“The future of journalism isn’t AI. It’s the audience. And it always has been.”
Adriana Lacy really hit the nail on the head with this statement. As she highlighted in a LinkedIn post, for too long, we’ve treated audiences as the end of our work rather than the beginning. We’ve measured their engagement without genuinely engaging with them and analyzed their data without truly understanding their needs.
The solution lies in shifting from a content-centric approach, where the end goal is publication, to an audience-centric one, where the focus is on impact. This means nurturing the middle of the funnel, or as Sarah Marshall calls it, the happy middle—the space between a casual visitor and a loyal, paying reader.
Unlike the fly-by visitor, these readers have repeated, meaningful interactions with your brand. They consume more, contribute to higher lifetime value and even advocate to bring others to discover your work.
Building these loyal readers should be the priority for all media brands.
So the question is: how can you build the middle of the funnel and turn “fly-by” readers into a community of loyal supporters?
H.E.C
It’s not a sexy initialism, but the solution to building a loyal readership can be described in a 3-way Venn diagram: Habits, Engagement & Community.
1. Build habits
Building habits around your content is one of the most effective ways of ensuring return visits. Just one look at Duolingo’s habit loop around their streaks feature and you’ll see the value.
This streak mechanism has even been adopted by Newsreel in the US. The reading experience includes articles broken into small chunks, interspersed with videos and quizzes to test whether the user is taking in the information. Users log a “streak” by using the app on consecutive days and reading every story.
What other strategies can you use to build habits?
Publish habit-forming content, such as content series (e.g. like Les Jours), daily formats (eg. “question of the day”), pop-up newsletters that are sent on a certain day for a few weeks (e.g. The Guardian’s “Reclaim your brain”) or bundles of content around a certain topic.
Of course, newsletters as whole are one of the most powerful tools for building reader loyalty, proving valuable across key metrics. For instance, research has shown that readers who are registered for a newsletter are 15% more likely to renew their subscription, and signing up for a newsletter can reduce churn by 50%.
The Washington Post is a great example of a publisher doing this well:
- Align content and user needs: “The 7” daily newsletter solves both the audience and publisher’s needs:
- What are the audience needs? Users are finding articles too long, they don’t have enough time to consume it all but still want to access quality journalism
- What are The Washington Post’s needs? To form daily habits as an essential part of the customer journey towards high engagement, subscription and retention
- Solution: a daily round up of 7 article summaries to be
- Personalized curation: WP offers a “Newsletter Quiz” to help users find their perfect match, leading to personalized recommendations.
- “For you” newsletter: the format of a daily newsletter for habits, with the personalization that increases engagement, bringing people to the website with articles adapted to their interests
2. Foster community and conversation
Moving to an audience-centric approach means moving away from a relationship driven by the search for growth, towards one focused on purposeful engagement. In this system, publishers move beyond one-way communication to feedback loops, meaningful interactions, intentional outreach and content where form follows function.
This community-building adds an emotional layer to the relationship, making it difficult to copy (by AI for instance) and improving customer retention.
How can you build a community in practice?
- Commenting, forums and debates: Taking comments to another level by creating discussion groups or debates around specific topics can be a great way to engage readers and concentrate conversations on a single topic into a single space.
Digital Spy has successfully used forums to build a community, with one member even sharing that they met their partner through the forum and got married.
Article formats and modules can also help to bring readers to the conversation, for instance with one-click voting, poll of the week or debating topics.
The Financial Times also adds a “quiet intervention” into articles with an AI-generated question, reviewed by the editorial team, to encourage thoughtful conversation in the comments section. This increased comment views as well as shifting the tone of the comments, helping to keep conversations on track.
- Live Q&A Sessions: Hosting “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) sessions with journalists or experts is a great way to create unique experiences for users.
The Toronto Star saw success with its “Billionaire Murders AMA series,” which generated 159 first-time commenters and 1,671 logins.
