Thursday August 13th: 4 ways publishers are engaging audiences during COVID-19

August 13, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

Our good friend Damian Radcliffe is back on What's New in Publishing, writing this time about how publishers are working to secure reader loyalty during the pandemic. With consumers having less money in their pockets, reducing churn is a priority and publishers are looking for ways to 'super-serve' their most loyal audiences.

  • eCommerce is high on the list, both a revenue source, and a means to engage and deepen relationship with audiences.

  • Providing non-COVID content features prominently in Damien's engagement strategy ad news avoidance increases.

  • Answering the questions of confused consumers is a powerful engagement tool, addressing audience concerns head-on.

  • Personal connections are working, with individual journalists taking to social media to pull back the curtain on COVID reporting operations.

As always Damien has done a deep dive on how and why each of these engagement strategies delivers now. But the bottom line is, securing subscription revenues with these measures, and more, should 'outlive the pandemic and become a publisher’s “new normal.”

What do you know about data journalism? No, me neither. That's why this explainer from Paul Bradshaw on the online journalism blog is so brilliant. He's taken 100 pieces of data journalism, analysed them and identified seven core data story angles. This article outlines the first four story types; the last three follow in the second part of the series.

Another job ad another product development rumour. This time it's The New York Times looking for a Director of Marketing for a potential future subscription offering for product recommendation site Wirecutter. The job? To 'deeply understand the audience', the 'willingness to pay' and 'what the execution needs to be like'.

Counterpoint's Sam Bradley talks through his positive experience of the International Magazine Centre's Troika consulting sessions. Esther and I have both been Troika 'experts' for the IMC's September Troika session and I wrote a piece for this issue of Counterpoint. It's a small world after all

Today's throwback:

At the start of last summer we spoke to Google’s Madhav Chinnappa about the often-fraught relationship between publishers and platforms, what lessons he’s learned from the Google News Initiative, and what best practice looks like for subscriptions success.

Esther's eaten her bodyweight in ice cream so far this week. If you fancy chipping in for a virtual ice-cream for her, we'd massively appreciate it. She's costing us a fortune.