TL;DR
-> Mediahuis has built an 'essential subscription' bundling journalism with hiking apps, e-books, masterclasses and the New York Times

-> The bundle is structured around three layers — Inform, Guide and Enable — tailored by brand rather than by individual subscriber

-> Its 777 strategy aims for 70% of operational margins to be from digital by 2030, using the bundle to drive both volume growth and tier migration

-> 170,000 subscribers activated RouteYou; activated users show 26.5% lower churn, and subscribers log in 2.4–3.0 times per month on average

Key lessons: 
-> Stay within one degree of separation from journalism
-> Services that require a bigger conceptual leap tend not to stick

• The New York Times partnership sits alongside the premium titles — NRC in the Netherlands, De Standaard in Belgium, and the Luxembourg brands — where an internationally minded readership sees a natural connection.
• E-books are offered more broadly, with selections varying by brand.
• RouteYou has been rolled out for all titles, but is particularly successful in regional and Belgian brands with strong outdoor and weekend-lifestyle content, where a survey of more than 10,000 subscribers had already shown that 24% wanted a hiking and biking app as part of their bundle.

“Different bundles work better for different brands,’ van de Peppel explains. ‘We try to tailor it really around the brand and make those choices which make sense to the brand.“

The RouteYou acquisition

RouteYou is a Belgian company used by more than 15 million outdoor enthusiasts, with its strongest presence in the Netherlands and Belgium. Since the Mediahuis acquisition in 2023, coverage has expanded into the Irish, Luxembourg, and German markets, where the publisher’s titles already have deep roots. It competes in the same space as Strava, but with a distinctly local character and established relationships with regional tourism boards.

Mediahuis’s regional titles had long published hiking and biking content, especially in weekend editions, but the next step was always missing: readers could learn about a trail, but had nowhere to go from there. Now, a QR code in the article links directly to the route in the RouteYou app. ‘It’s a strong connection with the editorial rooms,’ van de Peppel says. “You can really make a direct connection between the content and then going out and doing something with it.’

The acquisition was not conceived purely as a bundle enhancement — Mediahuis bought a standalone business, intending to develop both sides of the business. Since then, investment in a native app and an expanded RouteYou team has driven +98% growth in standalone subscribers in 2025. 

When RouteYou access was extended to over a million Mediahuis subscribers, it immediately dwarfed the app’s existing standalone user base. Those who came through the news bundle were subscribing to journalism; the outdoor features are a welcome addition rather than the draw.

What the numbers show

The activation numbers tell part of the story. The retention numbers tell the more important one. Mediahuis tracks whether subscribers who have activated RouteYou behave differently from those who have not, and they do. 

Over a 12-week period, subscribers who had activated RouteYou were significantly more likely to remain subscribers at the end. For every 100 who had not activated, 4 had churned. For every 100 who had, fewer than 3 had churned. At the scale Mediahuis operates, that difference compounds quickly.

The perception data reinforces this. 

• Among all Mediahuis subscribers, around 52% consider RouteYou a valuable addition. 
• Among those who have actually used it, that figure rises to 82%. 

The gap between the two numbers is the central challenge: the product works, but only once subscribers try it. Getting them to that first experience is where most of the activation effort goes. Mediahuis offered exclusive webinars to help subscribers get started; 12% of readers attended, and 54% of those participants were already Mediahuis readers who engaged with the outdoor content in their titles.

Sustained usage backs up the initial activation picture. Active users log in 2.4 to 3.0 times per month on average, with 15% opening the app at least once a week, numbers that predictably spike in the spring and summer hiking season. In total, 49% of eligible Mediahuis subscribers used RouteYou at least once in the past year.

Mediahuis has been drawing lessons from the New York Times, whose bundle is a well-documented case study in how added services drive both retention and revenue per subscriber. ‘They see strong effects on retention and ARPU when people start using more services, van de Peppel says. “We are seeing the same thing, which is really encouraging.’

The 777 strategy

The essential subscription is the commercial engine behind Mediahuis’s 777 strategy: shifting 70% of operational margins to digital by 2030. Currently, the balance runs roughly the other way, at around 60% print and 40% digital.

