The Norwegian group Amedia started with a troubling observation: its publications had more subscribers over the age of 80 than under the age of 40. To break this deadlock, their team tested a radical approach in two local newsrooms: tailoring editorial content exclusively to the behaviors of readers under 40. The result: a product deemed more relevant for all generations and, at one of its publications, Romerikes Blad, a 30% increase in the under-40 demographic over nine months.

The Next Gen News Report 2 (NGN2), a collaboration between FT Strategies, Medill Knight Lab, and the Google News Initiative, provides a roadmap for news organizations to reach younger audiences. The core of the report is the 7 Modes of Engagement, which distinguishes how "next gen" consumers (ages 18-25+) discover, consume, and share news.

 The vibe: passively encountering news whilst browsing social feeds
 The energy: engagement is often spontaneous and fleeting, shaped by the emerging news producers they follow and platform algorithms.
 The strategy: intentionally create content that feels native to the platform and find patterns that break through to capture fleeting attention in the few seconds before viewers scroll to the next post

Mode 2: Seek

 The vibe: actively looking for information on a specific event or topic
 The energy: a highly intentional mode of engagement, where consumers look for efficient, information-rich content that delivers depth and relevance without distraction
 The strategy: anticipate information needs and make depth accessible without friction, ensuring that credibility, clarity and efficiency guide every interaction.

How to win at Seek mode

• Guide discovery
• Deliver curated briefings
• Offer live formats that capitalize on immediate interest.
• Create seamless, intelligent discovery experiences (such as Ask FT or Ask The Post)
• Design intuitive interfaces within owned and operated platforms
• Provide high utility & control, such as personalization and tailored formats based on preferences, such as listening or watching

Case study: Particle News. Using AI, Particle gives readers the option of discplaying a news story in 6 different ways, including the 5 Ws, opposite takes on the same story or “Explain like I’m 5”

Mode 3: Subscribe

 The vibe: receiving news from trusted, curated sources (newsletters, podcasts, SMS) they have deliberately chosen
 The energy: people expect timely, important or novel updates from sources whose judgement they rely on and do not want to miss
 The strategy: timely, important or novel updates from reliable sources

How to win at Subscribe

• Sync with daily habits: design delivery around audience routines and preferences, not output cycle, and consider offering personalized delivery
• Make subscribe content dense and easy to complete
• Standardize the skeleton for instant scanning
• Keep it short, but provide options to go deeper

Case Study: The Edinburgh Minute. Short paragraphs, plain language, softer tone in the introduction. A long list of key stories, each with two sentences max, along with an emoji to introduce the topic, and a follow-up link.

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2. The “Consumption” Modes: how news is processed

In consumption modes, users have chosen to explore a subject, topic or piece of content more deeply.

Audiences are more likely to engage further when a story feels personally relevant, emotionally resonant or sparks their curiosity. How they first encounter that story does not dictate what happens next. Differing motivations shape how individuals choose to go deeper, whether by verifying facts, exploring context, or interpreting different perspectives.

The 2025 findings reinforce the three modes we previously identified that capture how audiences engage more deeply with the news once they move beyond sifting. These modes are:

Mode 4: Substantiate

 The vibe: verifying if a story is true or finding the "raw" facts.
 The energy: an individual has found a piece of information and wants to quickly and credibly confirm it
 The strategy: create content that is promptly delivered after a breaking news event, focusing on main claims and facts, with simple, clear and digestible evidence at its core

How to win at Substantiate mode:

• Meet your users where they are
• Prioritize accuracy and relevance over speed or volume
• Push information directly to audiences
• Lead with facts
• Create quick, easily digestible formats 
• Show your working: stitch primary source materials into the content and show the process

Case Study: UnderTheDeskNews. They often presents sources behind the presenter, such as maps of military facilities, to promote substantiation. These successful news producers clearly annotate from where information has come using overlays on videos or references in text, and they include links in captions and bios

Mode 5: Study

 The vibe: going deep to master a topic of personal or professional interest
 The energy: a desire to learn, upskill and be inspired. For some, Study mode is a pleasant distraction
 The strategy: producers can create long-form, information-dense content that has high-production value to keep engagement high, while showcasing their lived experience as a means to draw users into the story.

How to win at Study mode:

• Bring the story to life through immersion.
• Show interest
• Open with the motive, not just the topic
• Use mini-brands or shows as a creative sandbox
• Start with a learning goal to orient the audience and prime attention
• Favor evergreen or under-explored themes
• Build concepts progressively and go deep
• Bring it to life: gather original evidence, showcase it in original ways and develop a signature form

Case study: HowTown. 15-plus-minute long-form videos that have clear chapter markers and distill key information while allowing users to easily go back or skip specific sections.

