Editor’s note: The Fix is running a series of articles on different jobs in the media industry. We ask leading news media professionals about their job positions – what they actually do, how they make decisions, what excites them about their work, and what they can advise newcomers in their fields. In this episode, we describe the Head of Paid Content position based on our interview with Nick Tjaardstra from Handelsblatt Media Group (Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche outlets). 

The Head of Paid Content is a managerial role in an outlet responsible for strategising, planning and coordinating readers’ conversion into subscribers, as well as engagement and retention. It is a relatively unique role in newsrooms, and the Handelsblatt Media Group introduced it about a year ago. 

This person works as a mediator between teams working on conversion, engagement, and retention, sets goals, conducts experiments, and collects data to report the results to higher management and to make decisions on further goals and plans.

More from The Fix: What’s your media job: Head of Audio and Newsletters

What the Head of Paid Content in Handelsblatt Media Group does

Handelsblatt Media Group from Germany is the publisher of the financial title  Handelsblatt and the weekly business magazine WirtschaftsWoche, both subscription-first newsrooms. Handelsblatt has over 87,000 print and digital subscribers.

View of the Handelsblatt office building (courtesy of Nick Tjaardstra)

Nick Tjaardstra joined the company at the beginning of 2022 for the newly-created role of the Head of Paid Content. His task was to gather and organise two teams: one responsible for engagement and retention of existing subscribers and another working on paywall conversion. 

These teams consist of very different people: journalists, UX and UI designers, marketers, developers, sales specialists, and others. Their work is coordinated by Topic Owners (like Product Owners), and they are the ones who report to Tjaardstra. In turn, he reports to Janina Reimann, Director of Digital Products. 

Nick Tjaardstra points out that the teams were partly gathered of people already working in their respective departments. For example, data analysts (there is one for each team specifically) report to the Head of Data Science & Analysis, and software developers report to the Head of Development. The same goes for other roles. In total, about 20 people are working for the teams. 

“The team comes together for the project, but they all have different reporting lines. What’s important for me is that we’re setting goals agreed upon in all those departments. That means we have to work very closely with the Director of Marketing, the Head of Digital in the newsroom, all of the different teams that everybody has the same goals,” explains Nick Tjaardstra.

Nick Tjaardstra (courtesy of Nick Tjaardstra)

More from The Fix: Nine key tactics for making changes stick in the newsroom

Daily work of the Head of Paid Content

Tjaardstra  doesn’t have a typical day, though it is usual to have several meetings: regular team check-ins, discussions about specific brand performance etc. Additionally, Tjaardstra regularly meets with different departments to have everybody on the same page. 

The Head of Paid Content has discussions with newsrooms on the rules of putting content behind the paywall or creating dashboards that would help media managers in their work. 

Both engagement and paywall conversion teams have daily meetings, which Tjaardstra often joins. Additionally, there is a weekly insights meeting where different departments of the organisation share what worked well recently. For example, the marketing department would talk about how effective a new  onboarding mailing was. Going between various departments, Nick Tjaardstra plays a connecting role between them and his teams. For instance, understanding how the funnel team developers can build the paywall for the website product team. 

Brainstorming in the Engagement team (courtesy of Nick Tjaardstra)

He also has weekly meetings with Topic Owners, though he is in contact with them daily. Tjaardstra points out that they all speak “more in the language of e-commerce,” discussing conversion optimisation, A/B testing etc. 

Another regular though rare part of his job is participating in Design Thinking workshops organised by the Topic Owners in partnership with the teams’ agile coach. Tjaardstra gives an example of a workshop to rethink the onboarding process for new subscribers: “Having a truly cross-functional Funnel Team means we automatically include everyone from the newsroom to our front-end developers who have a great perspective on what is really possible. And at the end, we come out with sketched prototypes that we can quickly build into demos for user testing with our subscribers.”

Nick Tjaardstra explains that he is “a coordinator and sometimes a politician” at his job. He can’t directly tell people what to do: “We have to say, okay, this is the goal. We want to increase the number of people that pay full price after a trial. So, how do we get there? Let’s brainstorm what we could build together, brainstorm what the product could look like,” explains Tjaardstra. And they also need to add some department heads to discussions to ensure they are onboard with the ideas.

He also points out that the Topic Owners are not bosses in their teams either. They work in agile methodology, meaning that Topic Owners prioritise what their teams should do, but then “everybody is on the same augenhöhe, or eye level, and a data analyst is just as important as a journalist or a Topic Owner.”

Overall, Nick Tjaardstra was an active member of both teams in the first months of work in mid-2022. This year, he focuses more on improving the cooperation between teams and finding ways to define specific sales funnels for particular audiences. “In other words, [I’m focused on] how we can optimise the selling of Paid Content and follow our Subscription First strategy,” explains Tjaardstra.

Organizational structure of Handelsblatt

More from The Fix: Skills vs people. What kind of skills does a modern news organisation need in 2022?

Most exciting and challenging parts of the job

Nick Tjaardstra most enjoys the speed of work. He likes the diversity of the two teams he organised and the opportunity to test ideas rapidly. “You can, in a two-week sprint, basically build a whole test, a new functionality. And just to see how the people work together daily and support each other, I think that’s what I find the most fun,” says Tjaardstra.

Nick Tjaardstra with paid content hat from Axel Springer summit on the office rooftop (courtesy of Nick Tjaardstra)

The most challenging thing, however, is that there is no guidebook. Tjaardstra explains that he can’t simply take best practices from another organisation like the Financial Times but has to develop a specific case. Tjaardstra names the difference in the German market, the language, and the people as contributing factors. He adds that at the conferences, one can learn specific stuff for their job, precise guides, but then they have to find only what works for their organisation. 

What to read and watch if you are interested in the Paid Content

— Product Management topic on Betternews

— “The Human Touch: Improving resilience and agility in organizations step by step” by Xavier van Leeuwe, Matthijs van de Peppel
— Data Science course by freeCodeCamp

The Fix Newsletter

Everything you need to know about European media market every week in your inbox