Van de Peppel frames the mechanism plainly: it works on both Q and P, quantity and price. A more compelling subscription drives digital subscriber growth. And because most additional services are only available in the full premium subscription — not the basic tier — the bundle creates structural upward pressure on ARPU. The full subscription costs roughly twice as much as the basic tier, and as the bundle becomes more valuable, more subscribers opt for the full tier, either at sign-up or by upgrading.

‘We also see a shift from the basic subscription to the full subscription,’ van de Peppel explains. ‘Which in the end means they pay a higher price. We increase value, but of course, the value coming back is also higher.’ Volume growth and tier migration together are designed to get digital subscriptions generating the margins that print once did, and within a seven-year window.

Advice for publishers considering a similar path

Van de Peppel’s guiding principle is staying within ‘one degree of separation’ from core journalism, adding only services that connect naturally with what the newsroom already produces:

• The New York Times partnership works because Mediahuis titles already cover international affairs.
• E-books work because those titles are already reviewing books.
• RouteYou works because brands have always written about the outdoors — and the data already showed subscribers wanted it.

Where the connection has to be invented, it tends not to stick. Van de Peppel’s advice to other publishers is simple: don’t stray too far from what your newsroom already does well.

The lesson he returns to most on RouteYou is editorial embrace. Newsrooms are independent — there is no guarantee journalists will link content to the app. Where they do, the activation numbers bear it out: Belgium, with the strongest editorial collaboration, hit nearly 30% activation, compared with a portfolio average of 1 in 5. The success of RouteYou’s adoption really depends on editorial collaboration.

Van de Peppel’s target is for at least 70% of digital subscribers to regularly use at least one additional service, weekly or monthly. ‘We launched a lot last year. This year, we won’t launch as much. We will focus on what we have and really make it work.’

David Carzon (formerly of Arte, Télérama, Libération, and Binge Audio) is a journalist, consultant, and author. This article was originally published in his newsletter Hupster, and provides a follow up from Audiencers first article on Le Monde in English, published six months after its launch in 2022.

John Rahim is founder of The Media Stack, a newsletter delivering in-depth analysis of the advertising, media, and marketing technology sectors, with a focus on emerging trends in AI and monetization.

In this article, John shares his interview with Joshi Herrmann, founder of The Mill, a UK-based digital publisher known for its award-winning, high-quality local news newsletters. They discuss what an "overwhelmingly reader-driven" revenue strategy means for their business:
-> Cities are chosen based on having the right person to pioneer the launch. Herrmann looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism
-> Funds, when needed, have been from individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines
-> The company has a model that prioritizes readers over traffic and quality over volume

By 2020, the infrastructure was in place to try something different. Substack had shown individual creators could build businesses charging for content. Tony Mecia was running a successful local business newsletter on the platform in Charlotte, North Carolina called The Charlotte Ledger.

“I thought, well, it is a different market, he’s operating in a much more affluent area than Manchester—but this might be worth a go.”

Herrmann had no money for a big team. That constraint became an advantage. He’d launch a newsletter, keep costs low, and focus on quality over volume. He set the price at roughly double what most Substack newsletters charged, betting readers would value proper local journalism enough to pay for it.

They did.

The numbers

Mill Media now operates in Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, London, and Glasgow. About 175,000 people are on free email lists. 13,000 paying subscribers.

The original Mill in Manchester has 4,000 paying subscribers. The Sheffield Tribune has 3,000. Liverpool Post has 2,000. Newer titles are growing.

Revenue is overwhelmingly reader-driven. Advertising accounts for about 5% – high-quality sponsorships with the FT, Royal Horticultural Society, and Manchester Museum. Herrmann wants to grow that to maybe 20% for diversification, but the core model stays reader-funded.

“If you’re reader-funded, your incentive is to give quality to those readers,” he says. “We’ve got to maintain that.”

The company moved from Substack to Ghost, cutting platform costs to less than a fifth of what they had been paying while gaining greater control over design. “It’s a lot cheaper… it allows us to experiment.”

How to pick a city

There’s no spreadsheet. Herrmann doesn’t analyse demographics or run market sizing models. He looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism.

“The most important determinant is the person in the city who wants to do it.”

