During our Newsroom Summit in Copenhagen last week, Cormac Bourke explained how the acquisition by Mediahuis in 2019 brought about strategic and structural changes to the publishing house.

Bourke, who is Editor-In-Chief of Mediahuis Ireland in addition to being the Editor of the Irish Independent for both Digital and Print, noted he didn’t have any secrets to reveal, or easy answers.

Rather, success has come from “a lot of little things. I think a lot of it is the right people, co-operating together in the right way,” he said.

Mediahuis Ireland publishes three main titles: the Irish Independent in the Republic of Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph in Northern Ireland, as well as the Sunday World, which is the only one of the three to not yet have a paywall. Bourke focused his presentation on the Irish Independent, and its stable of titles.

‘The important thing for us was to get going’

When Belgium-based Mediahus acquired Independent News & Media, some key operational changes began almost immediately.

Digital became the top priority, and investments were made in both people and tools to help launch their paywall. Bourke noted that twice before, under different ownership, the Irish Independent had come close to launching a paywall, but each time plans had been shelved.

Bourke said when he thinks about what they’ve done in the past six years, it comes down to a fairly simple process: “Make a plan, have a goal, and begin.”

“The important thing for us was to get going,” he added.

Unifying many titles to have one clear brand

Equally important was to unify their people and brands, which used a mix of fonts, styles and colours up to 2022, see slide below.

They created a multi-channel brand campaign around the words “Listen, read or watch,” and included their various brands, as well as redesigning their flags for all brands to use the same font and colour (aside from the Sunday Independent) as well as a harp, which had already been part of the Irish Independent’s logo. Today, the brands have a clearly uniform look, as can be seen below.

Before, those were all separate brands within silos, but Mediahuis Ireland has been in the process of becoming one team.

“We needed to simplify, foster collaboration and try to look at the bigger picture – for all parts of the business,” Bourke said.

One key metric: Subscriber Attention Time

They had a great initial success, and attracted the attention of FT Strategies, which asked them to take part in developing a north star.

“The idea was you’d have a hypothesis, do an experiment, implement it, evaluate it, and put it in the bin if it didn’t work, and move on if it did,” he added.

Stressing the importance of collaboration, Bourke said: “Joint goals are very important. Traditionally, at newspapers, there have been competing goals, competition and tension between departments. You need to have joint goals. For editorial, the challenge was open your mind: Really, really open your mind to what’s possible. You have to trust your colleagues outside of editorial.”

In line with this thinking, they have developed a single metric to have everyone focus on: Subscriber Attention Time, or SAT, which they believe is the metric that will help them to reach 200,000 digital subscribers by 2030.

Subscriber Attention Time is based on the number of minutes that a subscriber spends on the Irish Independent’s platforms engaging with their journalism. This applies to all the Independent’s platforms, but has an especially heavy emphasis on their mobile and their app, which are where their users are spending the most time and are most engaged.

What’s interesting about Subscriber Attention Time as a metric, Bourke said, is it moves things away from just acquisition, and also from metrics like page views.

“We had an audience team that was trying to deliver all kinds of metrics: Video views, page views, gate views, And we wanted to have a simpler way to talk to the newsroom. It also puts a value on what we don’t put behind the paywall, because a lot of what we use is the live server. That’s part of our mission for our audience.”

‘Focus on the audience in every way’

He added that this also gets people to understand that it’s not a matter of only good stories going behind the paywall and lesser stories not.

“What’s important is, there is quite a lot of consumption of stuff by our subscribers that is not behind the paywall,” he said.

Furthermore, Bourke noted a specific case, around courts coverage, to illustrate how the Independent’s thinking about what content should or should not go behind their paywall has changed.

Their courts coverage has long been an important part of their overall coverage and was driving a lot of engagement and page views, Bourke said, “but we didn’t think it was worth putting behind the paywall because it was kind of everywhere, so we thought, ‘Ok, where is the value in that?’ “

For example, similar content was available on their competitor’s site, as well as the national broadcaster’s site.

However, he said, over time, the Irish Independent found out through their engagement on those stories as well as from the acquisition from local court stories, that “there was a massive value for our subscribers, and those who would subscribe, in what we did in courts,” Bourke said. “Now, all of our courts [coverage] is behind the paywall, which is something we wouldn’t have thought of doing three, four, five years ago.”

“Focus on the audience in every way,” Bourke urged participants.

That sounds obvious, he added, but it includes many less obvious things, such as offering to let subscribers use a variety of kinds of payment, such as Google Pay and Apple Pay, as well as perhaps more counter-intuitive things, such as making it easy to cancel, which is something else the Irish Independent has found works in their favour.

Developing newsroom planning around digital ‘signature journalism’

The Irish Independent is now focusing on ensuring they deliver a variety of content across a number of key areas that resonate with their local audiences that they are calling “signature journalism.”

Each day, they have several key slots planned around popular areas, using digital deadlines, where stories have slots on the homepage.

“This is how we are talking to the newsrooms, and we’re getting there. This is how we want the newsroom to look at what they are doing, and not – absolutely not – looking at print pages,” Bourke said. “We now have three central conferences over the course of the day. Print doesn’t get mentioned at all.”

“It’s a process. And all of these things I’ve talked about are a process for us,” he added. “None of this is finished, and I don’t think anything will ever be finished for us. That’s one thing I would say from how we look at it from a newsroom point of view: That change is constant.”