The focus on reader revenue means the newsroom is shifting slowly from cost-sink to profit centre. We talk to three leaders focused on content-driven subscription growth. 

While a torrential increase in online content makes it difficult for journalists to navigate misinformation and biased sources, it has also opened up new insights. For instance, you can now source up-to-the-minute perspectives on popular opinion and widespread sentiment, as well as identify trends through aggregated online search behaviour. In collaboration with Sky News, we showcase the example of a crucial investigative report based entirely on online search trends and site analysis sourced from SEMrush.

In June, Schibsted’s regional title Bergens Tidende launched a completely new premium vertical on BT.no. Boligsalg (Home Sales) consists solely of robot written articles about house and apartment sales, tagged down to the street level to enable hyperlocal segmentation. The high quality of the articles and images combined with the geotargeting accuracy now drives 60–70 subscription sales a month for the Norwegian publisher. Jan Stian Vold will share learnings and key success factors around this newsroom automation project.

Read more about the BT newsroom automation case here.

The only thing keeping some subscribers on board is the second wave of Covid. It’s time to rethink the way we think about data and the different aspects of churn. We look at one bleeding-edge award-winning approach, as well as getting collected wisdom from across the world. 

There are many specific challenges for local publishers launching and growing digital subscriptions. Key to this is changing the idea of a single local audience - moving from one size-fits-all to serving and understanding multiple audiences with different backgrounds, demographics and interests. We explore how two leading regional publishers, in Scotland and Belgium, have addressed the transformation challenge.

Onet.pl is one of the most popular news portals in Poland, with 18 million unique visitors and billions of page views every month. However, keeping users engaged on their platform was a challenge for them. Part of the solution was to gain agility and efficiency in their editorial production. The other part was to deploy content personalisation and better engage with their audience. Here's the story of how they did it with the support of Ring Publishing.