Mode 6: sensemake

 The vibe: looking for context to understand why a story matters and what to think about it
 The energy: exploring different viewpoints to form opinions. This mode is driven by curiosity and a desire for co-learning spaces
 The strategy: create spaces that invite perspective and transparency, helping audiences process disagreement and find orientation amid uncertainty

How to win at Sensemake mode:

• Create open conversations 
• Create open spaces for honest conversation where producers and audiences can think aloud
• Clearly disclose your intention, bias or viewpoint
• Orient and include the audience: vary show formats to deepen engagement and reach audiences across information needs
• Use livestreams to transform news into a shared, real-time act
• Use satire wisely (it should stimulate critical thinking): build recurring inside jokes to make complex topics feel approachable and foster a sense of belonging

Case Study: Morning Brew. Always linking to the original business story to anchor it to one company and how it’s being covered. Satire is created through the use of props, funny captions and over-the-top personas or characters.

---

3. The “Social” Mode: how news is shared

Mode 7: Socialize

 The vibe: sharing news to connect with others, express identity, or start a conversation. Sharing news is less a discrete consumption habit and more of a long-term relational action to be considered in its own context.
 The energy: there is no more valued, trusted source than friends and family, and often these connections help cut through content overwhelm.
 The strategy: build for sharing!

How to win the Social mode:

• Make sharing a “product feature” that makes the action effortless for readers
• Create content that people want to send to their peers
• Leading news producers tell human stories
• Consider using memes to condense meaning and inject humor

The takeaway for publishers

The “Next Gen” consumer is suffering from information overwhelm. To win, publishers must transition from being “content factories” to “mode-specific service providers.” Whether it’s winning the first two seconds of a Scroll or providing the deep-dive tools for Study, success in 2026 and beyond depends on meeting the audience exactly where they are.

By Danuta Bregula and Liesbeth Nizet, authors of the How Publishers Can Grow with Today’s Youth report and the Youthquake and stuff newsletter for publishers.

 

Now, let’s take a closer look at how this generation map translates to media consumption. Notice anything interesting? There are indeed significant differences, but more importantly, there’s a huge opportunity here. Generation Alpha is being raised by the most tech-savvy, brand-conscious, and emotionally-attuned parents yet: Millennials and older Gen Zs. These next-gen parents are not only redefining parenting but are also shaping the preferences and expectations of future consumers. Here’s the kicker: they still recognize and value the news brands they grew up with, as long as those brands and products continue to meet their needs.

> To add to your reading list: Getting young people to subscribe means changing how we define journalism

 

Belonging over transaction

On the marketing side, there has been a significant shift as well. The traditional marketing funnel just doesn’t work anymore for these new generations. 

We’re shifting from a linear model to a more dynamic, engaging approach that reflects the ways Gen Z and Gen Alpha interact with content and more important, that starts from a belonging perspective. That is why we reshaped this funnel into a youth-friendly way using success stories from both inside and outside the media world:

Take a closer look because at times it’s all about nuances. Take stage (3): Belonging a smooth transaction process that allows new users to pay however they want is not just the expected technical product feature but a message to them: we understand you, you belong here, we recognize you prefer Klarna. More than 80% of GenZ expect alternative payment methods like in-app payments and mobile wallets.

Or, think about how successful news brands execute the stages (1) Inspiration and (2) Excitement: they put the personalities of their journalists and columnists first (meaning: short video “commentary” formats) because they recognize that community needs a face.

And then there’s the product level: in one of the case studies we wrote about in our newsletter we featured Sam Koslowski, the founder of The Daily News, an Australian news brand, who hit the core challenge: “The news is overwhelming – the way it is presented doesn’t have to be.” 

On the marketing side, think about initiatives like the recent collaboration between Highsnobiety, a global fashion and lifestyle media brand based in Berlin, and some of the most iconic Parisian brands, including Le Monde, for this year’s edition of their Not In Paris campaign. See more beautiful photos from the campaign here and learn about all the accompanying events here. If you watched the latest season 4 of the global Netflix hit Emily in Paris, you likely noticed how effectively the show portrayed Le Monde as an influential social powerhouse in one of its most dramatic storylines. 

Whose point of view do you channel?

Before we invite you to follow us on youthquakes.substack.com, we want to leave you with one overarching question to consider which could explain why many brands struggle to resonate with the next generations, even when their products seem nearly flawless: Whose point of view are you channeling?

>>> Need more examples and insights? Follow us on youthquakes.substack.com

Clearly succeeding in acquiring and engaging younger audiences, there’s a lot of takeaways to support the wider publishing industry. 

We interviewed Co-founder Paul on why they chose to target these readers, what strategies they’re using to achieve this and what they’d recommend to legacy publishers hoping to do the same.

Quick stats on Morning Crunch
- Launched in 2023
- Newsletter only 
- Already 700 editions published
- 50,000 subscribers
- Team of 3

Why did you want to launch with younger readers in mind?

We’d actually already tried to launch a youth platform when I worked at Handelsblatt. But we didn’t manage to find the right tone, platform or way of getting information across to younger audiences. It’s a tough job for a legacy publication with an existing tone, audience and brand reputation. 

