Pål Nedregotten: The phase we’re at at the moment is to try and convert scale into depth. We had a huge reach before we started this process, and we have started capitalizing on that reach. It’s like having a big reservoir that we’re building into a hydro dam that we’re funneling into electricity.

The key to utilize it further is to have a lot of data, so that we’re able to find the right segments to attack with different value propositions. We’re looking at how many visits it takes to register, how few visits it takes before you actually stop subscribing. We’re able to see patterns into which kinds of customers are likely to go to another level. We’re using this kind of insight both from the open-traffic, cookie-based, browser-based customers, all the way up the funnel to our logged-in really valuable customers, looking at what they’re willing to pay more for.

Because we’re a local media company — we have 62 titles scattered all across Norway — we have tested willingness to pay for more than one title, offering access in a region for all the newspapers we have in a region.

Nedregotten: One of the most gratifying things, as an old editor and an old journalist, is that the stuff we thought was important actually turned out to be important. That’s what’s driving this growth: the quality of the journalism, the quality of the content we’re actually producing. We’re seeing that clickbait headlines don’t sell, don’t drive engagement, don’t drive reading time, don’t drive the financial situation of our company. What does is the exact opposite: good strong creative headlines, good strong creative journalism, and covering the topics that people in our local communities actually care about.

Nedregotten: Yes, but that is supplementary. It’s part of the remit of a local news brand that has been ever since we started in this business 150 years ago. It’s extending it. But if we were only to turn into a local football coverage site, it wouldn’t work. It’s a package.

Nedregotten: Our journey isn’t necessarily a blueprint for others, but I do think some of our experiences are replicable. The key thing we rediscovered is the value of actually delivering something that a local reader values. Are we able to produce journalism? Are we able to deliver content every single day that people find relevant and that impacts them in some significant way, either as a standalone or as a process going over weeks and weeks? Delivering that kind of value is vital.

[Having 62 sites across the country] certainly made it easier for us, because we had done a lot of investments that we didn’t really have to think about; we had building blocks to stand on when we started out. But it was also understanding the advantages we had in the marketplace and the role we used to play in people’s lives. We wouldn’t have been able to execute if we didn’t have that kind of understanding.

It was starting out with: Okay, we have these 480,000 paying print subscribers. What are we going to do with them — are we just going to allow them to disappear one by one, or are we going to try and make them into digital users? That was the starting point that was rooted in a value that we had and a recognition of that value.

Now we’ve passed 130,000 paying digital subscribers; three years ago, we had zero. In a country with 4.1 million people above the age of 15, these numbers are significant.

Nedregotten: Print is vital for us. It will continue to be vital for us for years and years. An interesting side effect of what we’ve been doing in digital is that we’ve been able to increase the quality of our journalism, period. I would argue, and I think a lot of our readers would agree, that our printed newspapers are better for the digital transformation that we had.

When we started out, I’m sure a lot of people were worried about cannibalization, and people moving from print to digital, but that hasn’t really happened at all. We have good numbers to show that people who cancel their print subscription would cancel anyway, and we’re actually now getting them as a win back into the digital subscriptions. We’re putting up a value proposition: If you want the news delivered to your door every single morning, you can get it. If you don’t want that, you don’t have to. Every single print subscriber is also a digital subscriber, so they are getting the digital value and access to all the digital channels that we use, because we radically simplified our product pricing points and the products we offer.

One of the things holding us back in digital was production processes. All of our journalists were producing for templates in a print geometry. They were writing stories to fit the print geometry — because someone said many years ago that you should have four pages of culture, not withstanding the fact that you probably didn’t have four culture stories to print that day. When you just put those things online, no wonder nobody clicked on it or read it — it wasn’t that interesting. When we changed our production flow and our journalists started actually writing for our digital platforms and the digital tool first, that improved massively the quality of journalism that we were publishing in the print papers as well.

Nedregotten: You don’t change these things overnight. We’ve been at this now for three and a half years, and the bell curve still applies. You do have a bunch of people who are really far ahead of the pack, and you have some who probably wish that digital never happened at all, but most of the journalists are in the middle. I think the important thing is that we’re shifting the bell curve to the right. There’s a lot of optimism these days, which is very intriguing to see.

Nedregotten: We used to have pretty much 100 percent ad focus. The funny thing is that the ad business is coming up stronger as a result of the subscription business as well. We stopped going for scale for scale’s sake. We stopped chasing eyeballs, which meant that pageviews went down. But we were able to categorize the different kinds of readers that we had, and we could categorize the fly-by category. We saw that a lot of the less valuable traffic we had — less valuable even in advertising terms — came from those fly-bys.

We started going for the more engaged readers, the people who actually had a relationship with the communities where we published. That, after an initial settling-in phase, translated into higher pageviews.

There were a whole host of legal issues that we had to learn how to deal with. It’s also been a journey not just for the journalists, but for our sales guys, the administrative staff, the top management, pretty much for the entire organization.

Nedregotten: Deepening the engagement is really important. This doesn’t grow into the skies: There are only 4.1 million Norwegians above the age of 15. I would guess that we cover somewhere in the region of 2.5 million Norwegians, but not all of these people are willing to be subscribers. I would guess that we will start plateauing in 15 to 18 months. At that point, everything has to go into engaging.

Engaged readers are far better customers. They remain subscribers. It’s all about working smarter and being able to offer a better value for our subscribers. That’s probably never going to stop.

Nedregotten: It’s certainly those things, but it’s actually far simpler and far more difficult than that. Quite simply, it’s better journalism. As hard and as easy as that.