By Hannah Chia

Horiuchi Takashi, Deputy Director of Universal News Hub at Japan’s Asahi Shimbun outlined how one of the country’s oldest newspapers transformed itself digitally and how it is fine-tuning those efforts to meet today’s challenges, during our Asian Media Leaders Summit in Singapore.

Founded in 1879, Asahi Shimbun now has 3,800 staff, about half of whom are journalists. The paper launched its website in 1995. In 2011, the publisher started a paid subscription service, Asahi Shimbun Digital. Ever since, they have invested heavily in content beyond text, such as visual journalism and video journalism.

During the pandemic, they also hosted online events, such as their Reporters Salon, which continues to run twice a week. 

Their attempts to move to digital platforms also led to a re-evaluation of audiences and an understanding of the needs of digital readers, Horiuchi said.

Rethinking success metrics

Introduced in 2022, Asa-Digi Score, which is designed to understand reader satisfaction, also aims to provide journalists with an objective metric for identifying areas for improvement. 

Asa-Digi Score is built on Asahi Shimbu’s first program for reading audience data, Hotaru, in 2016.

Hotaru, meaning firefly in Japanese, functioned as an in-house tool for analysing and reporting users’ activities. While Hotaru was effective in measuring audience volume, questions soon emerged about whether high traffic necessarily reflected journalistic quality.

Likewise, Horiuchi said page views were a weak indicator because clicking the headline did not tell “how it is read and how much is read.”

At the same time, Asahi Shimbun faced a growing churn problem. 

“It was like pouring water into a bucket with a hole at the bottom,” Horiuchi said, describing the loss of subscribers despite strong conversion numbers.

A data-driven perspective to reader satisfaction

“Conversion is not a goal … It’s a starting point of the journey of subscribers,” Horiuchi noted.

The shift in focus from conversion to satisfaction was a decision based on the increasing loss of subscribers faced by Asahi Shimbun. 

“Do our subscribers feel very satisfied with our articles? The key question is… what should be done to enhance the subscriber satisfaction?” he said.

Asa-Digi Score is a 100-point scale that combines multiple metrics, including completion rate, article saves, share of readers under 40, and paid subscriber page views. These indicators are visualised in charts for journalists to understand their article performance. 

Crucially, the data is accessible to all journalists.

“We wanted data-informed journalism,” he said. “So it is very much essential to have our journalists in the driving seat of this program.”

WAN-IFRA Members can replay Horiuchi Takashi’s presentation on our Knowledge Hub by clicking here.

Asa-Digi Score has now become part of the daily newsroom practice. The newsroom team utilises the tool to review their stories in their regular meetings, while some use it to check if they are reaching the right target audience. 

“Our journalists rarely talk about page views now,” Horiuchi said. “They talk about quality.”

To complement Asa-Digi Score, Asahi Shimbun surveyed 10,000 paid subscribers to understand their needs and segment them into several categories, such as information seeking, emotion-driven or action-driven needs.

Asahi Shimbun then takes its newsletters (it has around 40 different ones) and segregates them into its most prevalent categories, and Asa-Digi Score is then used to identify the stories suitable for that particular newsletter.

“Distributing stories that fit readers’ interest is important,” Horiuchi said, “And it’s a great way to address [the] needs and interests of our users.” 

Since utilising the system for their newsletters, Asahi Shimbun has seen 18% higher engagement in the past year among paid subscribers, with churn rate falling by 10% in the past two years.

A work in progress

“Our journey toward data-informed journalism has only just begun. There are a lot of things to be done,” Horiuchi said. 

Currently, Asa-Digi Score operates on a limited number of metrics and focuses primarily on paid subscriber satisfaction. Horiuchi said the focus should also include non-subscribers, and noted that Asahi Shimbun is working on improving Asa-Digi Score’s system towards that goal. 

Understanding who reads the story also remains a priority for Asahi Shimbun, Horiuchi said,

Data is a shared asset across the newsroom, and the company sees the need to make it a common language for data-informed journalism to happen in the entire newsroom, he added.

About the author: Hannah Chia is a student at Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.