The Bell in Glasgow happened because Robbie Armstrong got in touch, they met for a drink, and Herrmann recognised someone with encyclopaedic knowledge of the city and genuine passion for quality work. “At the beginning, when it’s difficult, and it’s a real battle, and you have almost no money, and it’s a real risk, you need that first person who is a pioneering person.”

Cities with universities help. Strong local identity distinct from London helps. But the human element matters most. “If someone came along in a city that I really loved, and I had the right person, I’d probably go for that over not the right person in a very large city.”

Individual backers, not VCs

Herrmann raised funding from people, not funds. Mark Thompson, former CEO of the New York Times and current CEO of CNN, Nick Johnston from Axios and Investor Turi Munthe.

They’re individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines.

“The conversations I had with those people were no different from the conversation I’ve had with other journalists”, Herrmann says. “Someone who cares about journalism asks a bunch of questions for 45 minutes, and then I say at the end, would you throw in a bit of cash?”

They provide advice when Herrmann asks for it. They don’t interfere with editorial. “Fundamentally, you can take all the advice you want, but you have to go with your gut. The mistakes are mine, and the decisions are mine.” The investors share Herrmann’s view that journalism must be commercially sustainable.

“The only genuine solution to the journalism problems that we have is via commercial sustainability.”

City by city profitability

Each city aims to break even within two to three years. Manchester and Sheffield are already profitable. Liverpool and Birmingham should hit profitability this year. London by year’s end. Glasgow early next year.

“I don’t expect us to be the most profitable company in the UK, but I expect us to cover our costs in our cities after a couple of years,” Herrmann says. “Otherwise, you’re creating some sort of vanity project. I’m not interested in that.”

When The Bell launched in Glasgow, journalists at traditional Scottish newspapers weren’t thrilled. They felt they were doing quality work but were stuck writing 14 stories a day to feed the traffic machine. Herrmann’s not criticising the journalists.

“It’s not the quality of the journalists. It’s not about their effort. It’s about the fact that the people who make decisions in these newsrooms have made bad strategic business decisions that have led them to a model that means these young journalists have to write 14 stories in a day.”

What works

Mill Media now employs 22 people and is growing. The company has a model that prioritises readers over traffic and quality over volume.

“We’re trying to introduce a way of people valuing high-quality local journalism in a way that hasn’t been there in the culture before,” Herrmann says. It’s not easy. It requires exceptional journalism every day, smart promotion, and relentless focus on basics. But the growth is real. From one person during lockdown to a multi-city operation, backed by media veterans and sustainable economics in each market.

Regional journalism’s problems were never about reader appetite. They focused on business models chasing the wrong revenue. Herrmann’s success is the proof. The question for Britain’s struggling regional newspaper groups isn’t whether this model works. It’s whether they have the appetite to execute it.

Interactive map at LA Times

One of my favorite examples is from LA Times who have built interactive “places” lists, providing an excellent demonstration of Integrated Utility Design – the interactive features eliminate friction and deliver immediate value to a local audience.

Instead of a static list of top restaurants, this interactive map format transforms the article into a powerful, real-time decision-making tool.

• Eliminate user pain points

The interactive map that moves as you scroll eliminates the most common pain points of a list: location and proximity. As the user reads about Restaurant X, the map instantly highlights its location. This allows the user to judge factors like neighborhood, parking, or proximity to their current location without opening a new tab.

• Provide as much usable information as possible

For food writing, the menu description and the geographical reality are equally important. The synchronized map connects the author’s text (the food) with the real-world utility (the location), making the entire proposition easier to visualize, share, and act upon.

• Make it actionable

The design often includes action buttons—like “Visit Website,” “Call,” or “Make Reservation”—embedded directly next to the map marker. This design respects the user’s intent: they aren’t just reading, they’re planning a meal, and the article facilitates that action immediately.

• Allow for personalized browsing 

Instead of forcing a linear read (top to bottom), the user can toggle between the list and the map. A user can find a restaurant on the map first (e.g., “I need a place in Santa Monica”) and then click the marker to jump directly to the editorial review in the list, catering to different planning habits.

• Data collection

The publisher can track which areas on the map are being viewed and clicked the most. If users consistently interact with restaurants in, say, Koreatown, the editorial team gains valuable data for covering future food and neighborhood trends.

