Launched last year to help local newspapers retain their subscribers and attract new ones, the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index has grown to include more than 100 news organizations that are funneling their reader data to the project.
The list runs the gamut from small to large media organizations and includes regional powerhouses such as the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News, the Seattle Times, the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times. All Lee Enterprises and McClatchey newspapers are now contributing, according to Tim Franklin, Senior Associate Dean and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.
“The Index is a tsunami of data,” said Franklin, who oversees the initiative. “In the first few pages of the site, we have 35 different performance metrics and then we have benchmark data for all of them. That’s what makes it particularly valuable. Publishers only used to be able to benchmark internally but now they have a line of sight into other organizations around the country.”
One medium-sized news publisher in Florida is making extensive use of the Index. Donna Prentice, manager of audience growth and development at the Tampa Bay Times, says her publication finds the benchmarking features to be extremely valuable. “The fact that we can look at how we’re performing versus our peers is really amazing,” she said. The monthly report that the Times downloads from the Engagement Index is the subject of meetings of a cross-functional group that includes the company’s CEO as well as representatives from the newsroom, marketing team and IT department. “We’re looking at it closely and putting together strategies that we can build around the key indicators,” Prentice said. “It’s exciting where we’re headed, and we are very excited to continue diving into the details.”
The Index is expanding at a time of quiet transition in the local news business. For decades, publishers garnered the vast majority of their revenue from selling advertising. But ad revenue began precipitously declining in the mid-2000s as Internet retailing and advertising mushroomed. Savvy publishers realized that building subscription revenue from both print products and websites was a key survival strategy. For the first time in 2020, revenue from subscriptions or “memberships” at local news organizations made up more than 50 percent of overall revenue. “This is a real sea change, and this trend is only going to continue,” Franklin predicted.
The Index website also has been redesigned to better highlight numbers that matter to publishers such as subscriber “churn rates,” the rate at which subscribers stop paying because they cancelled or defaulted. Going beyond subscriber data, new metrics have been added that look at the entire “reader funnel.” At the top of the funnel, publishers can now see how many “unknown readers” they have, those who are not registered with a news site but explore content there through side doors like Google and Facebook.
In the middle of the funnel are “registered users,” those who have provided their contact information to the publication, so they receive news alerts and subscription offers but are not yet subscribing. At the bottom are subscribers who are paying to have access to a publication’s content. “It really comes back to the funnel,” said Ed Malthouse, Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications, research director of the Spiegel Research Center and a data scientist who oversees the Index’s analysis using anonymized data from the news organizations.
“We know the size of each reader segment and the flows between them. Publishers can see what fraction of their active subscribers are becoming inactive and project that into next month or run it forward for the next three years.”
Using the “What if?” tool on the site, publishers can project how those numbers might change if they found ways to reduce subscriber churn such as launching new products or offers targeting at-risk subscribers.
In a new section, publishers can track how many visits a reader makes over a certain period, a metric that has proven critical in retaining readers and building loyalty. That metric of visit frequency is flashing yellow right now for some large publishers, adds Franklin. “Among the top-tier publications in the Index, the benchmark for visits is only five days a month. That’s not very often and it’s something that publishers need to focus on. The engagement numbers are much, much higher for medium and small publications so maybe there’s something the large metros can learn from them.”
The Medill Subscriber Engagement Index is continuing to grow and should reach 150 news organizations within the next four months, Franklin predicted. The data and analytics for the benchmarking function will continue to improve as more organizations contribute their data. “The more we have, the more robust the benchmarking becomes,” he said. The site’s analytical tools are currently free to publishers who are contributing their reader data to the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index, which is partially funded by a grant from the Google News Initiative.
Susan Chandler is a freelance journalist based in Chicago who previously taught as an adjunct faculty member at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University.
Article image by Jay Clark used under Unsplash license (Unsplash)
