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.

Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (KStA) is a daily print newspaper and web publication, owned by DuMont, a regional publisher based in Cologne, Germany. During the past year, KStA made significant headway with the aim of focusing on specific audiences rather than general ones. The publisher used data analysis to identify the topics that engage its audience – and those that it could stop covering – with impressive results.

Le Parisien was the largest company in the first round of Table Stakes Europe with a newsroom of 440 journalists. The print newspaper is still by far the largest revenue generator for Le Parisien (90% of the revenue). However, with a steady annual decline in print paid circulation, the newspaper needs to gain 200,000 digital-only subscribers to offset the print decline and sustain its editorial ambitions.

DC Thomson is a publisher based in Dundee, Scotland. The group owns magazines, radio stations and four daily newspapers: The Press and Journal, Evening Express, The Courier and The Evening Telegraph. The group joined Table Stakes to strengthen its internal Apollo programme, which was working on their digital transformation. Their challenge statement described their ambition for the 12-month programme: “We will refocus our newsroom – currently 95% print-focused – to one where we create higher quality, indispensable digital journalism and a first-class user experience for local audiences to drive subscriptions through a metered/premium paywall model.”

The Zaragoza, Spain-based news media company Henneo, which publishes the newspapers 20 minutes and Heraldo de Aragon, has spent much of the past year focussing on its audiences and developing more targeted content. This is being done in concert with efforts to launch a digital subscription model.