After a successful first round, ARA returned to Table Stakes Europe with a new challenge: to embed audiences-first thinking across its entire editorial team. Building on its initial success with a website focused on housing in Barcelona, the team has started to help other parts of the newsroom shift towards audience-driven journalism.
Launched in 2010, the Barcelona-based news brand ARA publishes content in Catalan, Spanish and English on its website ara.cat and its app, as well as publishing a Catalan-language daily print edition. ARA adopted a paywall in 2015, and in mid-2022 it had over 41,000 print and digital subscribers combined. The company has about 130 employees, of whom 100 work in the newsroom.
By Anna Cuyàs, Growth & Product Lead
We first participated in Table Stakes Europe in 20192020, with the goal of introducing data into our newsroom and starting to publish articles at the times when our audience was visiting us. During our first round, we therefore focused our efforts on our data and product teams.
This second time, our challenge was to include the entire editorial staff from the beginning. Since we knew it would be difficult, due to the workload they encounter every day, we made sure that our Head of Audiences and Deputy Director, Enric Borràs, was included in the core TSE squad.
After our first time in Table Stakes, our ability to share data with the editorial staff and their understanding of that data has improved significantly. (You can read about those efforts in a previous article.)
However, as a regional newspaper with limited resources, success can also reduce room for iteration and improvement. That’s why this year we returned to TSE: to try to f ind answers on how to enhance the dynamics of publishing articles by thinking about specific audiences and how to create targeted content for them.
This time, Pablo Casals, Director of Operations, David Quiñonero, Head of Data, Enric Borràs, Deputy Director and Head of Audiences and myself participated with the aim of building a new dynamic aimed at creating content for specific audiences, in a newsroom where there is a lot of data and great journalistic instinct, but a certain difficulty in combining these two points.
Building a site about housing in Barcelona
It was clear to us that we wanted to apply the TSE methodology more widely in our newsroom, but we needed to work out the steps to get there. What we came up with was creating a website from scratch, outside the Diari ARA brand.
The goal was to test the TSE methodology based on specific audience segments and creating content that would be of interest to them. Doing this on a separate site would allow us to test this approach without putting the newspaper’s brand at risk.
If it didn’t work, the newspaper would not be affected, but if it did, we could apply what we learned to the different sections of the newspaper.
The first step was to decide what we wanted to publish. We knew we wanted to talk about housing, since there is a great crisis of access to housing in Barcelona and in Spain in general, given the high rents and the arrival of investors and expats in the big cities.
We put a lot of effort into defining user personas that would help give us a clear idea of who we would be addressing with this content.
The next step was to find a technology that was easy for us to use. We opted for Ghost, a simple, fast Content Management System also used by our colleagues at 404 Media, allowing us to start publishing immediately.
With the CMS in place and the audiences defined, the only thing left to do was to start creating content. By June and the third TSE session, our content was already appearing on the first page of Google Search, thanks to the support of our SEO team.
Taking the momentum to other teams
With new content being published regularly during the summer, user growth was exponential.
The early positive results have allowed us to take advantage of the second part of the challenge, which was to document this methodology and present it to two other teams at Diari ARA: the Balearic Islands edition and Health.
We have therefore created a playbook that acts as a “howto” guide to help our newsroom get started with creating targeted content for targeted audiences. It explains how to:
- Define audiences
- Analyse the size of these audiences and the content they might be interested in
- Set goals for targeted content
- Follow a publishing checklist to make sure the methodology is applied.
The TSE team sat down with the head of our Health desk as well as the head of the Balearic team to start implementing these playbooks. The reception was positive. For instance, the Health desk understood that they needed to refine their content to better reach target audiences.
The teams were surprised to have to set out objectives for the pieces they created, but in a positive way. We created a dedicated spreadsheet for them to track their work and goals.
The teams are now doing one audience-centric article per week and, with the support of our Editor-in-Chief and Deputy Editors, we are very happy with how this approach has been applied to our newsroom.
However, one objective we have not been able to implement was involving and training the commercial team with the audience-first approach. But we have not given up on this goal, and hope to develop a strategy and a playbook also for the commercial team at a later point.
Final thoughts
When it comes to adapting workflows, it can be difficult for our journalists to collaborate with us in the business team. The day-to-day reality in the newsroom leaves little room for manoeuvre when it comes to changing how articles are produced.
The Table Stakes methodology has provided us with tools that have made it much easier to talk to stakeholders and people involved in the production process in an effective, simple and fast way. On both occasions we have participated in TSE, the Design-Do mentality has helped us successfully execute key elements for a positive evolution towards a production that helps us combine editorial instinct with production for specific audiences.
In the first round, the key to this was creating the necessary tools for the newsroom to have a picture of who reads us and what they are interested in. On the second, we succeeded in establishing some parameters that help journalists think more clearly about who they are addressing and what their audiences’ needs and expectations are.
It is very clear to us at ARA that we would not have been able to achieve this so quickly without our participation in Table Stakes Europe.