On this day, you will learn best practices from our Innovate Local and Table Stakes programmes and hear about the new level of User Needs. We will dig deep into newsroom topics on these interactive sessions. Be prepared to be engaged!

Innovate Local: Hyperlocal journalism and opportunities for new audiences.

Lea Nowack, Project Manager Digital Products at Tamedia will do a presentation of their product/feature and take questions from workshop participants. The presentation will be followed by a group work section, where participants brainstorm ideas around audience development through hyperlocal content.
– What are some user needs on a hyperlocal level that might present an opportunity?
– What type of content or service could a news publisher provide?
– What business/journalism objectives could be served from the publisher’s point of view?
– Ideas around implementation, marketing etc
The groups will present their ideas, followed by discussion and feedback. Participants will bring home actionable ideas around audience development through hyperlocal content.

_____

Table Stakes: 
Performance driven change and the idea of mini-publishing.

WAN-IFRA’s Table Stakes Europe program runs successfully in the 5th year. The participating teams learn how to change their newsrooms performance-driven and how to focus on the core audiences they should address in the digital market. Stéphane Mayoux is the most experienced coach in the program. Together with former and recent participants of Table Stakes, he will provide an insight in the methodology of challenge building and making it work.

______________

User needs: 
How to adapt the method in your newsroom/New trends in user needs.

In this workshop you will hear not just about why User Needs helps you to differentiate your content from everybody else, but also how you need to change your journalism to truly be a User Needs brand. Jeremy will take you through the model and how to apply it to your brand’s core purpose. The workshop will have you creating your own content ideas around different types of User Need, equipping you to take the methodology to your own newsrooms.

Pick up your badges and meet your fellow participants!

Welcome – A few words about this year’s NRS

How research and investigative journalism can help to engage your audiences.

An insight into Ringier Media: Ladina Heimgartner will share the group’s current strategies in the areas of leadership and communication across their newsrooms, and how the investment in quality journalism and technology is driving Schibsted and its brands to greater heights.

Mix and mingle with your global industry peers whilst drinking a cup of jo.

Alberto Marello, from Il Piccolo di Alessandria – which includes three newspapers (Il Piccolo, Il Novese, and L’Ovadese) and eight websites, encompassing Il Piccolo and its seven regional editions (AlessandriaNe ws, NoviOnline, AcquiNews, CasaleNotizie, OvadaOnline, TortonaOnline e ValenzaNews), will focus his presentation on Digital First- a tool integrated with InDesign which allows publishers to create printed papers starting from digital content present in the CMS, making it easy to build the print version of articles starting from the website.  Their news is available in both print and digital formats, accessible via the web and mobile apps. All seven regional editions are managed through a single CMS, incorporating artificial intelligence functions. Tecnavia’s solution enables Il Piccolo di Alessandria to consolidate the content management of its eight newspapers into one unified platform, seamlessly integrating both the websites and the dedicated mobile application. This integration streamlines operations, allowing for immediate switching between the e-paper editions and the latest news updates.

Before Jyrki Utriainen joined Etelä-Saimaa in September, he was managing editor at Karjalainen Oy in North Karelia/Finland. There he restructured the newsroom with a focus on local communities and introduced the Table Stakes methodology. He will show us how you can be successful with a great idea although you are a small company.

Based in Munich, Bavaria, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) is one of Germany’s largest daily papers, with more than 500 journalists and correspondents around the world. They first introduced an online paywall in 2015. At the end of 2023, it had 170,000 print subscribers and 295,000 digital subscribers. Hannes and Fabian will present on SZ’s editorial transformation and walk us in detail through the different stages from when they started the transformation to where they are today.

Reach is UK’s and Ireland’s largest commercial news publisher with over 120 trusted brands, from national titles like the Mirror, Express, Daily Record and Daily Star, to local brands like MyLondon, BelfastLive and the Manchester Evening News, as well as their US brands. Every month they reach 69% of the UK online population, who come to them for trusted news, entertainment and sport. David Higgerson will share Reach’s AI strategy that is helping their digital growth, and present key findings, highlighting the challenges and opportunities for newsroom editors.