Despite this failure, we know that there’s a huge gap in the German market – an estimated 1M young professionals in Germany – who aren’t really being targeted by legacy publishers. These readers have grown up with the challenges of stock crashes, lockdowns amidst the pandemic, challenging economic situations, etc. but no real news outlet to inform them in a way that actually helps them to understand what’s happening in all of this. The only ones doing this are self-proclaimed ‘influencers’ on social media.

What Gregor and I realized was that the formats and ways of telling stories needed to change if you wanted to attract and retain younger readers. That’s incredibly hard to do authentically if you’re a legacy publisher. If you have the freedom to dare to do something different, you’re in a better position. 

In short, it’s better to start from scratch – even as a legacy publisher, you can launch a completely new standalone brand. Of course, that takes courage. 

So you knew you wanted to target these readers, how are you doing this?

Adapted content and formats. For example: 

• What we call ‘smart bullets’ – a way of explaining and illustrating a point in a short, concise and easy-to-digest format – a format that Axios has perfected
• Pop-culture references, humor and memes that resonate with young readers. This is also a more ‘daring’ format, and something that legacy publishers might be hesitant to do
• Topics that young readers care about, those that directly impact them – and explaining them in a way that is entertaining but also informative 
• Adding a section “why this matters” to every story – that’s where we connect the bigger story to the individual reader

It’s also about the angle. We don’t just report what’s going on but how it’s impacting young readers and their realities. For instance, we wouldn’t just say “this event has impacted interest rates” but “open your banking app and you’ll probably see that this interest on your savings has declined, here’s why and how it will affect you long-term – and why crypto still isn’t the answer to declining interest rates”

We don’t yet have the team to do scoops, we have to find out which stories are interesting and relevant to our readers, understand the news, consider how it impacts them and give them our take. 

> A must-read on the topic: Getting young people to subscribe means changing how we define journalism

We have to position ourselves as a smart friend, but we equally don’t want to talk down to people. It’s a tough balance to find. 

Apart from the stable (and high) open rates, the signs that it’s working is that readers actually reply and contact us – they even correct us, and we put these corrections in the newsletter, showing that we, too, make mistakes. It’s about building close relationships as individuals, not just a brand.

“Young consumers’ definition of engaging storytelling looks very different to the traditional news report...The mass appeal of social media platforms and the explosion of new storytelling methods - including video, personalized interactives and documentary style podcasts, to name a few - has shifted consumer preferences towards being more visual and graphic, more immersive and more readily available.”

Next Gen News Report 2024 research reveals that the next generation of news consumers have strong preferences for particular storytelling formats:

1. Convenience: “I don’t want this to require more effort than necessary”

2. Language: “I want words that I understand and a tone that is welcoming”

3. Format: I want this in a form that works for me and my situation”

What are your success metrics? How do you know you’re successfully attracting and retaining these readers? 

We look at the classic newsletter metrics – open rates, click rates – as well as retention rates, a tricky one for newsletters. You always have readers who unsubscribe but also others who just stop reading. They don’t help with ad revenue, so you need to find who they are and re-engage them. 

We keep track of how much feedback we get, replies and responses to our polls. This also helps us get a better idea of who is reading us – their age, profession, position in a company, etc. 

“The business is currently monetized through advertising”

I definitely think it’s more valuable building a brand first and thinking of ROI more deeply in the future, so we only monetize through advertising for the moment. We also know that US examples like MorningBrew and Axios make a majority of their revenue from advertising. 

The current newsletters, which are more general interest, don’t really suit a paid subscription model yet. We plan to go more deeply into niche topics in the future, where we provide extra data and value, and that’s where we’d also start thinking about paid offerings. But then there’s the question of whether our young audience really wants all of that. 

For instance, a long, detailed daily newsletter may appear to be worth paying for, but are audiences going to read that for 2 hours every morning?  

Best in class example: The FT Edit app where Financial Times built a lighter version of their product. This has value (and is worth paying for) in the fact that they carefully pick out the most important articles to read each day. It’s this curation that the reader is paying for. 

The growth strategy

We’re planning to grow more newsletters, like Axios has done. It’s what we just completed a funding round on. The German market is definitely mature in its propensity to pay for quality news, in particular across niches. But many legacy publishers aren’t digital-first or catering towards the young professional. So we hope to fill this gap in the future, spreading out to the farming industry, auto-motive, etc. 

It’s also essential that we stay with these younger readers, so we’ll hire a few young editors, but we’re also open to more senior editors who understand what we’re doing. We want to stay lean though, newsletters don’t need a large team. 

What have you done differently to when you launched the youth platform with Handelsblatt that didn’t end up working? 

Perhaps the fact that we’re starting from scratch, without any audience, rather than trying to build on an existing brand, and using the same platforms that we’ve already been using for other readers, sets us apart from traditional publishers. We don’t need to worry about the risks involved with testing new acquisition channels, or trying to change the reputation of an existing brand. 

