🇵🇹Don’t underestimate the power of the Portuguese mentality and keeping things simple! 🧲

This week, Francesca Dumas chats with Catarina Osório, Publishing Manager at Contacto (Mediahuis Luxembourg), about the often overlooked nuances of audience engagement. With over 100,000 Portuguese people in Luxembourg, Contacto has built up a large community that spans generations, creating its own challenges in audience engagement. 🧓👶🧒

⚠️Catarina highlights a critical point for news publishers and journalists: “Everything happens so fast right now… if you lose time, you might lose the game.” Readers have higher expectations than ever before.

How do you walk the line between frustrating readers and driving valuable engagement? 🤔

🎧This week on Redefining Engagement, Francesca spoke with Madeleine White, VP Marketing at Poool and Co-founder of The Audiencers, about the delicate balance publishers need to strike to convert casual readers into loyal subscribers. 💙

Madeleine highlights that every conversion (newsletter sign-up, app download, subscription) involves a degree of “frustration” (paywalls, pop-ups).

🔑 The key is understanding each reader’s engagement level and tailoring the “frustration” accordingly. Show a paywall to someone who’s new to your site, and you risk losing them. Show it to someone who reads you daily and subscribes to your newsletter, and they are more likely to convert! 🤝

📢Stop Guessing, Start Listening: Engaging Your Audience Beyond the Dashboard📢

This week on Redefining Engagement, Francesca spoke with Fabienne Meijer, Head of Journalism Products at The OCCRP and Innovation Consultant. Fabienne dropped some serious truths about how newsrooms need to rethink their approach to audience engagement.

👂Hear about:

– Strategic vs. Tactical Research : Are you just trying to get people to consume existing content, or are you crafting journalism in service of your community?

– Community over Global Audience: Focus on building meaningful relationships within communities instead of chasing global metrics.

– Invest Before Asking: Build trust and credibility before soliciting feedback or expecting engagement. Be transparent about your funding and address tough questions head-on.

– Beyond the Metrics: Page views are proxies, not proof of value. Combine behavioural data (return visits, retention) with qualitative insights. Actually TALK to your audience!

Fabienne’s insight that “we like to measure what’s easy rather than what matters” really resonated. Are you falling into this trap? It can happen to the best of us…

📣 What motivates journalists to engage with their audience? It might not be what you think!

In this week’s Redefining Engagement, Francesca speaks with Lars K. Jensen, Audience Lead at Berlingske Media, about the importance of cultural shifts in newsrooms. 

Lars asks a powerful question: Are reporters being rewarded for engaging with audiences/readers? 🤔

Are they incentivised for it? Lars challenges us to rethink how we appraise their work.

If they were appraised for how well they engaged, what do you think the result would be? 

• 👏 Recognition matters: We are driven to excel where we receive positive feedback and recognition.

• 🌐 Digital is different: Articles truly come to life when published online, that is where the journalist/reader relationship starts. Make the leap from print-centric thinking. An article’s life begins when it’s published online, not ends!

• 🔗 Silo-busting: Lars’ unique role bridging commercial and editorial departments highlights the value of cross-functional collaboration.

Learn how to foster a culture that values audience engagement in this episode.