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📮In this week’s newsletter, we are inviting you behind the scenes of IPI’s Transition Accelerator Bootcamp that took place in Vienna, on 3-6 of December. After the first months of online training, coaching and open conversations we developed a 4-day in-person Bootcamp programme packed with theory and practice on audience research, product thinking and development.

This first instalment of the special Bootcamp newsletter will summarise the main lessons of Day 1 on conducting, leveraging and disseminating audience research in your newsroom.

The challenge: Keeping up with your audience

This year the participants are tackling an exciting set of challenges, from launching a communications campaign for a debate project, to podcasts and AI-powered audio features. At the centre of all these projects is a shared goal to create more appealing journalism products informed by the audience’s evolving needs.

“It sounds funny, but they don’t read”, said Samuel Akoni from Project Syndicate, reflecting on their journey of reaching out to newer generations of news consumers. The team has been working on their data infrastructure and using it to inform and shape their value to the audience. But how do you approach an audience that is not interested in written content? How do you engage the audience that experiences news fatigue or avoids hard news altogether?

The solution: Focus, set a routine, share the insights

Lena Beate Hamborg Pedersen, at Transition Accelerator Bootcamp 2024, Vienna

First things first, “Stop focusing on everyone, you have to pick and choose,” said Lena Pedersen, the Head of Product Development – DN Media Group and our Bootcamp trainer.

Catering to everyone is an impossible undertaking for a lot of public-interest journalism organizations; instead, these newsrooms should focus on identifying specific audience segments, researching their needs, and tailoring their products to the segment at hand.

How to put that into practice? The participants had a chance to conduct a sample interview and test out the techniques with a group of volunteers. The act of doing mock audience interviews has given the teams some real aha moments. Here’s a summary from Lena Pedersen’s training:

  • “People will give you the best version of themselves”, so when conducting audience interviews, use indirect questioning techniques to elicit authentic responses and uncover genuine user behaviors, needs and preferences. For example, instead of asking how often your interviewee reads the news, ask what were the last pieces they read and how did they find them.
  • Prioritize understanding problems and pain points before diving into ideation and solutions to effectively address the audience’s real needs and save resources.
  • Monetise your idea, as “you won’t get far if you can’t earn money from it (your project/product)”.
  • Involve more team members in the audience research process, including sharing user insights and feedback to shape the offering. For example, send developers interview transcripts so they know user concerns and how it can inform their part of the product.
  • After the interview – debrief and incorporate audience research as a consistent and manageable routine to gather valuable input without overburdening resources.

💡Eventually, establishing this routine could let newsrooms have a deeper dialogue with the readers. “Don’t just meet people where they already are, but also lead them to where you want them to go,”  as added by Urszula Kifer from our grantee Pismo.

✍️ Highlighting success stories, we had the pleasure of featuring two special guests at the Lightning Talks, Lukas Burnar from our previous grantee Andererseits (on the left) and Florian Novak from a news start-up Jetzt.at (on the right), who shared their experiences in driving innovation within Austrian newsrooms with provocative insights on fostering audience relationships through newsletter subscription models, reinventing news formats and user experiences.

Innovation Deck

Share your thoughts, reach out to the Media Innovation team and help us shape our media support programmes! Say hi – [email protected].