Plus, a legacy publisher might launch a product aimed at young readers and get a substantial number of sign-ups immediately after launch, but they’re not the right audience. It’s still the same readers that you had initially – and that means you now have a new way of monetizing your existing audience, but no new audience. 

User acquisition 

• Working closely with influencers and meme pages
• Trying new channels like Quora and Reddit
• Being bold in trying new ad formats, user-generated content for example
• Media companies don’t tend to use these acquisition sources because of the risks involved

Tonality 

• Make jokes and be the joke, a lighter but well-informed take 
• Deliver high-quality financial journalism and keep the banter to very few, and clearly marked, sections (e.g. Memes at the end of the newsletter) 

Newsletter only 

• Publishing houses would think hard about this strategy because of the single channel risk – on the other hand: newsletter brands have first party data, which many established brands do not 

More flexibility 

• We don’t have the concerns of brand safety and the risks of trying to gain younger readers whilst retaining existing ones 
• Starting from scratch with an entirely new brand and no audience means we can work to acquire the readers in the right target market. For large brands, they might launch a newsletter aimed at young readers and get thousands of sign ups immediately, but they won’t likely be the right audience. 

What would you recommend to anyone in a large publication trying to target young readers? 

Ringier did a great job with Izzy projects, and FT with Sifted. A completely new brand meant freedom in playing around with the brand proposition, acquiring an entirely new audience all whilst having the benefit of expertise from the parent brand and sister companies who are one step ahead.

• Don’t do it under the same label 
• Give freedom to the brand 
• Bring in young people 
• Be willing to give away some budget without predefined budget lines – you don’t know beforehand what a new brand needs 
• Accept that this budget may not be used in the ways you initially planned, or in the ways that it may be used for legacy publishers

Of course, it’s easy to conclude that this is because young demographics don’t care about the news and just want to spend their time on TikTok… but that would be wrong. Think about what has happened over the past decade. We’ve seen young demographics demand more action in terms of climate change. We’ve seen how young demographics are the strongest supporters of #metoo and are the most vocal about how it impacts them. It’s also the younger demographics who are out there protesting against the many war crimes and human rights violations we see around the world.

It’s also the youngest demographics who are the most worried about what is happening. They are the ones facing the housing crisis, and the ones worrying about jobs in a future that is becoming more and more automated, as well as bigger issues like the loss of biodiversity. It’s getting so bad that in a 2020 study, reported by The Guardian, when interviewing thousands of under 35 year olds living in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK about the idea of having children, “an overwhelming majority (60%–80%) reported that they were either postponing or entirely abandoning the idea.”

It would be a mistake to think that ‘young demographics don’t care about news, and just want to spend their time on TikTok’. It’s actually the exact opposite. Young demographics care more than any other demographics. But this also illustrates the problem we have in the newspaper industry around conversions.

Why is it that the demographic who care and are the most active are the ones moving away from newspapers, while the demographics who are the least active are the ones who stay?

The answer can partly be explained by the way we do journalism, and how we define that role in society.

There is a wonderful (adapted) quote that originates from a 1974 book by the two journalists, Sam Kinch and Stuart Long, called: “Allan Shivers: The Pied Piper of Texas Politics”. It says:

If one person says it’s raining, and another person says it’s not. Our job, as journalists, isn’t to cover what these people said, but to look out the window and see what is actually going on.”

You’ve probably heard this quote before, but what many don’t notice is that it also perfectly captures this generational divide. You see, older generations look at newspapers and journalism as being about the first part. They look at us as sources of information, and as a place where news is reported to them. In other
words, they value that we cover “that one person says it’s raining, and another person says it’s not.”

But the younger demographics live in an entirely different world. For them, information is everywhere. They are inundated by it. And so they don’t need journalists to tell them what different people are saying. Instead, younger demographics require a higher level of journalism. They require newspapers to figure out what the issues are and to put the effort and expertise into investigating this news, rather than just reporting on it. They want us “to look out the window and see what is actually going on.”

> To add to your reading list: How publishers can grow with the youth: takeaways from the Valuable Young Audiences report

And this isn’t just theoretical.

One example of a publisher already doing it is the Danish Zetland. Their journalistic focus is not to merely write 100 news articles per day, reporting on what different people say. They are doing this other form of journalism, and as a result, they have a very strong young audience – 65% of their readers are below 45.

There are of course other factors at play, but changing the journalistic focus is a really important step. The younger demographics represent our future audiences. If we can’t convert them, we don’t have a future.

The Audiencers' Festival at The New York Times Building on March 15th brought together 150 digital publishing professionals to discuss everything from audience research to newsletters, engaging young audiences and maximizing on the value of registration.

Julia Munslow, Senior Platform Editor at The Wall Street Journal, spoke on stage about how she works on developing long term relationships with young audiences through TikTok. Joining the Journal from Yahoo! in 2021, Julia and her team spent a year thinking about how to launch on TikTok as a legacy news organization. The main goal: attract a new audience of younger readers.

