During its participation in the first edition of Table Stakes Europe in 2019, the Scottish group took a big step forward with the transformation of their newsroom from being print-focused to digital. They also began using the mini-publisher perspective, which has helped the company build a strong investigations unit.
Publisher bio: Based in Dundee, Scotland, DC Thomson is a news publisher that owns four daily newspapers: The Press and Journal, Evening Express, The Courier and The Evening Telegraph as well as magazines and radio stations.
Challenge: Internalising the mini-publisher team concept to push their journalism forward
Fast-forward to late 2022, and Table Stakes’ mini-publisher team concept has become internalised in the company’s newsrooms. Here, Richard Prest, Head of Content Development at DC Thomson Media, discusses some of the amazing pieces of content they have to show for it, and how this work is helping them to engage their audiences, retain subscribers and bring in new ones.
Overall, Prest says, the team’s formation and development is directly related to their participation in Table Stakes Europe.
“We can trace this right back to our digital transformation two years ago and after we’d been with Table Stakes,” he says. “We changed the newsroom around to follow the mini-publisher team approach. As part of that transformation, we created a content development team, which I lead.”
The team has seven journalists, which includes an investigations team, a data team and a special projects editor.
Prest describes their goal this way: “to try to expand our content into new formats, reach different audiences and to challenge our journalism. We keep pushing it forward really.”
In doing this, his team has created a number of different types of projects from data visualisation pieces to long-form investigations as well as three major investigative video documentaries.
Decisions: Story format, planning and development
A key starting point for each major investigation is deciding on the right format for the story they are trying to tell.
“If we felt a story best lent itself to data visualisation, then that would be how we present our story,” he says. “If a story was best told in a visual way, then we’d do that.
And in certain cases, there are just some types of stories where you think, ‘This is a video documentary. It’s going to have the biggest resonance with our audience if you tell it this way. It’s the best way to tell this story.’ ”
DC Thomson has released three feature-length investigative documentaries in the past year. All have required extensive working with the company’s AV and graphics teams.
The first of these was “Missing from the Broch: The disappearance of Shaun Ritchie,” about a 20-year-old man who went missing after going to a remote farmhouse with a group of friends for a Halloween party in 2014.
Shortly after its release, DC Thomson announced the 40-minute documentary film broke engagement records for them with nearly 1,000 people signing up to The Press and Journal, their regional daily covering northern Scotland, to watch it in its first 10 days.
“Missing from the Broch” has been only available to subscribers, but people could also watch it by signing up for a 30-day free trial.
About six months later, in May 2022, DC Thomson released a second major investigative documentary, “A Short Walk Home,” which focused on the disappearance of Allan Bryant Jr., 23, who vanished in the early morning hours of 3 November 2013, after leaving a nightclub less than a mile from his home. This documentary was made for The Courier, DC Thomson’s regional daily based in Dundee.
For each documentary, Prest’s team spent a great deal of time talking with the men’s families and police investigators to try to get a better understanding of what happened to them, and what more could be done to try to help bring closure to their loved ones.
“It was important with these documentaries that firstly, we worked closely with the families involved,” he says. “And in both our circulation areas, our readership areas, we are the local media, so we have to be trusted to produce quality journalism and that means not just going in and working on a documentary and then disappearing.”
In addition to the interviews, an enormous amount of work goes into the planning and development of these kinds of documentaries.
“We’re a local paper, so long-running investigations are not something that you often have the resources and time to do,” Prest says. “But as we transform the newsroom, we’ve really wanted to de-couple some of those resources to take a small number of reporters away from day-to-day activities to ensure they have the time to carry out these investigations.”
This can be challenging, especially for newsrooms that don’t have the resources of major national dailies.
When each of the documentaries was finished, DC Thomson had extensive marketing campaigns to promote them across their properties along with email and social media. After all, a 40-minute investigative documentary is not a normal piece of content for most legacy news publishers, and they crafted these campaigns to ensure the audience knew what to expect before they clicked “play.”
In addition, both “Missing from the Broch,” and “A Short Walk Home,” were released at 8 pm on Sunday nights. A third documentary, “The Hunt for Mr. X,” which looks into the escape and disappearance of the mastermind behind a 100 million pound Highland cocaine plot that took place in 1991, was released in mid-November 2022, just as we were finalising this report. Because of the timing, we have focused here on the learnings from the first two documentaries.
