They even created a new role, one of Brand Manager:

‘’This person is from marketing and is responsible together with the newsroom to evaluate every single piece of product that we have using data. Whenever we’re deciding on a new product, designing the weekend edition or even changing columnists, marketing is involved to make sure our brand is aligned with those decisions taken with the newsroom.’’

Having implemented a structure that combines marketing within the newsroom, Petterle insists that although it was a hard process, it ultimately paid dividends for the publisher. Now, marketing shares all product decisions with the newsroom, and the latter has no total power over what to launch: everything must be supported by data and market research in order to optimise their editorial offering.

“Consumers are our king,” she added. “We began using the design thinking process, especially in our newsrooms, because we have to understand what our audience wants, and what our clients and our advertisers want, and once you start doing that, you can’t stop.”

“Marketing used to be a support area and we’d only see results after a few months of implementing a campaign. Now we built these squads that work all together to make changes to the campaigns on a daily basis with the sole focus on acquiring users.’’

Petterle does clarify that although the newsroom has lost editorial power over distribution, their autonomy over content production remains completely intact: ‘’We have so much data related to the reader journey that we know exactly what kind of content that people are looking for, and when (for example, what kind of content to push out at 4 p.m.). The editors have the call to decide what is in the front page and the stories that they do, but they have to follow the guidelines and they have to listen to the data that we have.’’

Read further: You need hard facts to change newsrooms