The WSJ’s approach to attracting young audiences on TikTok

• A dedicated core team – including TikTok specialists and social media experts who do the majority of production work
• Collaborating with the newsroom – Julia’s team makes sure to train and coach journalists across the newsroom, making it as accessible as possible for everyone to be involved. Journalists are made aware of the social work that Julia’s team are doing, the places where they can step in and how to do this effectively (scripting, filming, hosting, fact checking, etc.).

• Smart curation – Julia’s team do the majority of the work, carefully considering hooks (the first 2-3 seconds of a video), visuals and topics. Their job is to carefully select and curate content for this specific audience, understanding that they’re not the same as traditional Journal readers. As research such as FT Strategies’ Next Gen News Report reveal, younger readers are seeking softer, less harsh news that’s accessible, helps them feel connected and doesn’t require much effort.

• Intentional tone – It’s not an easy job to engage these readers. Publishers are fighting for attention against not only other news sources but also influencers, celebrities and a user’s friends on these platforms. But understanding these audiences’ behavior, how they want to consume news whilst also taking lessons from “everyday people” Julia shared how they balance straightforward delivery with humorous skits.

Case Study #1: The power of compelling visuals

@wallstreetjournal

Rescuers are racing to find a missing submersible headed for the Titanic shipwreck. The vessel, owned and operated by OceanGate Expeditions, lost contact with the ship monitoring it from the surface one hour and 45 minutes after it began its dive in the North Atlantic on Sunday morning. Graphic by Kevin Hand for WSJ, Source: OceanGate Expeditions #titanic #submersible #oceangate #wsj #wallstreetjournal #thewallstreetjournal

♬ original sound – The Wall Street Journal

Why was this successful?

Aside from the traditional view metric, Julia also looks at other engagement metrics to get a more complete view of success.

• Over 20 million views 
• High completion rate – 75% people finished this video (which is a very high percentage compared to benchmarks)
• Gained 34K followers just on this video alone

How did they make it a success?

• Bouncing off a big news moment
• Bespoke graphics + unique voiceover to make it more compelling
• Short video – young readers want to be told the key information in a short period of time, in an accessible and efficient way, to be able to learn something then scroll and get on with their day

Case Study #2: The power of exclusivity + SEO

@wallstreetjournal

Russian draftee Ruslan Anitin is one of the few Russian soldiers to try to surrender to a drone. Drone footage reviewed by WSJ captured in its entirety the frantic efforts of a man trying to survive. If Anitin’s experience is any indication, Russian morale appeared to be fraying even before the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive began. A Ukrainian hotline for Russians who want to surrender has received more than 17,000 inquiries since September, Ukrainian officials said. : Code 9.2 Unit of Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade, Achilles Unit of Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade : Sasha Maslov for WSJ #russia #ukraine #wsj #thewallstreetjournal #wallstreetjournal

♬ News, news, seriousness, tension(1077866) – Lyrebirds music

Why was this successful?

• Longterm, consistent growth – in the 48hrs after publishing, this video gained 3M video views, which isn’t anything remarkable for the Journal. But a year later, it’s now at 9M views.

How did they make it a success?

• Newsroom evangelization – whenever you have a new platform, with new audiences, you have to let teams know what you’re doing, even simply via coffee chats, to get the word out and pick their brains and resources. This will pay off in the long term
• Planning – this story was an exclusive for the Journal, and they knew it was coming so could get ready for the moment of publication, making use of resources from across the newsroom
• Search optimization – including keywords, trending hashtags, and optimizing these over time. It’s thanks to this that the video’s performance has continued to grow over time, especially as younger audiences are turning to TikTok as a form of search engine

Case Study #3: The power of impact

@wallstreetjournal

A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict Donald Trump for his role in paying hush money to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election, kicking off a process in which the former president will likely be required to come to New York to face charges, according to people familiar with the matter. Investigations Editor Michael Siconolfi breaks down the Pulitzer Prize-winning WSJ reporting that triggered the investigation that led to Trump’s indictment. : Getty (6), Reuters (2), AP (5), Rob Alcaraz, Drew Evans and Dave Prokopec for WSJ #trump #politics #indictment #news #wsj #wallstreetjournal #thewallstreetjournal

♬ original sound – The Wall Street Journal

Why was this successful?

• Expert POV – explainer video by an award winning journalist. Research has proven that young audiences care about who is telling the story, they often like it when someone has “been there” in the room (first-hand experience or is filming whilst there).
• Turned a complex subject into an engaging, accessible story – a viewer doesn’t need much context prior to the video to understand what’s going on.
• News peg to old award-winning coverage

How did they make it a success?

