Five lessons I’ve learned about audience building

Close to 400 editorial leaders have so far signed up to The Fix’s limited-run newsletter course which explores how newsrooms can build, grow and serve their audience. 

In this article, course author Emma Löfgren, editor at The Local and contributor at The Fix, rounds up some of the insights she learned when interviewing five leading experts for the course.

You can still sign up to the full course by clicking here.

1. You can’t build without tools 

To leverage the power of your audience, your newsroom needs the equipment to handle it. That goes for your staff structure as well as work processes and content management systems.

If you have ten people and one of them resigns, hire an audience person

recommends Dmitry Shishkin, CEO of Ringier Media International

A common mistake is to hire a tech person who excels at statistical analysis, but has little understanding of the editorial process. Your best pick is instead someone from an editorial background who loves digging into audience data. 

Another must-have feature he recommends is that every content management system should have three drop-down menus that can be manually (or maybe with AI) added to each story. 

When newsrooms add tags to a story, these are often thought of as something for external use: to place the story in a particular part of the website, encourage the audience to read more about a topic by clicking on tags, and perhaps to boost SEO. But their internal use is just as crucial.

The first drop-down menu, he recommends, should be the topic. This one is usually external and you’re probably already using it. In addition, it’s worth having a second menu for around ten story formats (for example listicle, explainer, interview etc), and a third one for what user needs the story meets (read more here, but for example, inspire me, update me, educate me etc).

This way, once you start analysing your audience, a lot of the useful data is already there.

2. Social media don’t have to change your journalism

When newsrooms constantly battle to be at the forefront of innovation it’s easy to start thinking of exciting technologies or new social media platforms as the be-all and end-all of journalism. 

I know it’s easy, because even top-level media executives make that mistake all the time.

This interview with Johanna Rüdiger, who manages social media strategy for Deutsche Welle’s culture and documentary department, is a good reminder that all the various social media giants out there are means, not an end. I believe the same lesson can be applied to deciding where AI fits in your audience culture, although we don’t specifically address that in the interview. 

Rüdiger is in particular a TikTok ace, with a hugely successful personal channel as well as her work for DW, and she’s found it excellent for engaging with audiences. Newsrooms should be where their audience is, she argues, and if that is an external platform, then so be it. 

But what she and DW have found is that listening to your audience and responding to its needs is far more important than what app or platform you use to do this. That’s the superpower that’s going to stick around even when the latest trending app is discarded or changes its name. 

It’s also worth learning from DW’s Holocaust series on TikTok, which shows that it is possible to cover a serious topic in social media nuggets without abandoning your storytelling principles. 

Or as Rüdiger herself puts it: “People still want well-researched facts, a well-told story – all the stuff that we’re already good at as journalists works on these platforms as well.”

3. Learning about the audience you don’t have

As many other journalists, I suspect, I know exactly why people read me. After speaking with Trusting News founder Joy Mayer, I realised that I have far less insight into why they don’t.

There’s so much talk about news avoidance, but how many newsrooms actually sit down with audiences they don’t reach to ask why those people don’t feel well-served by their journalism?

“In my ideal world everyone in the newsroom would have one conversation a month, just a 30-minute conversation with somebody who is not deeply engaged in the news, to find out what they’re missing, how they’re maybe operating just fine without the news, or what they wish were covered, or what assumptions they have about how journalism operates,” says Mayer.

My own audience goal after this course is to make more of an effort in the future to connect with potential audience members who don’t currently read my coverage. I already know my most loyal readers, but I want to be equally curious about what – and whom – I’m missing. 

What’s your audience goal? Tell me and I’ll be your accountability buddy.

4. Service does not equal subservience

One of the people I looked forward the most to interviewing for this course was Julia Agha, CEO of Alkompis, Sweden’s largest news site for Arabic-speakers – partly because Alkompis’ growth potential makes it a newsroom worth keeping an eye out for in the future, and partly because it touched on an aspect of audience building that I feel we perhaps don’t talk about enough. 

When we set out to serve our audience, what do we do when our audience is wrong?

“When you cover a niche group and are close to that group, you’re their voice,” Agha argues about striking the right balance. “But it’s like a magazine for doctors or a small local newspaper: we also have to cover our target audience. Just like when the magazine for doctors has to cover a doctor who did something bad, or a local newspaper needs to raise a problem in its town.”

Changing the way you conduct your journalism to show that you’ll listen to and take your audience seriously helps build trust. But changing your fundamental editorial values on every whim just to pander to the mood of individual members of the audience isn’t trustworthy. 

Alkompis tackled a disinformation campaign that had taken hold in their community by letting experts set the record straight, but also by hearing their readers out and offering them the chance to raise their voices, and teaching them about their individual rights. It’s an excellent example of how to serve your audience by tackling difficult conversations head on.

5. Don’t skimp 

It’s near impossible to pick just one lesson from my conversation with Tav Klitgaard, CEO of massively successful Danish scale-up Zetland – easily the longest interview of this course. 

But one thing I noted is that Zetland doesn’t do things half-heartedly. 

Their churn rate is reassuringly human from a media company that’s been profitable for the past five years, making their success seem more achievable for the rest of us. Instead, they grow their membership in annual bursts thanks to their ambassador campaigns, when existing Zetland members commit to convincing at least one more person to join as a member. 

In 2023, they recruited a whopping 8,000 new members in three weeks.

What you need to know about replicating those ambassador campaigns is that they require a lot of effort and planning (preparation for each campaign starts months before it gets under way – and that doesn’t even include the prerequisite of making a product that’s worth paying for). 

Klitgaard also argues that a lot of media entrepreneurs start too small and try to keep their budget low by for example hiring as few people as possible. But instead they end up with a product that isn’t as good as it could be, or doesn’t consider the full package of the news experience (there’s little point hiring journalists if you’re not also investing in tech and in making the articles, video or audio into a pleasant reading/watching/listening experience on the site). 

“If you want to create a habit among people, you can’t do that with a Substack newsletter that comes once a month,” he says. “It’s just not going to take you to that very intimate relationship with the customers where the member comes back each day and trusts you to deliver their daily or weekly news cycle.”

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