- Reward Your Community: Acknowledging and rewarding your most engaged readers can be a powerful motivator. You can provide a “super engaged user” tag, reply to their comments, or feature their contributions publicly.
The New York Times, for example, celebrated some of their top commenters by featuring them in an article, whilst The Times of the UK invited top commenters to visit the newsroom and meet journalists.
- People over brands
As Lars K. Jensen writes, “Audiences want personal connections with news, not distant institutions. Logos feel abstract, while individual journalists bring trust and authenticity. Publishers are being urged to amplify the people in their newsrooms, because faces—not brands—create conversations and lasting engagement.“
Whether it be through in-person meet-ups or simply putting a human face on the paywall, article and newsletter, using profiles over brands is essential for building lasting connects.
WIRED has clearly understood this with their recent subscription launch, showing a a deliberate move towards community/relationship building, in particular with their exclusive, subscriber-only newsletters, each with a writer at the forefront.
- Help your loyal audience be advocates: whether that be by simple “Gift article” options or discounts for referrals
Best practice: don’t forget to employ a dynamic paywall for users who receive a gifted article from a subscriber! Here, AOC uses Poool to present these audiences with a 24 hour discovery pass in exchange for their email address.
3. Engage with interactive and user-generated content
Readers are no longer just passive consumers of content; they want to participate, interact and contribute.
- Reader-led journalism: Help readers feel part of your journalism with user-generated content, like The Times and Daily Maverick, both of whom use readers to fuel their journalism which in turn fuels the community.
Daily Maverick ask readers to share information about them in the onboarding journey to build a database of contactable experts in different industries.
- User-Generated Content: Create platforms where audiences can engage on your site.
Village Media for instance launched “Spaces,” a chatting platform for users to connect based on interests, whilst Graham Media has built their own version of Instagram, named Pins, for readers to share photos and videos to support a news story.
You could even consider training these users to become better citizen reporters.
- Interactive features and articles: Incorporate interactive elements like quizzes, polls, and Q&As into your articles to create a richer user experience. As highlighted in the introduction, form needs to follow function!
Voting modules inside articles or debating formats encourage readers to get involved in your journalism and questions its impact on their opinion.
The Los Angeles Times has built a brilliant article format for discovering restaurants, with a scrollable article on the left that automatically updates the map on the right to show readers the location of the establishment being discussed.
Also essential: optimize the user experience
A seamless, personalized experience is key to moving a casual reader to a loyal one.
- AI summaries: Aftonbladet has found that providing AI summaries, or a “short version,” of an article has increased engagement. Users reported that the short version gave them enough of an introduction to want to read the full article.
- Personalization: people want the right content at the right time. It’s one of the key reasons why NPG digital made personalization a core principle of their product strategy, and nowhere is this more critical than on the homepage, where readers begin their journey. Today, 80% of their homepage is personalized.
- Find a suitable balance for advertising: of course, this is a key revenue stream for many media brands, but too many frustrating pop-ups and your fly-bys won’t stay around to engage, however many of the above strategies you put in place
- And the user experience essentials: mobile responsiveness, high page load speed (one to check when you have ads plus a paywall), intuitive navigation, content-first layout, etc.
The metrics must follow
Whilst reach and engagement are essential, they don’t measure repeat visits. As Heiko puts it, “Reach measures visibility, not connection. Engagement tends to measure moments, not relationships.”
His solution is belonging.
Belonging describes the reader who returns regularly. Who builds habits around your content. Who participates thoughtfully. Who chooses your publication over the infinite alternatives. This is not passive consumption. It is investment.
Metrics are important because they impact your team’s behavior and decision-making. Though harder to measure than reach, belonging as a key metric for your organisation will help build meaningful, lasting relationships with readers.
By focusing on these strategies—building habits, fostering community, embracing interactivity, and moving towards metrics that focus on belonging—you’ll be able to transform transactional relationships with fly-by readers into a relational one with loyal, engaged audiences who stay.
