Daily Herald is suburban Chicago’s largest daily newspaper, based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Their primary goal during the Accelerator was to develop a plan for growing their digital subscriber base and securing their future. Through the Accelerator, Daily Herald went from not knowing their target audience to choosing to focus on a younger, more diverse family audience segment.
Signups in August for new family-focused newsletter
Net increase in digital subscribers in the first three months of the Accelerator
During the program, the Herald saw a number of wins: they added a Suburban Families newsletter that gained over 600 subscribers by October and has a 47 percent open rate. The Accelerator helped the Herald identify neighborhoods where young families are increasingly moving to so they could better target their coverage.
The Herald also knew they had a strong digital subscription base during super events (prep sports season, elections and big news events) but not year-round. They determined that excelent newsletters drive people through the funnel by propelling readers to the website enough that they find they need to become subscribers.
My advice to other newsrooms is to be open to radical changes, even if they’re radical experiments.
Lisa Miner, Daily Herald Managing Editor / Team leader for the LNA
The Accelerator enabled Daily Herald to better understand who their audience is and what they are looking for through a combination of audience survey results and U.S. Census data. Equipped with this specific knowledge about their audience and more effective goal-setting strategies, Daily Herald has become better prepared to achieve its mission of becoming an indespensable part of life for a diversity of residents in the Northwest suburbs.