• Planning ahead of known news – this was also a story that they knew was coming so they had time to prepare, publishing it pretty much as soon as the news dropped
• Engaging visuals that were also reused across multiple platforms – this same video was published on Instagram and Snapchat
• Took action post-publication – engaging in the comment section. Young readers engage through conversation, so this continued interaction is important for trust and relationship building, which is an audience expectation on these platforms. This is why it’s valuable to have an expert in different platforms on your team, to understand the norms of each platform.

Case Study #4: The power of engagement

@wallstreetjournal

Whether they win or not, top nominees reliably leave the Oscars with thousands of dollars in swag. Here, a look at how the most extravagant goodie bags in Hollywood come together. : Sean Dong, Courtesy of Distinctive Assets #oscars #academyawards #hollywood #oscarsgiftbag #wsj #thewallstreetjournal #wallstreetjournal

♬ original sound – The Wall Street Journal

Why was this successful?

• WSJ angle on a big news moment, one that fits the Journal’s area of expertise but is also engaging for younger audiences with a unique point of view. Part of this is because of the algorithm, but also bringing value
• Over 1M views on TikTok

How did they make it a success?

• Planning ahead of known news moment
• On-camera host – makes the news feel more approachable and engaging, humanizing your brand, but also familiarity with some people appearing regularly, building a clear brand image

• Post-publication actions including engaging in the comments section

Strategies for engaging in the comments section

• Check the user and how to interact with them, make sure it’s not going to negatively impact your brand
• Use existing reporting OR talk to your reporters to help answer your questions

Why is this important?

• Young audiences consume news via discourse – this conversation takes time to develop, but you could start by posting a question to initiate the conversation. Or maybe try commenting on other videos that aren’t published by your brand. This humanizes your brand and makes you seem more accessible. You can also consider posting across platforms and encourage editors and reporters to share videos to start the conversation.
• Make videos complementary to a story – this opens up opportunities to develop the conversation, for embedding, for sharing, and you’re providing a new value that adds to your other work

The playbook

1. Establish goals – why are you going on social? For WSJ on TikTok, it’s to help establish their brand identity, and figure out how to create a relationship with young audiences. Make sure these goals align with what’s possible on the platform (i.e. conversions via TikTok isn’t very feasible.
2. Optimize for search – pay attention to what audiences are using for search, but it’s no longer just Google. And do this with all content
3. Measure your impact – once you have your goals, measure whether you’re meeting them. One essential here is to establish benchmarks for each platform and content-type, to compare performance and see when a video has performed well. This way, you’re not only looking at videos that have high views as the sole success metric, but also median performance, and why it might have performed well in other areas, for other reasons. e.g. number of new followers, completion rate, audience demographic, etc.
4. Take action post-publication – What can I do next to continue to expand the reach and performance of this content? Posting on other platforms, getting in the comment section, optimizing for SEO over time…
5. Engage with a community – community is so important, but specific to each platform, so engage with users differently across platforms.
6. Regularly update your strategy – once you have all of these things figured out, go back and do it again! Ensure you’re ahead of the game, keeping up with latest platform trends, testing and iterating with your strategy. Don’t be afraid to take risks! You never know when they may pay off.

Question from the audience: are there any insights here that can be applied on-site?

“I really encourage everyone to look at the North Western and FT report, it contains a lot of interesting insights on this topic. But one thing I like to say a lot is that you need to take these news consumers seriously – they may have a different profile, have different ways of consuming news, they might prefer social… but how can you integrate all of these learnings on-site? This could mean changing the tone of your reporting, experimenting with first-person point of view, adding more imagery or integrating social videos into content, but the important thing is to understand these audiences and apply learnings from social on-site.

Question from the audience: how does this tie back to the newsroom and how do you get buy in for this work when it’s not linked to traditional success metrics like page views?

“At the beginning, when you’re asking people to be on camera for social video for a new platform, some of them are going to look at you like you have 2 heads. But what we did was that we did a lot of preparation work before we started approaching people, and then we found it to be a snowball effect.

Once we looked at the platform, we took all the research we could find across the internet (about young readers, social, where people are getting their news, etc) to prove that this is where our potential audience is – we want those audiences, we should be there.

Then building the relationships around the newsroom, getting teams involved in the fun of social too. Evangelizing the newsroom, getting even the longer standing journalists to join a video. Finding your champions. But it’s not going to be everyone, and that’s ok, just push with those who are onboard.

And proving that it’s not a whole load more work for them. Our team will do all the hard work and will only ask for 15 minutes of a journalist’s time.

But to be honest, I don’t think there’s much convincing now for Tiktok. But when I was at Yahoo, people took a lot more convincing. So what we did was find the champions, the success stories, and really push those to prove the value of this platform and the time spent on it.”

We met on a cold Friday morning, in a noisy café in Paris’ 15th arrondissement. Coffee in hand, Bérénice Lajouranie, Managing Director of the daily business newspaper Les Echos, accompanied by Violaine Degas, Digital Director, begins to share the inside story of their recent quest to reach new audiences. Recounting the context and vision behind this major digital project, I learn about the reasoning behind this work, how it unfolded, the KPIs measured and results attained. 

