What kind of newsroom innovation is working at Immediate Media as it stares down a decline in pageviews?

The U.K.-based magazine publisher is now a business with multiple formats, multiple audiences, and multiple ways to monetise its assets.

At its core: trust and human connection and an editorial department that changed a great deal to become video-first.

“Our strategy was all about human content, all about trust, and all about bringing that really amazing content curation strategy, the ability to create joy for our customers and really drive connections,” Jess Burney, managing director of customer marketing and subscriptions, said at the recent INMA Media Subscriptions Summit.

Immediate realised it was important to have a single unifying North Star goal that everybody in editorial, finance, product and tech, and marketing could get behind. For them, the goal is to reach 3 million subscribers by 2030. 

“We’ve already seen a lot of success on the way. To do this, we had to think about being really good at stuff that magazine publishers weren’t so good at traditionally,” she said. “We had to transform our editorial teams. They didn’t just think about content on a page. They thought about content on WhatsApp, on YouTube, on Instagram, on Web in the app.

“We had to think about reach. So, investing in video because that’s where a lot of our audiences come from and actually being on platforms and thinking about up the funnel.” 

This led to a strong investment in social and SEO audience teams.

Immediate was also thinking about ways to not only drive eyeballs or attract attention but to create “that deep trust and relationship with the brand that traditionally magazines had back in the days, when magazines were in huge growth.” 

This led to a Faces and Voices strategy to differentiate its brand, ensure employees are front and centre, and that readers can develop a sense of connection with them, Burney said: “The important thing is actually to create our own talent and to actually own that talent and use that talent to be driving those commercial values.

“For a long time, publishers believed that the brand was the magazine and that model broke. Now, it’s all about the authority of editorial teams … . The faces, the people that we’ve created with talent within the organisation that now talks directly to our audiences and meets them at events.”

The push has led them to digital communication with their audience as well, she said.

“It’s the mode of messaging. As of now, there’s not one way. Some of our best talent that we work with, they will have conversations across the platforms, and those direct relationships are what’s creating trust. 

“This whole point — video, audio — those are the mediums through which we create audiences and the journey isn’t linear. People find us in different ways, and they consume us in different ways. But what really matters is the love and the personal connection that we have managed to take from a print page into a variety of different media.”

All of these initiatives required “a lot of change” for the organisation, which had actually been “a very siloed business.”

Now, information flows in every direction. 

“Some people love that journey, some people have really embraced it. They get a real buzz from being able to work with different teams and understand the metrics. Other people didn’t like it so much and they went a different way.

“But, this is no longer about sort of text journalism or people that are chasing keywords in SEO or simply creating single use assets. The world we’re in now is all about all content in one place, and you can use that across all formats. It’s about thinking about multiple formats when you do creation.”

Creating content more efficiently was a challenge, she said.

“We have to work within the same envelope of cost. We have to modernise and that means working harder. We chose to become video first and really push for video capabilities and also apps.

“Storytelling is not about text and visuals. It is about video, about podcast, about audience. It’s about engaging people in different ways and creating those points. Text alone just doesn’t cut it any more. We’ve invested a lot in transforming the business. We’ve had a lot of change. Change can be difficult at times, but it can also be hugely empowering.”

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