We all remember when the wall between editorial and technology began tumbling down a few years ago: Developers were suddenly “allowed” into the newsroom, storytelling started to become a collaborative effort, and initiatives like Hacks/Hackers brought the formerly divided worlds closer together.
Well, guess what: There’s another wall that needs to fall, and 2017 will be the year when we will start to tear it down — the one between editorial and marketing.
Every media organization that’s not operating based purely on reach and advertising wants to sell products to its users. It’s the ultimate goal, because many of us know advertising alone won’t sustain our journalism.
Until recently, most media outlets basically hoped that visitors would somehow magically convert to paying subscribers when they bumped into a paywall. Sales funnel? Conversion strategies? Retention rates? These words weren’t part of the digital news industry vocabulary for a long time.
But the reality is a user’s first click creates very little value per se, besides creating an ad impression. The second click is when it starts to become interesting: A user that we attracted wants to get more of our content, our service. He stays longer, registers for our newsletter, takes part in a survey, signs up for an event: Now we’re talking. We’ve managed to engage a potential customer and make him identifiable. From now on, we can address him with specific and personalized offers and content. Which leads, finally, to the ultimate proof of engagement: Our user buys a product we sell. We managed to create a lead and convert this lead into a paying subscriber.
What’s unique and powerful in media is that we own the digital sales funnel. Our websites, apps, newsletters, and e-papers are the product, but they are in a sense the marketing machine as well. Once you see it this way, it’s obvious why we need to get our journalists, our marketing people, our social media teams, and our engagement editors at the same table.
Our content sells our products, so the people who are in charge of sales need to be close to the content creators. Diverse teams on the intersection of technology, marketing, product, and journalism will help make our paywalls and digital subscription models effective.
Several subscription-oriented news organizations are already deep into experimenting with the effectiveness of specific content to drive conversion. The Wall Street Journal recently identified that more than half of its subscription sales now come from individual story pages. The New York Times and the Financial Times have started to work with propensity modeling, a statistical method to predict user behavior, to drive their conversion rate.
Different groups of users are engaged by different kinds of content, and they react to different kinds of offers. Our task is to identify what a specific user likes about us, deliver it to him, and offer him a subscription targeted to his needs. If you think about it, it’s actually pretty neat: We can use and customize our core product to drive our sales.
Anita Zielina is chief product officer for NZZ Media Group in Zurich.
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
David Weigel A test for online speech
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing