The Baltimore Banner: Turning live coverage into a product audiences want to return to
How The Baltimore Banner turned live blogs into an audience product: 62% new visitors, 2.2x registrations and record election conversions
Operations
Def. Supporting you in the everyday jobs and processes required for a successful digital strategy. We hope that these articles give you answers so that you leave knowing exactly what to do to solve your current challenges, impress your boss and achieve your business goals.
118 posts
The anatomy of a news article built to boost subscriptions
13 elements of a news article built to convert during big news moments, from a moment-specific pitch to a page that changes for each reader
How SvD grew digital subscriptions by 60% in two years by putting editorial first
How Svenska Dagbladet grew from 98,000 to more than 158,000 digital subscribers in two years: one North Star, paid by default and aha content
How to run a user needs audit with AI, in seven steps
How to audit your content against user needs with AI: a seven-step process, a rubric to copy and nine-in-ten agreement with human tags
Why your newsroom shouldn’t write its own user needs model, and what to do instead
Dmitry Shishkin on user needs: why “update me” stories underperform, the three tags to commission on and who should own your model
How we segmented our paywall audience to optimize ARPU
Why Handelsblatt's ARPU growth started with showing readers less, not charging them more, and why the winning paywall variant wasn't the one with the best conversion rate.
Do you have enough recurring value to launch subscriptions? The questions to ask yourself
Subscription fatigue is the easy explanation when a paid product struggles. The more useful question is whether there was enough recurring value to begin with.
Synthetic audiences: where they help, where they stop, and how to run one
Understand and use synthetic audiences to make better decisions whilst understanding the limitations of this method
3 acquisition tactics from Foreign Policy, a publication offering near-to-zero free articles
Foreign Policy's Corinne Osnos shares three low-effort, high-impact tactics her team uses to bring in readers despite running one of the strictest paywalls in media.
From opinion to evidence: how we built a data-led product framework for news apps at Funke
Senior Product Manager, Stefan, shares a framework he developed to make product decisions in a structured, data-led way.