Knowledge Base

During its participation in Table Stakes Europe in 2019–2020, the German newspaper made significant progress in establishing a new digital-first, audience-focused workflow. Since then, the publisher has continued to innovate on how it covers local news, and it has created a new product – an evening news summary – that matches its readers’ interests and habits.

The Austrian publisher had already made the strategic decision to focus on digital subscriptions when it joined Table Stakes Europe, and this year they launched a freemium paywall. In this interview they discuss how the TSE experience helped them engage their audience and increase their digital subscriptions.

The daily 24heures has a real presence across the canton of Vaud and its capital, Lausanne. One of the things that set this area apart is the diversity of the foreigners who call it home. Although these people number close to 260,000, articles about their lives, interests and concerns are few and far between. As part of its Table Stakes Europe challenge, the 24heures team went out to find out more about Portuguese expats, who make up the largest foreign community in the area.

Vocento’s lifestyle and health section Vivir was hit hard by the pandemic. But moving away from print-centred workflows and adopting a digital-first mindset allowed the group to boost traffic, turning it into a success that can serve as a model for other sections.

Nordkurier, a news publisher based in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the country’s northeast, created a weekly newsletter that aims to strengthen the bonds between people who used to live in the region with the area’s present and its future. By autumn 2021, the newsletter had just over 3,500 subscribers, and apart from advertising it has also enabled other business opportunities for the publisher.

During the past year, the staff of Diario de Navarra (DN), a regional news publisher based in Pamplona, Spain, have been intensifying their efforts to drive digital subscriptions. The publisher is also targeting two specific audiences (families and professionals) as part of an effort to move from a generalist audience approach to segmented audiences.

To support its ambitious goal for increasing digital subscriptions, the publisher, as you might expect, based in the far north-west of Germany, launched a newsletter in June targeted at families. Over 3000 people have subscribed to the newsletter since then, and it is also driving digital subscriptions on nwzonline.de.

In late May, the Bonn-based news publisher General-Anzeiger launched a weekly newsletter called Bonn Appetit aimed at foodies. It has taken off like a hot new restaurant, allowing the newsletter to hit its annual subscriber goal ahead of time.

Table Stakes Europe allowed the French publisher to streamline collaboration between the newsroom and other departments of the company, and provided structure to clarify governance in the newsroom. Over the course of the programme, Les Echos also made significant progress with segmenting and serving specific content to its target audiences, including female readers and the start-up ecosystem.

Having identified people interested in housing as a promising target audience, the German publisher used a persona-based workshop process to create a new product – a website subdomain – for its content about building and living. The workshop approach demonstrated how user-focused methods can help news publishers in their product development.