Today, Les Echos has 100,000 subscribers, 75% individual, 25% B2B. In the B2B segment, the renewal rate is close to 100%. Even on the B2C side, it’s very good. So, clearly, subscriber retention isn’t a priority for investing resources this year.

On the other hand, we’re finding it difficult to win over new readers. 

This is partly due to brand image, and then perhaps because we have a somewhat generalist, somewhat specialist positioning. But also the conversion tunnel which, at the moment, can be imagined as a fancy champagne glass thanks to our relatively niche premium product positioning. Our goal is to move from the champagne glass to more of a martini glass – a wider entry funnel to go after audiences that are less obvious to us – young people and women, but also companies in certain sectors, under-represented in our B2B portfolio.

How did you decide which audiences were worth going after?

Bérénice: Firstly, by reviewing the profile of our current readership. Two-thirds of our audience are men and one-third women, with an average age of 50. So it quickly became clear that we needed to attract women and young people! 

Violaine, Digital Director: We worked with Demain agency, coordinated by our publisher Marie Van de Voorde, putting everything we knew about our readership into an Excel spreadsheet. We interviewed our in-house teams before working with the agency to organize interviews with subscribers to create a gallery of personas. 

Our young readers (who don’t have the typical profile of any young person) are aged between 20-30, are in or have completed higher education and could be described as a ‘young talent’ or ‘future executive/expert’. They’re the people who will help transform tomorrow’s business world.

And it’s this young reader segment who is particularly important to us and the future of our business. If we can prepare a qualified, engaged young audience, these readers may be our future loyal subscribers. 

Bérénice: from a strategic point of view, we’ve reinvested in audience research. For years, we’d been very focused on web analytics. And now we’ve rediscovered the means for qualitative research, for listening to the voice of our readers. We have a lot of research underway.

Violaine: I think what it allowed us to do was to bring out the insight, the irrational side of the request. Something that obviously we weren’t going to find in our analytics…

When it comes to young people, we found a lot of the same things we’ve been saying everywhere: they’re pretty far removed from information, they see it as anxiety-provoking, they get their information from social networks in audiovisual formats. When they subscribe to Les Echos, we can see that their consumption is irregular. We see them more in tune with Echos START, our editorial offering for young professionals, which works well for them. They find it more accessible, and feel better represented by the subjects we cover, around the start of a career, a first job… Our aim is to bring them to Les Echos full subscription too.

We’ve really delved into the relationship between work and the company. We realized that this is a generation that sees work as a means to personal fulfillment. They’ve already made a sacrifice – their studies – and when they start working, they want a meaning to what they’re doing, they want a good salary and to learn new things. They experience work as a vector of freedom and autonomy, not as a sacrifice, and the protection of their private/professional life balance is essential to them. They also like to form their own opinions on social issues that affect them, such as environmental impact, or the role of AI, for example. And of course, they prefer short, accessible video or audio formats, which they consume mainly on social networks, where they’ve mastered the codes. We need to respond to a form of impatience…

Do you pass on all the insights you gather during these interviews to the editorial team to inform them of reader expectations?

Violaine: We operate as a multi-disciplinary working group: editorial, audience, product, distribution, data… all coordinated by the editor, and it works well that way. Clémence Lemaistre, the digital editor, is our link to the editorial team.

> You’ll also enjoy: How the customer centre at Bonnier News became a source of insight – and the tools we used to achieve this

So, what’s your plan to appeal to this young target audience?

Bérénice: We’re aware that it’ll take time for them to buy a subscription, so our aim is to get them to visit our platforms, website and mobile app, subscribe to our newsletters and find out what we do.

Violaine: What we’ve been working on a lot are formats and distribution. In concrete terms, that means a lot of videos! 

We were already producing news formats, but we started working on more complete video formats which better showcase the editorial expertise. In this area, we were supported by the Upian agency, along with the digital editorial team and audience teams.

Bérénice: video isn’t part of the Les Echos culture, we’re really a print-oriented company – it wasn’t an obvious step for us to take!

Violaine: The workshops set up by our editorial and audience teams, those working with Upian, were a big hit and really beneficial for this project. Journalists discovered a new way of conveying their expertise with a different kind of storytelling. The first format we produced is called “Ça s’explique” – literally translated as ‘that’s explainable’. Because, as our digital editor Clémence puts it so well, “for every problem there’s a solution that’s simple, clear and wrong”.  We want to show that we need nuance!

We’ve produced our first 4 episodes: one on the hidden benefits of inflation, a reportage format showing that cows can also help reduce pollution, one on why bicycles are no longer manufactured in France, and one on deciphering the success of the shop, Action. You can watch them on our Youtube channel:

In the last 3 months, these 4 videos have gathered 750,000 views, with a completion rate of 50% on YouTube and an average age between 25 and 35. Overall, all types of videos combined, we’ll generate three times more views in 2023 than in 2021 on our site or on platforms like Instagram or LinkedIn.