Check out the article on LA Times

Debating at DER SPIEGEL

Commenting on articles is a well-recognized way of engaging readers. But ultimately the value of conversations are diluted across the many articles discussing a single topic.

At Der Spiegel, they built a new format of content that brings value to both readers and the publisher – debating. The debate format offers users a structured and respectful platform for co-creating content, making participation feel more meaningful than a typical comment thread.

• Structured dialogue

By separating the Debatte section from regular article comments, Der Spiegel established a clear “safe space” for discussion. Strict moderation ensures the conversation is constructive, focusing on the content (E.g. horror film recommendations) and not descending into trolling or hate speech.

• Ritualized interaction

Users can vote, share their views and discover articles discussing the same topic. By creating a weekly or regular “Debatte”, the publisher creates a ritualized interaction. Loyal users return to the site not just for news, but to actively participate in the ongoing conversation, leading to high visit frequency and sustained loyalty

• User Generated Content (UGC)

For a question like “Which horror film do you recommend?”, the audience provides the content itself. This crowdsourcing approach leverages the collective expertise of thousands of readers to create a dynamic, useful, and diverse list of recommendations that a single author couldn’t replicate

Check out the debates on DER SPIEGEL

> Read more on how they built this unique format

Sub-categories at Wired

Wired’s “AI of a thousand faces” article is fantastic example of a content strategy known as Layered Storytelling. This dual “bitesize” and “full article” format is highly effective, especially for complex topics like AI, and provides distinct value to both the casual and the deeply engaged audience.

• Adaptable discovery

Each card shares a brief introduction to this ‘possible reality’, linking to an article diving deeper into the topic, accommodating the skim-reader and deep-reader equally. Skimmers can quickly browse the entire issue to see what interests them, while divers can transition to the comprehensive text with a single click, fulfilling their curiosity.

• Low barrier to entry

Complex topics, especially in tech and science, can be intimidating. The creative, interactive wrapper and bitesize snippets lower the barrier to entry. The user isn’t faced with a massive wall of text; they get an accessible, visually engaging appetizer before committing to the main course.

• Can be controlled by the user

It’s almost like a tool that the reader can control – it respects the their time and attention span by allowing them to choose their level of commitment.

Check out the article on Wired

Interactive check list at The New York Times

The NYT’s interactive checklist format is a prime example of how digital design can transform content utility into a powerful driver of audience engagement.

• Personalized utility

Any list is useful in itself, but a checklist instantly transforms the static text into a form of ‘progress’ bar (“I’ve seen 75 of 100 films”) shifting the ownership to make the content instantly more valuable and relevant to a user’s life

• Gamification

The gamification element builds a sense of accomplishment as well as a challenge to go try to watch more of the listed films. Think Duolingo and the value of their ‘goal setting’ element.

• Optimized for engagement

For the publisher, this is priceless for engagement – unlike a static article where a user scrolls once and leaves, the checklist requires multiple actions (reading, clicking, checking, scrolling, filtering), increasing the amount of time spent on page.

• Social sharing potential

The team have also made sure to build a personalized list summary at the end that readers can download and share. It makes me think of Spotify Wrapped and how users are proud of their ‘performance’.

Check out the article on The New York Times

Interactive health quiz at The Telegraph

This article from The Telegraph uses an Assessment Calculator format, one of the most effective types of interactive content for health and lifestyle publications. This structure is designed to transform complex, sometimes intimidating, health metrics into a simple, personalized, and actionable score.

• Instant personalized self-assessment

Users input personal data (age, diet, exercise, habits) and receive an immediate, unique result. This moves the experience from reading a generic article (e.g., “7 Ways to Get Healthier”) to getting an assessment score (“Your health age is X years old”), creating a powerful, personal “hook.”

• Actionable insights (not just information)

The interactive element forces the user to actively consider their habits one by one. By showing the input directly affecting the output, the quiz implicitly educates the user on which behaviors have the largest impact on their health, making the advice feel more tangible and relevant.

• Conversion potential

Not in this case, but health calculators are also prime candidates for strategic gating. The publisher can ask for an email address to “receive your full, personalized health report” or “save your score and track your progress.” This turns a casual visitor into a valuable, qualified lead at a high conversion rate.

