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The challenge: Keeping up with your audience
This year the participants are tackling an exciting set of challenges, from launching a communications campaign for a debate project to podcasts and AI-powered audio features. At the centre of all these projects is a shared goal to create more appealing journalism products informed by the audience’s evolving needs.
鈥淚t sounds funny, but they don鈥檛 read鈥�, said听Samuel Akoni听from听, reflecting on their journey of reaching out to newer generations of news consumers. The team has been working on their data infrastructure and using it to inform and shape their value to the audience. But how do you approach an audience that is not interested in written content? How do you engage the audience that experiences news fatigue or avoids hard news altogether?
The solution: Focus, set a routine, share the insights
Lena Beate Hamborg Pedersen, at Transition Accelerator Bootcamp 2024, Vienna
First things first, 鈥淪top focusing on everyone, you have to pick and choose,鈥澨�said听Lena Pedersen,听the Head of Product Development –听听and our Bootcamp trainer.
Catering to everyone is an impossible undertaking for a lot of public-interest journalism organizations; instead, these newsrooms听should focus on identifying specific audience segments, researching their needs, and tailoring their products to the segment at hand.
How to put that into practice?听The participants had a chance to conduct a sample interview and test out the techniques with a group of volunteers.听The act of doing mock audience interviews has given the teams some real aha moments. Here’s a summary from听Lena Pedersen’s听training:
- 鈥淧eople will give you the best version of themselves鈥�, so when conducting audience interviews,听use indirect questioning techniques to elicit authentic responses and uncover genuine user behaviors, needs and preferences. For example, instead of asking how often your interviewee reads the news, ask what the last pieces they read were and how they find them.
- Prioritize understanding problems and pain points听before diving into ideation and solutions to effectively address the audience’s real needs and save resources.
- Monetise your idea, as 鈥測ou won鈥檛 get far if you can鈥檛 earn money from it (your project/product)”.
- Involve more team members in the audience research process, including sharing user insights and feedback to shape the offering. For example, send developers interview transcripts so they know user concerns and how these can inform their part of the product.
- After the interview, debrief and incorporate听audience research as a consistent and manageable routine to gather valuable input without overburdening resources.
Eventually, establishing this routine could let newsrooms have a deeper dialogue with the readers. 鈥淒on鈥檛 just meet people where they already are, but also lead them to where you want them to go,鈥澨�as听added by听Urszula Kifer from our grantee,听.
Highlighting success stories, we had the pleasure of featuring two special guests at the Lightning Talks, Lukas Burnar听from听our previous听grantee听听(on the left) and听Florian Novak听from a news start-up听 (on the right), who shared their experiences in driving innovation within Austrian newsrooms with provocative insights on fostering audience relationships through newsletter subscription models, reinventing news formats and user experiences.
Innovation Deck
Apply by December 31, 2024馃搷Worldwide
Apply by December 31, 2024馃搷EU
Apply by January 10, 2025馃搷Worldwide
Apply by February 5, 2025馃搷Wordwide
Happening March 22-23, 2025馃搷Bucharest,听Romania
Share your thoughts, reach out to the Media Innovation team and help us shape our media support programmes! Say hi – [email protected].
