22 February 2024
Making journalism accessible in audio, data-driven decision making, and using a digital archive to generate traffic and sales are among the initiatives you can use in your digital newspaper strategy.
Would you rather listen to the article? Press play and have the article read aloud by the Text-to-Speech Google Cloud speech synthesis.
The digital transformation of the printed newspaper to a digital version has led to new trends and products being introduced. Here are 7 initiatives from this development, which you can use as inspiration for your digital newspaper strategy.
Audio content allows readers to consume news while engaging in other activities, such as driving, exercising, or doing household chores. It enables them to ‘read’ the ePaper even when they are away from it.
The list of audio content benefits is long. Here are some of the most important:
Overall, incorporating audio into your digital newspaper can enrich the user experience, drive greater engagement, and increase accessibility.
As readers continue to turn to digital platforms, media companies gain new possibilities for tracking readers' activity, habits, and preferences. This creates new opportunities for converting data into knowledge that can be used to make decisions. And better than ever before, media companies can now provide advertisers and journalists with documentation based on hard data.
Examples of data for digital newspapers that can be shown in real-time:
• Number of times a publication has been downloaded
• Which articles are being read
• Which ads are being seen and clicked on throughout the day
• Readers' geographic locations
• Which platforms readers are using
Knowledge of user behavior provides a better basis for making decisions for future digital strategies. By setting several performance metrics like the above, you can create informed editorial strategies and influence advertising and newspaper sales in connection with documenting effect, user behavior, and user preferences.
Newspaper archives are one of the digital areas in which readers have not become accustomed to obtaining free content. Experience has shown that search access to newspaper archive content is a feature that readers will gladly pay for, just as the availability of such an option serves to retain current subscribers and attract new ones.
Adding a digital newspaper archive to your news app not only makes your heritage available to your subscribers. It can strengthen your digital product by providing greater value to your subscribers. It also increases the time spent in your app, as readers will have more content to read and explore.
A growing number of media organizations publish digital versions of their newspapers immediately after sending the physical paper edition to print. Readers are warmly embracing this trend. The early release of the newspaper generates evening traffic on web browsers, smartphones, and tablets.
This is a clear example of how reading habits have changed primarily due to technology. Many newspaper organizations see an increase in digital reading in the evenings around 8:00 pm, showing that readers go from reading news in the morning to reading in the evening.
A great way to engage your readers and offer them added value is to publish the digital version of the newspaper the night before.
New digital advertising products have emerged for newspaper apps for smartphones and tablets. Ads can be made clickable and interactive. Interstitials – ads that resemble full-page spreads but have interactive functionality – are particularly popular among advertisers.
A big difference between print and digital advertising is that digital ads are interactive. You can add clickable links or surveys, which increases reader engagement. Digital advertising also makes it possible for advertisers to access real-time analytics and metrics to track the performance of their ads, including impressions, clicks, conversions, and engagement metrics.
By using digital advertising formats in your electronic newspaper, you can offer interactive and measurable ads for your advertisers.
A digital-only newspaper is a publication that is exclusively distributed and consumed via digital platforms such as mobile apps and desktops. Unlike traditional print newspapers, digital-only newspapers do not produce physical copies for distribution.
Even if a newspaper does not come out in print, it can still resemble its paper counterpart. Many media companies are publishing digital-only versions of their newspapers on days that are otherwise newspaper-free, i.e. at weekends and on holidays.
Digital-only can be used to publish the digital newspaper 365 days a year, so a newspaper will be published even on ‘paperless days’. But it can also be used to experiment with reduced publishing days to save money on print and distribution and as part of converting more print readers to digital readers.
An online evening edition of a newspaper refers to a digital version of a newspaper that is published specifically in the evening, typically featuring news updates and articles that have occurred or developed throughout the day. Online evening editions aim to provide readers with the latest information and developments in the late afternoon or early evening hours.
A special evening edition can be used to fill up the space in the evening when readers have time to engage with your news. It’s also a good way to keep your readers updated if the early release of the morning newspaper is ready late in the evening, for example around 10:00 pm.
Or maybe you could publish the newspaper more times a day. The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten publishes two editions a day. Its evening edition called Aftenposten Aften is published exclusively as an ePaper and provides readers with an edited summary of the day's most important news from around the world.
The online evening edition of your newspaper can be a great way to provide your readers with more value or influence them to use more digital products.