Check out the article on The Telegraph

Heiko Scherer is the founder and CEO of tchop. In this article, Heiko discusses how the homepage has changed - it's no longer about one screen. It’s about shared intent that runs through the entire product experience.

In a strategic move to engage a new and distinct audience, as well as take note from the creator economy, The Economist has launched its data journalism newsletter, “Off the Charts,” on Substack. This decision to venture beyond its traditional paywalled ecosystem offers a fascinating glimpse into how a legacy publisher is adapting to the evolving digital landscape. 

I sat down with Aaron Coultate, Head of Newsletters at The Economist, to discuss the thinking behind this exciting initiative.

Fabio Venneri is founder of unfolded.news, a project that experiments with dynamic content architectures to move beyond the atomization of articles and rebuild hierarchy, context, and narrative continuity in news.

Online news and the atomization of content

Everyone knows what a newspaper looks like. As a product, it’s pretty straightforward, basically it’s just folded sheets of paper with text on each page. Nonetheless, in its simplicity, it is a very powerful design, and its value comes from the very fact that it is limited, from its boundaries. It forces journalists to make lots of decisions, and in those decisions is where the journalistic, informative value lies. So, besides the very content of the articles, also the way they are arranged together, the amount of space given to this or that, what goes on the front page and what on page 32, it all add context and additional levels of information.

News websites have long thought they could avoid making these decisions, because the container was no longer forcing them to. Space has become infinite, time unconstrained, so everything can be published, at any moment. Recency is almost the only criterion for organizing a homepage. 

But it’s also true that basically no one even sees the homepage anymore, and it’s actually easy to draw a line between the homepage’s declining relevance and years of chasing low-quality traffic from social media and search engines: news sites optimized for direct traffic to individual articles, embracing an “atomization” of content where each piece lives largely on its own – and where there’s very little value in the way they are (not) pieced together.

The digital era’s early years were defined by the quest for volume, and with volume advertisement revenue, and with that the long-chased economic sustainability of a news business. Publishers have focused for years on driving traffic, only to find their business models constantly threatened by minor changes to Facebook’s newsfeed or Google’s search algorithm. At the same time, they culpably gave up on developing their owned media, where they are in control and where people are actually looking for value.

All chickens came home to roost when they started thinking about how to monetize their content with paywalls and subscriptions: they found out that everything they had done to be read (= to grow page views) was the exact opposite of what they should have been doing to get paid (= to get people to trust them and pay for their content). (Of course there are a few notable exceptions.)

This quantitative approach, as said, brought to what I called the atomization of content. If we were to imagine a news website in the physical world, I could think of a ream of A4 papers with an article printed on each of them. Not very practical, is it?

From print to digital: lost in translation

I was there when the first newspapers launched their online versions, and I’ve worked in the industry ever since. What I’ve seen is very little thinking about the product itself, about digital’s unique capabilities and how to leverage them.

Think about this, most news websites have been running on WordPress, which at its very core is a blogging platform, a journaling platform. Its main organization is chronological sorting. And this logic was inherited by all the organizations that built on top of it. They chose the tool (for lack of better alternatives or knowledge), and the tool dictated how they were built. And it still looks like that’s the case today, even though news websites no longer literally run on WordPress, since most have developed their own CMSs. Because of this decision, we’ve been treating news sites as feeds of posts, not as products designed to make sense of the world.

Another factor shaping these early years of digital news products is that with a lot of data came the illusion of control. And so everything shifted towards micro-optimization. Journalists became obsessed with reach, and with what to do to get it.

This struck me hard when I first read it:

“Among the first “old” media executives to awaken to the threat was Mel Karmazin, then the CEO of Viacom. He visited Google in 2003 and remembers how Page and Brin extolled the value of being able to measure everything, including the effectiveness of advertising.

This alarmed Karmazin, for it threatened how he sold advertising, which was based on salesmanship, emotion. Karmazin and the networks continued to charge steep rates because, Karmazin says, “advertisers don’t know what works and what doesn’t. That’s a great model.”

But it’s a model, the Google executives told him, that is horribly inefficient.

Karmazin, before departing, trained his eyes on his Google hosts and blurted, only half in jest, “You’re fucking with the magic!”