Bérénice: The subjects are very in-depth and serious… but the tone and design are new. It’s fresher and more accessible. 

We tried to reproduce what we’d done with our podcasts, in particular “La Story”, which has become one of the best news podcasts, where we worked really well with the Binge studio and editorial team.

For this project, we closely followed Binge’s recommendations, which were to give ourselves the means to ‘go big’ with this project, committing to doing it well, including hiring 3-4 dedicated positions which, at the time, was a daring and costly gamble. But today, it’s working well, we’re still getting a good audience and we’re monetizing the podcast well. So it was the right thing to do!

For our videos, we try to do the same thing: work with external experts for the form and format, then onboard teams for writing the content.

How do you organize distribution of these videos?

Violaine: Broadcasting is a priority on the site. We’re working on a video template that hasn’t been released yet, so for the moment videos are included in a classic article template, but this will evolve.

Bérénice: The “La story” podcast I mentioned earlier is superbly linked in all our articles, so we need to do the same with the video!

Violaine: We also broadcast them on social networks (Instagram, Facebook, X), in a teaser format lasting a few seconds (each video is 8-10 minutes long). We’re currently studying which teaser format works best for each platform (carousel, short video showing highlights,etc…). The next goal will be to optimize distribution on YouTube and improve our channel.

Of course, we felt a good fit with Linkedin, where we already have a strong presence with a very loyal community and two newsletters, “Mes Echos de la semaine” by Nicolas Barré and “Le pitch START UP” by Charlie Perreau, which have a combined audience of nearly 1 million people, and where we’d particularly like to strengthen our support for young working people in their thirties.

We’re currently releasing 1 video a month, studying storytelling and the right time to post. We’re also analyzing the format and rate of distribution, with the goal of increasing the rate of production when we feel we’ve found the right way of doing things.

Did you make any new hires for this project?

Violaine: Upian’s role is to pass on skills to us internally (video editor, motion designer), so yes, we do need a video producer in particular, and this will be our next big recruitment.

But we’ve been working hard on Les Echos’ social media presence for several years now, and we’ve really put a lot of energy into it. So we’d already recruited Community Managers on the editorial side to adapt formats to each platform. 

We doubled our reach on Instagram between September 2022-23 by working on both the form and content of our posts and stories. We’ve adapted our visual charter, left more room for infographics, videos and regular collaborations with the team at Datagora, one of our incubated start-ups specializing in democratizing public data, making it more accessible to as many people as possible. Instagram is an interesting platform for us – it has enabled us to rejuvenate our audience (the majority of which are under 35), but also to feminize it, another of our goals with this project.

On TikTok, Les Echos START, embodied by Faustine Mazereeuw and other Les Echos journalists she invites, brings together a community of over 50,000 subscribers, whose average age is between 25 and 34, with a perfect 50/50 gender split. A good example of what happens on this platform is the highly educational content produced by the START editorial team on certain types of French savings accounts, which has amassed 450,000 views. It’s proof that “serious” subjects interest young audiences too – they’re useful in their daily lives as first-time savers.

Which KPIs did you measure for this project?

Violaine: It’s pure image notoriety and branding, and that’s what we need. As soon as we can, we link to the site and not to Youtube, because we need to bring people back to our subscription funnel. This will probably involve a newsletter in the future…

Bérénice: For the “Ça s’explique” project, our KPIs are average age of viewers, completion rate of each video and the number of views. Each project has its own quantified goals. And twice a year, as a model student of the WAN-IFRA Table Stakes program, we often ask ourselves the question of “what should we stop doing?”

We have to stay on course, and not let ourselves get sidetracked!

And you don’t think you can calculate an ROI?

Violaine: as long as we don’t have the right mechanism to encourage people who come to see a video to sign up, it’s going to be difficult to assess…

What are your next steps?

Violaine: We’re obviously going to continue what we’ve started. On top of that, we want to…

• Understand how we can better align the START brand with the Les Echos brand, to pursue the same goal of attracting younger readers
• Increasing our ambitions in the video format, without deviating from our brand positioning
• Devising ways of registering these new users and measuring the number of people who discover Les Echos and consult it regularly, a prerequisite for more subscription-oriented actions

Have you ever considered opening the entry funnel through language – for instance making content in English to attract English speakers?

Bérénice: Not really. Where we could bring specificity is in the treatment of France in both macro and micro economics, but frankly I need to prioritize and don’t believe in the potential, given the complexity of the project.

And this is a huge part of my role, to settle on the macro subject that we’re going to work on over the next year, to know that this is where we’ll focus resources. This doesn’t mean that we don’t deal with the other subjects, but that we choose the one on which to concentrate.

I’m constantly being asked to lose direction. We’re in a very, very fast-moving world, in which we share a lot with others: that’s good, but it’s important not to lose focus!