2025-02-14. Through an initiative aimed primarily at younger female readers, The Irish Times has redefined its focus on key demographics, combining data-driven insights with qualitative feedback to create content that resonates with its readers’ lives and priorities. The post ‘For You’ – The Irish Times goes audience-centric, surfs data overload and gets insights from employees appeared first on WAN-IFRA.
This article was originally published in our Best Practice Showcase, which features case studies from Table Stakes Europe on how to accelerate the transition from print to digital, reach new audiences and better engage your local communities.
“Some of the best parts of your future are rooted in some of the best parts of your past.”
This is what Doug Smith, the architect of Table Stakes, tends to say about digital transformation in legacy news organisations.
Of course the real challenge is to identify these parts and weave them into a meaningful whole.
Enter The Irish Times.
The media outlet has been a trusted news brand for 165 years. Their challenge now is to secure their future as the only independently owned news media in Ireland.
As they first embarked on their Table Stakes Europe journey in January 2024, they had obvious strengths as well as powerfully stated (and familiar) challenges. Readership and paying readers were at record highs but revenues had been under pressure.
The digital transition of the newsroom was well underway but half of the newsroom was mainly concerned by meeting print needs. Subscriber-centric journalism was the goal, but in practice too much journalism was still diary-led.
Crucially, a lot of strategic work had been done before joining TSE. Key audiences had been identified and could be accurately described.
The female skewed 30-45 target audience had clearly defined needs that had been identified in previous research. It formed the scaffolding of what would become known as the “For You” plan.
These readers are interested in life advice; human interest stories; climate coverage that feels relevant and useful to their lives; intelligent, audience-centred politics; and they value accessibility of news.
They live busy lives, have money worries and have been affected by cost of living pressures and the Irish housing crisis. Importantly, they are heavy social media users who value audio and video content.
The main focus of The Irish Times’s TSE journey was to target that audience. Doubling the proportion of readers under 45 to 20 percent was the team’s original and aggressive goal.
How to start: The Ease/Impact matrix
In the spirit of Design and Do, the team conducted a quick assessment of what they could start doing “next Monday.” Literally.
The Irish Times team used a simple tool out of the TSE toolbox – the Ease/Impact matrix. The tool helps give priority to possible actions now that will drive outcomes now. These are experiments that sit at the core of TSE methodology. They are not revolutionary. They do not aim to transform an entire organisation in one go.
Experiments are carried out by a group of pioneers. That group can be a one-person band. Hopefully they deliver evidence that something is indeed working.
What was simple, and yet had potential at The Irish Times, now? For Opinion Editor Jennifer O’Connell, commissioning extra articles for 30-45 female readers was in line with the strategic goals of the organisation to target new audiences.
They created an onsite tag “For You” to enable them to track the performance of these articles and promoted content on social media, including paid promotion.
The aim was simple: to ensure that female readers aged 30-45 would always be able to see themselves somewhere in the Opinion content – in the themes, headlines, writers and imagery.
This meant commissioning opinion pieces from writers within that age group on themes that research had shown would be likely to resonate with the target audience: parenting and fertility; education; audience-focused opinion articles on big themes like climate and politics; fitness, health and mental wellbeing; moving personal essays and human-interest stories about well known people. Superb writing and strong opinions continued to be guiding principles of commissioning.
The Irish Times understood already that their readers were drawn to stories with an Irish angle. The results quickly confirmed these observations.
Three of the best performing of these early “For You” articles included columns titled: “I am that deeply suspect Irish creature, a mother of an only child. It was by choice”; “If warnings about Atlantic ocean circulation are correct, Irish people could become climate migrants” and “Sinn Féin was the shock absorber of Irish politics. It’s worn out.”
Overall page views for these pieces went up 50 percent on average compared to other Opinion articles, and subscription rates were up by 50 to 60 percent.
Initially, the team didn’t know who was reading or subscribing but in June 2024, thanks to a breakthrough from the data team in assigning a gender to existing subscribers, they were able to report a 95 percent increase in female subscribers reading the “For You” Opinion articles over other Opinion content.
The online news desk followed suit, paying more acute attention to their audiences’ needs, interests, problems and passions.
Assistant News Editor Joe Humphreys held roadshows across the newsroom to introduce more news journalists to the Table Stakes methodology. Page views of “For You” pieces went up by more than 100 percent on average compared to overall article benchmark. Conversions by these articles were also higher.
But what does audience-centric journalism even look like?
It all started with an impromptu chat and brain-storm during a Table Stakes Zoom call. How could the team actually describe audience-centric behaviours? What’s the playbook? It ended up with a usable checklist journalists and desk editors can now look at and think about.
At the top of the desired behaviours, The Irish Times invited journalists to “put audiences ahead of (…) traditions.” Then they listed skills around headline writing, choice of imagery and use of data. The attached checklist is easily shareable and adaptable. To get an idea whether a journalist was on board, they placed the bar at 8 “yes” out of the desired behaviours. These check-lists were self-administered.
One of the required behaviours was quickly introduced to other parts of the newsroom – the four-part audience question routine: Who is my article for? How will they see themselves in the story? What do they need? How can it be best promoted?
Audience-centric editorial tactics can vary from outlet to outlet. The Irish Times’ four-question routine looks easy enough to adopt by most newsrooms.
From data maelstrom to surfing usable data
The Times’s data team was able to gather lots of data across the board. However, during their last TSE presentation in Hamburg in October 2024, the team compared their original data set to a maelstrom – large, scary and hard to navigate.
How could they track behaviours of their target audience (30-45, female skewed) when they did not even have the gender and age of their own subscribers?
While ensuring GDPR compliance, they sent a survey to a sample of randomly selected 10,000 subscribers, asking for the missing information. Amazingly, they got a 28 percent response rate, enough to cross reference their behaviours and reading habits with, for example, gender and age.
Suddenly “For you” readers became much better known.
Insights from the inside
On top of an improved, easier-to-use data set, the team wanted to gather qualitative insight about their content and the public perception of their news brand.
Audiences Editor David Labanyi assembled a group of 10 Irish Times employees who could embody the needs and views of their priority target audience.
This internal focus group would meet every two weeks and be asked questions about their perception of the brand overall, their views on specific content as well as their expectations around future topics and stories.
There was one condition: the feedback was anonymised so they could feel at ease to be forthright about editorial content. Indeed their feedback was not always positive. They also express some readers’ needs.
They favoured “short and snappy,” easily digestible articles. They also hoped for immersive storytelling, to mirror the experience they could get on digital media platforms. News summaries ought to come on audio and video formats – their busy lifestyle was not offering much time or space for leisurely reading. Practical, relatable financial advice was also called for. Still they still trusted The Irish Times to cover key national events.
As for the team’s next steps, the plan is to double down on targeting the 30-45 female audience in 2025. To give them the best possible chance of success, they want to expand the demographic profiling of subscribers so that progress towards this goal can be measured.
They will also support this editorial strategy with new, bespoke commercial offers tailored for this audience. Finally, they will use what they have learned so far in their Table Stakes journey to target other demographics.
The post ‘For You’ – The Irish Times goes audience-centric, surfs data overload and gets insights from employees appeared first on WAN-IFRA.
