How
the Herald Sun’s content drives
digital
subscriptions
At the heart of a successful digital
subscription strategy must lie the most important and valuable asset a news
service has: its journalism.
These are a few ground rules
we’ve applied at the Herald Sun in Melbourne as we transition from Australia’s
best-selling newspaper into a multi-platform subscription news service.
The value of journalism
We kept original journalism
central to what we do. Our reporters don’t sit at computers copying and pasting
work from other sources. They get out and gather stories. Traditional
boots-on-the-ground journalism.
Our police reporters speak to
victims and police contacts. Our court reporters sit in courtrooms covering
trials.
Our food reviewers eat at new
restaurants our readers are talking about. Our movie reviewers see the movies
first.
Our sport journalists are at
the games and the training sessions, interviewing players and club officials,
to keep fans deeply informed on the teams they follow.
Their original, news-breaking
journalism has value.
Stay true to your roots
The Herald Sun’s
news-breaking heritage and leadership position lies in three key areas: Australian
rules football, crime, and local news. This has been carried across from the
newspaper to digital.
We publish content from the
same pool of journalists and have the same approach in our tone: being
parochial, fighting for our readers, and focusing on the topics that matter
most to the 4.9 million people in Melbourne and 1.4 million people in regional
Victoria.
There may be a commercial
temptation to pivot to content of mass appeal, which is a strategy that can be
achieved efficiently by ripping off content from other sources and going after
a global, advertising-driven model. But we’ve chosen to focus on news and
events directly affecting our community. Our print heritage can be traced to
1840.
This approach has resulted in
us building a loyal subscription following.
Empowering journalists
With the journalists in place
to break the stories, it’s important we empower them to take control of the
content they create.
We hold master classes to
give journalists the digital skills and knowledge they need in a modern
newsroom. We run master classes in SEO. Journalists are trained to build their
own stories for digital publishing. They shoot video when needed.
They are equipped to join
comment threads on stories and talk to readers, building engagement, and finding
new angles to build on their journalism.
Democratising data
Our journalists and newsroom
leaders have digital data at their fingertips.
This year we launched a
digital dashboard called Verity. Journalists now know how their stories
performed in digital, including the number of pageviews, the number of
subscriptions their content has generated, where the audience comes from, and
where their content has been published. They can also see what stories across
the newsroom readers are engaging with in real time.
This is putting the power of
digital publishing in their hands.
Multi-skilled teams
We are merging our production
teams for print and Web as much as possible to build a multi-skilled team that
can push content to audiences regardless of the platform.
While this is a work in
progress, we have seen staff develop new skills ensuring our journalism reaches
the widest possible audience in a more effective way.
While there are challenges
for our newsroom, just as there are in many around the world, we believe we
have the right fundamental elements of a long-term subscription strategy.
The result
We are ahead of this year’s
targets for subscriptions driven by content. We have driven down churn and our
engagement scores have increased.
Core to this is putting the power of digital growth in the hands of our newsroom and the people who create the content — the content for which readers have willingly paid for many decades.
A successful digital news subscription strategy is only as good as the content. And the content is only as good as the journalists and newsrooms creating it.
Core to this is putting the power of digital growth in the hands of our newsroom and the people who create the content — the content for which readers have willingly paid for many decades.
A successful digital news subscription strategy is only as good as the content. And the content is only as good as the journalists and newsrooms creating it.
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