(Excerpted from Googled by Ken Auletta.)

We are fucking with the magic. Back in the days, we didn’t know what worked or not, and a newspaper had value as a complete product, not just in the single articles printed on it. The way each edition was packaged was not tied to immediate metrics of reach or views, but to the responsibility of delivering information, providing context, and helping readers understand the world. Movements in reach and distribution were slower, on a longer timeline, so adjustments were more thoughtful. 

Now we see individual article performance dictating editorial decisions, trying to replicate what worked, avoid what didn’t. But most of the time no formula could ever be found or replicated. I remember my previous organization obsessing over push notification open rates, but you know what? Most of the time it was COMPLETELY RANDOM. Yet we made decisions based on this instead of focusing on how to explain the world so readers can make informed decisions about their lives.

unfolded.news: from atoms to molecules

I said I’ve seen very little thinking about products, about how to leverage what digital can do. What I’ve seen instead is just a move to bring content online, as if that were enough.

But digital actually enables us to do things differently, and to do entirely new things. It allows newsrooms to approach news in completely new ways. If we were to redesign a news website from scratch in 2025, it will look a bit different from what we are used to.

And that’s what I’m trying to do with unfolded.news: rethinking the container, redesigning the “news website” product to open up new possibilities for doing journalism well.

This is not just a nice-to-have. This is absolutely necessary, as we move towards a zero-click search future in which publisher’s content will be exploited by AI agents. Content alone is no longer enough.

As the name suggests, unfolded.news is about covering news stories as they unfold, shifting the focus from individual articles (the here and now) to the longer narrative they belong to. Covering “the climate, not the weather” they used to say. 

At its core are two principles: 

1. Old news is good news. The peculiarity of digital is the ability to create dynamic relations between content pieces: this makes it possible to recreate every time the whole context around any piece of information, leveraging a living, more complex content architecture, and to turn the archive into a strategy rather than into a graveyard. 
2. Hierarchy and differentiation. Print excelled at this, but it got lost in translation: in newspapers and magazines, you would find different font sizes, sideboxes, and a wide variety of templates. Some articles will have a callout on the front page; others will get a few lines on page 32; others will deserve a double spread. Online, everything is the same, same style, same importance, same space taken. Every new article being published makes it to the homepage.

Working on these two aspects is the starting point for building better digital news products.

But the foundation is always the same. I always go back to Jeff Jarvis’ definition of journalism:

“Convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation, reducing polarization and building trust through helping citizens find common ground in facts and understanding.”

unfolded.news is built upon understanding. But there’s another word I care about: transparency. As Jeff Jarvis (again!) once paraphrased David Weinberger: transparency is the new objectivity. Because I don’t believe in objectivity either. Not in journalism. Not even in photography! Photography realized five minutes after its invention that it wasn’t capturing reality nor truth, it was making decisions: cropping, exposure, color, framing, contrast, light manipulation, staging. Journalism does the same. It’s not “just telling what happened.” It’s structuring information. It’s about depth, hierarchy, contrast, vividness.

So when I say “transparency,” I mean transparent reporting, the ability for readers to see how you’ve covered a story over time, what you got right, what you missed, how things evolved. It’s about context over content. 

And that leads us to the real shift: moving from a system where everything revolves around the article, to one where the article is just one piece in a larger narrative. From atoms to molecules.

unfolded.news is a light editorial layer that builds dynamic content architecture on your site. It connects articles into storylines, giving readers context and publishers stronger engagement—and integrates easily with your CMS and workflows.

On a design level, unfolded.news is built on 3 main components:

• The homepage organizes content by storylines, highlighting latest news surrounded by contextual articles
• The storyline page uses a timeline structure showing differentiation between article types and visualizing coverage density over time
• The article page places each piece in temporal context, enriched with contextual information

My bet here is that without changing your current editorial output, and just working downstream of your usual workflows, I can repackage your content in a more engaging, informative experience.

Let’s collaborate. This can be tested with minimal effort – no disruption to your workflows, no risk to your Google Discover traffic. For demos, I’ve used live content from existing publishers (maybe yours too).

I’d love to show you more. Reach out to get an invite to unfolded.news and let’s talk.