Creating a playbook helps transfer learnings to the next project
The DC Thomson team learned numerous lessons from making “Missing from the Broch,” which they were able to apply to their process while creating “A Short Walk Home,” and Prest says having a playbook from doing “Missing,” helped enormously.
“One of the great things about Table Stakes was we were always encouraged to keep playbooks and templates about how we did things so we could constantly iterate and change things and processes,” he says.
Video documentaries being a heavy investment in time and resources, the team had to make sure that the process is effective.
“What we’ve learned is trying to do as much as we can upfront in that process,” Prest says. “So you’re trying to plan it, work out how that’s going to come together. What the key elements of the story are. What the interviews are likely to be, and when they’re taking place. Everything is designed to try to make the filming and editing process as effective as possible.”
Among the many moving parts that need to be taken into consideration to help ensure effectiveness are:
- Creating a story arc for the documentary to follow with a clear beginning, middle and end
- Interviews with families, friends, witnesses and investigators
- Locational visits so the audience can see where the events took place
- Lots of editing
After making “Missing from the Broch,” Prest and his team sat down and evaluated what they had done, what worked well, and what they could do to make it even better the next time. This became their playbook.
Using an outlining technique common to film production, called storyboarding, Prest’s team along with DC Thomson’s AV specialists plotted out as much of the documentary as they could in advance, especially around the beginning, middle and end.
“One part we found quite challenging was how do we storyboard out the actual flow of the investigation,” he says. “How is the investigation going to be presented so that we can set up all these things in advance knowing what the outcome is going to be?”
As various pieces were filmed, the team would continue to refine the documentary’s timeline.
“We would then start to see the gaps and the continuity and what else was to be done,” Prest says. “That gave us a really early indication for our graphics team and our data team, to say ‘We need a map here. We need data visualisation here.’”
Throughout the process, he adds, they have found that “we need a specific person in there who is the conduit, who is able to keep every- thing just bouncing along to make sure that it when it comes time, six months down the line, and you’re launching, nobody says ‘Oh, I haven’t done that.’ Because it’s difficult. It can be really complicated to get all those things to come seamlessly together.”
Outcome: Strong audience engagement, long-term subscription driver
The investigative team’s efforts are showing impressive results, and they are long-lived as well.
“Missing from the Broch,” has had particularly strong results.
“We saw that 60 percent of those people who viewed it watched 90 percent of it, and it was 40 minutes long,” Prest says. “So the engagement was really high.”
Even more importantly, he says that these projects need to have a long lifespan as they are a big investment in time.
“One thing that’s pleased us the most, even more than the huge number of subscriptions we got with the first one, was that we can still see on both of those pieces, people subscribing to watch a year on.”
He said this has also been true for previous investigations they have done in recent years that weren’t video, but long-form. He noted one of these were published more than two and a half years ago.
“It’s still got subscriptions coming through now. And that’s the important thing for us: We’re creating evergreen content that’s still attractive to an audience some- time down the line, and again, it provides value for the subscriptions.
Most of these pieces are hard-paywalled, and that’s the intention, to say ‘Look, for your subscription this is the quality and depth of content that we can give you on our sites.’”
A few weeks after our conversation with Prest, DC Thomson announced that the digital subscriptions for their daily news brands had surpassed 25,000 paid sub- scribers, 18 months after they had begun an ambitious drive to build a new, sustainable model for local journalism. The announcement also noted that in September’s Scottish Press Awards, The Courier was awarded Website of the Year and The Press and Journal was named Daily Newspaper of the Year.
While doing feature length investigative documentaries might not be a possibility for some publishers, DC Thomson has certainly hit on something that nearly every publisher can make use of and that’s re-examining those major stories from your archive that people in your market remember and still talk about from time to time.
As Prest puts it: “There’s absolutely no shame in going back to these stories that we did 30 years ago, if that’s a fantastic story. … we can re-tell that old story in new ways.”
“The ones we’re doing are very much about retention, making sure those subscribers retain and see value in the subscription, but also brand builders to show potential subscribers we actually create journalism that’s a bit different.”
Prest also notes investigative content pieces can be effective in helping to recruit staff, offering the possibility of working on something deep and meaningful versus working somewhere where they might be expected to write 15 stories a day.
In summing up DC Thomson’s experiences with its investigative documentaries, Prest cites a key learning from Table Stakes: “It’s OK for stuff to go wrong as long as you look at it and ask ‘Why, and how you would change it, how you can fix it, and how can we make it better next time?’ And I think the newsroom has become really used to that process now. We just keep honing all the time.”