Data-led double murder story drives subscriptions

In the small Dutch village of Weiteveen, a couple is found murdered. The editorial team at Dagblad van het Noorden springs into action, publishing a series of stories online. Newsroom analyst Alwin Wubs works to bring order to the chaos, and ultimately finds there has been a bump in subscriptions.

The following situation will be familiar to every newsroom around the world: something dramatic occurs, and you instinctively rush to answer the fundamental questions – who, what, where, when, and why? And, as soon as there are some answers, you hit ‘publish’.

With modern media, data dashboards can quickly reveal which articles draw the most readership. With the real-time data provided by smartocto, Alwin Wubs noticed something unusual: although there was a surge in traffic soon after news of the double murder broke, the articles were only being briefly skimmed. The average attention time fell.

“We sensed something was amiss. In the first two days after the murders, we published around ten stories online. Many of these made the homepage, but not all. Nor did every article make it onto Facebook. Our hypothesis was that readers couldn’t find the information they were seeking.”

User needs as leading approach

Wubs decided to analyse the articles through the lens of user needs – a method that, simply put, focuses on addressing readers' specific requirements. At this point, eight out of ten articles were in the ‘Update me’ category, with a few falling under the ‘Give me perspective’ umbrella. The editorial team also tried to convey local sentiment by including community reactions to the tragedy. Yet, it seemed something was missing.

“Then we thought: we need to help readers locate the information they’re after. So we created a ‘Help me’ article, guiding readers through all the other pieces we’d published with concise summaries.” The headline: ‘This is what we know so far…’ This way, they received the complete picture in an easily digestible format.”

The impact of that article? Attention time normalised. Wubs believes journalists sometimes assume too much pre-existing knowledge. Not everyone follows the news obsessively, so readers need their own entry point. Moreover, each reader has slightly different information needs. By adopting this approach, the editorial team responds to these individual requirements.

More subscriptions after experiment

Now, to the business side of the story. Many of the articles at Dagblad van het Noorden are behind a paywall, but the help article initially was not, allowing anyone who found the page via Google to access the overview for free. “However, many of the articles we link to are indeed behind the paywall. And on the day the article was published, we observed a significant increase in subscriptions.”

For strategic business reasons, Wubs can’t disclose exact numbers. “We’re a regional newspaper, so we’re not talking about hundreds of new subscribers, but the figures were genuinely positive and useful.”

Lessons learned

So, what lesson has Dagblad van het Noorden drawn from this experience? “As a newsroom analyst, you need to be as alert as the rest of the editorial team when something big and timely happens. It’s also crucial to take a step back at such moments, which can seem counterintuitive. What are we seeing in the data? What would you typically expect, and what does it mean if the data doesn’t reflect that expectation?”

From there, he says, you can form a hypothesis and experiment. “In this instance, we used the user needs approach, but other methods can also be effective. The key is to be alert at the right time because that’s when you can really make a difference.”

This article was first published on INMA.org.