An important goal for Our Media during its participation in Table Stakes Europe was to start moving away from being viewed as a conservative medium towards being seen as a fresh, modern one in order to reach younger people. The publisher also wanted to increase engagement with its audiences by producing more high quality content. A key metric was to track the amount of time that their audiences spent with content.

During its year in Table Stakes Europe, the German publisher created a successful new brand for food and gastronomy content and transformed its approach to covering local music festivals. These and other audience-focused efforts have dramatically improved their performance metrics and paved the way for future digital revenue growth.

2023-04-25. “We want to create emotional touchpoints that not only strengthen the loyalty of our existing readers to our brand but also engage with new audiences who have not yet experienced our platform, allowing them to form a positive first impression through one of our verticals,” says Bettina Widmer, of Switzerland’s Blick Group.

The Spanish publisher has created new dashboards that give insights about the performance of its online content and help inform its newsroom’s editorial planning. The company has also conducted a website and app redesign, which has produced higher reader engagement while also reducing churn.

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.

Barcelona-based news brand ARA launched in 2010. They publish a print newspaper and have a digital presence (website and apps) with ara. cat. ARA has editions in Catalonia, Andorra, Girona, Tarragona, Lleida, Balearic Islands and Valencia. There is also ARA in Spanish and a selection of articles in English.

Le Télégramme has always been recognised as one of the best regional daily newspapers in France. Its 150,000 print (home delivery) subscribers are loyal but ageing and Le Télégramme needs to speed up the acquisition of digital subscribers to fuel its growth again.

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.