Poland: Targeting professional audiences to transform audience strategy and drive digital growth

Publisher profile: 
Gremi Media is a leading media group in Poland, best known for its flagship pubication, Rzeczpospolita, one of the most respected and influential newspapers in the country. The newspaper’s website rp.pl is a key player in Poland’s digital news landscape, reaching over 21% of internet users in the country.

The goal: double the number of active subscribers by the end of 2024

What’s needed to reach this subscription target? Identify and target key audiences more precisely, with a focus on creating relevant, personalized and profitable content

Specifically, Gremi Media found that a large part of its active subscribers are professionals, executives and small business owners. These users access content on rp.pl mainly during working hours and have a high interest in topics related to law, economics and business management.

Targeting these audiences in practice:

A more user-centric approach, moving from an approach based on the print experience to a fully digital model, where editorial and marketing decisions are driven by user preferences.
New products such as “Pro Zone” (Pro.rp.pl), offering in-depth reports on key aspects of the market and specialiszed analysis in the fields of law, economics and business.
A series of podcasts, including summaries of political and business news, interviews, and cultural formats. Specialized podcasts on the job market and legal advice for professionals have also been launched in the “Pro Zone.
Enhanced user experience for retention, including a new mobile app which allows users to save articles, share them on social networks and receive push notifications about new content, all with the aim of creating a daily reading habit among users. Within weeks after the launch, the app had been downloaded 3,700 times, seven times the target set for the period.
Improved newsletters, a key channel for reaching professionals seeking information on specific topics. The open rate of these newsletters has improved significantly, with 20 percent of the emails sent being opened and having a click-through rate of 15 percent.

One of the biggest takeaways for the team: the need to consolidate decision-making under a more rigorous, data-driven approach, rather than relying mostly on intuition. In the past, many decisions were made on the basis of experience gained in the printed press.

Mediapart, France: From revenue niche to growth lever

Publisher profile:
Mediapart is a prominent French digital-only publisher, with a business model based primarily on digital B2C subscriptions (€12/month), boasting almost 230,000 subscribers and an excellent retention rate. This success is largely attributed to the public’s recognition of its journalism and investigative reporting. Behind the scenes, credit goes to its unwavering focus on digital platform performance and user and subscriber engagement.

The question at hand: Could Mediapart diversify revenues by developing out their B2B subscriptions?

“While we already have subscriptions in this sector, making it a priority has allowed us to allocate resources, draw the attention of the entire organisation, and set ourselves the personal challenge of rapidly growing this revenue,” explains Cédric Lepecuchelle, Director of Subscriptions at Mediapart

Step 1: identifying the potential audience

The team identified 40 B2B audience groups
For their initial experiments, the focus was on increasing subscriptions from schools, due to Mediapart’s popularity among teachers and librarians. They also targeted law firms, capitalizing on their interest in Mediapart’s in-depth coverage of major trials, financial crimes, and political corruption investigations.
Dedicated databases within their CRM were essential to streamline B2B communication and enable news alerts or notifications when resources were published on specific topics

A challenge: Account sharing left money on the table

The team identified that parliamentarians were using individual subscriptions for themselves and their teams, instead of opting for more expensive multi-user accounts.
So they began offering tailored plans, encouraging readers to request quotes. For those tempted to continue sharing accounts, a process was implemented, including email notifications and banners to alert them and redirect them to the appropriate subscription page.
This process has now been adapted for other B2B audiences and integrated into the subscription funnel
An internal dashboard detects anomalies in account sharing and guides further actions.

Results:

The team’s initial goal was to increase B2B revenue by 35 percent by the end of 2024, a target they successfully met
Notably, efforts to combat account-sharing fraud alone resulted in a 200% increase in revenue. Looking ahead, their next challenge is even more ambitious: to double B2B revenue in 2025 and surpass the symbolic €1M mark by 2028.