News producers need to take steps now to secure their future audiences. That doesn’t mean simply pivoting to short-form video or pure infotainment. It means a concerted effort to provide the news in a way that serves the next generation’s needs and its complex and evolving relationship with the news. In this session, Lisa MacLeod will explore what an ideal news framework looks like and share a three-phase toolkit to help you engage future news consumers.

JP/Politikens Hus is one of Denmark’s leading media companies, publishing several news media. Their activities include publishing houses, weekly newspapers, and niche media. JP/Politikens Hus three of Denmark’s leading national news brands: Ekstra Bladet, Jyllands-Posten and Politiken. Each month JP/Politikens Hus is in contact with more than 3 million Danes through their digital and printed media. Kasper Lindskow, Head of AI, will present on their Generative AI approach in the newsroom and learn about their AI based tools they have built in GenAI, as well as the recommenders systems and NLP.

Sponsored by Verlegerverband Schweizer Medien (VSM)  / The Swiss Media Publishers Association

The Tagesanzeiger in Zurich celebrates a stunning success with a gamification idea – the dialect test. It shows where users you come from. The motto is “Tell us how you speak and we’ll tell you where in Germany, Austria or Switzerland you grew up”. The linguistic diversity in German is so great that it is possible to localise people relatively precisely based on their regional differences. In collaboration with German studies professor Adrian Leemann and Carina Steiner from the University of Bern, this editorial team created a dialect calculator a year ago, which became the most frequently used feature on our websites in 2023.

WhatsApp for News Publishers. From the current processes in the social media team and the integration in the newsroom, to the use of different formats and content pieces: This is how Blick uses WhatsApp Broadcast Channels to reach new and younger audiences and build long-term loyalty. Additionally, based on best practices and recent data, we will pass on some tips, tricks, and challenges for news publishers/ media brands.

Liv will share with us The Economist’s successful video strategy and how it is helping to reach new and younger audiences. She will tell us about the increasing use of short form video and how most social platforms are now either increasingly only video-based, or are prioritising short-form video in their algorithms. Liv will also present their guidelines in creating successful short form videos used at the Economist.

ON-IA is a new project that targets a niche audience that El Nacional did not have until now. It is an editorial product based on a weekly newsletter focused on managers, business people and entrepreneurs interested in incorporating artificial intelligence in their day-to-day work to make the management of their work easier and faster. For the first time, through the economic brand of the newspaper, ON ECONOMIA, we are opening up to a niche audience, not focused on general information, putting into practice new project development methodologies learned through Table Stakes Europe, the WAN-IFRA programme in collaboration with the Google News Initiative. It has also been a challenge to open up a new way of monetisation. Accustomed to programmatic advertising revenues, we started working with a qualitative audience that can become subscribers and members, forming a community. To that community we not only offer audiovisual and written content on artificial intelligence, but we also offer training, services and a networking opportunity because they find it meaningful to be a member. In this talk, Clara Soteras, who has led the project, will explain how this project has been developed, the obstacles encountered and how they have been overcome in this first commitment of the medium to work in a different way with an audience that initially did not exist.

Join us for an in-depth look at Amedia’s latest initiative targeting readers under 40. This innovative project uses specially tailored dashboards that display data exclusively from this demographic. This approach has not only shifted the mindset of their journalists but has also produced very promising and some surprising results. Celebrating Amedia’s continued excellence, underscored by their recent “Best News Website” award at the WAN-IFRA 2024 Digital Media Awards Worldwide, Janne Rygh from Amedia will explain how Kilkaya’s flexible tools facilitated this impactful strategy, demonstrating Amedia’s adaptability in a rapidly changing media environment.

Emilie will present how she and and her team are leading the transformation within VG to integrate podcast production into the newsroom – and not as a “side business”. We will also learn from Kristin about Podme – a podcast subscription platform owned by Schibsted.

In collaboration with the Inter-American Press Association (SIP-IAPA), WAN-IFRA, with the support of UNESCO, presents a new piece of research that highlights how the misuse of financial crimes allegations are effective in silencing journalists and media. The report shows how the range of tactics comes from a shared playbook used by autocrats and enemies of press freedom, and discusses the need to come up with strategies to push back against the phenomena.

Join the authors and some of the victims of these allegations as they present their findings.