INMA’s Media Innovation Week in Madrid is over, I’m back in Zurich. Before the memories blur into one long plate of tapas, I want to pull together the ideas I brought home from Madrid, the ones that will shape a lot of my work for the Young Audiences Initiative in the months to come.

When I recorded our debrief podcast after the event with my colleagues Greg Piechota (lead of the Readers First Initiative), Gabriel Dorosz (lead of the Advertising Initiative), and Sonali (lead of the Newsroom Innovation Initiative), I tried to sum up the week in one image: a house.

Greg told us to open more side doors. Monocle told us to build a house worth walking into. Gabe told us the house needs to be premium, down to the ads. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that for young audiences, the house itself might not be the most interesting part anymore.

So here are the three lessons I’m taking home from Madrid.

1. Creators have officially arrived

A year ago, creators were still mostly a hallway conversation in our industry, something people discussed with a mix of curiosity and worry. This year, they were on the main stage from the very first morning.

In his opening keynote, Earl Wilkinson described a shift I have been writing about in this newsletter all year: Trust is moving from the masthead to the individual.

According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 27% of people worldwide now get news from a creator every week. Earl also quoted Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, who wants his company to become a creator platform within five years.

What struck me in Madrid is that the conversation has moved on from whether to how. Jonas Lips from HLN in Belgium showed what that looks like in practice.

He and his colleague run vertical news video as a team of two, with the same faces every day, so young viewers always know who is talking to them. Jonas gave such an inspiring keynote that everyone in the room understood why he is successful and what creator collaboration can look like. 

When I talked to him afterwards, he told me it took some time to get to where he is now — a place where he can easily reach out to colleagues, interview them, and is seen as an important part of the newsroom. But his bosses believed in his work, and they supported him.

I also have a lot of respect for Jonas’ work ethic. It became pretty clear that he works a lot. He also mentioned on stage that young people sometimes wait for him in front of his apartment. As a woman who publishes content on the Internet, I find this thought absolutely terrifying. It reminded me I want to focus on the protection of creators as part of this initiative in the coming months — because showing your face to the public does come with risks. 

2. The house doesn’t have to be the Web site anymore

Greg’s session gave us one of the sharpest arguments of the week. We don’t have a subscription ceiling, Greg says. We have a Web site ceiling.

Across hundreds of publishers, online audiences are shrinking, but not evenly: Loyal heavy users are stable while casual users, the people who drop by now and then, are the ones leaving. 

Since most subscriptions are still sold on the Web site, that is a real problem.

Greg’s answer: Protect the core and open more side doors where people already spend their time, such as e-mail, podcasts, TikTok, and partnerships. 

Die Zeit is his favourite example. When Web site sales slowed, they started selling podcast subscriptions on Spotify and Apple, and 80% of those subscribers had never subscribed to Die Zeit before.

From my young audiences’ corner, I would go one step further. Young people are the textbook casual users, and my theory is most of them will never walk through our front door. For them, the side door is often not the entrance. It’s the destination.

The Boston Globe’s B-Side, which Sonali and I showed in our session, proves this beautifully. It’s a newsletter for young Bostonians that was never designed to drive traffic to The Globe’s Web site. Instead, it serves its readers directly with local news, events, and politics, and it makes money through ads and ticketed dinners where its super fans meet. 

B-Side isn’t a room in The Globe’s house. It’s a house of its own.

By the way: This week, Emily Schario from The Boston Globe was in Zurich (listen to my podcast episode with Emily here), and we managed to grab a glass of wine together. This is INMA, too: the connections you make with people from all over the world. I’m always impressed by the talent and smartness of my colleagues. So my tip: Make the most of this network! 

Back to the house. I think the real work now happens in the rooms around our Web sites: the newsletter, the podcast, the vertical video feed, the comment section, or the live event. Monocle described its brand as a house with many rooms, each with a different function but the same standards. I’d add one thing: Every one of those rooms needs a host, and that host is a person, not a logo.

What do you think? Hit reply and tell me which room you’re building in!

3. Super fans, not super readers

Another interesting moment this week was realising that Greg and Gabe, coming from completely different directions, ended up at the same people: the super users.

Greg looked at it from the reader side, where a tiny share of users generates most of the revenue. Gabe looked at it from the advertiser side. With ad spend on news down by one-third since 2019, his message was clear: Stop selling volume, and start selling trust through partnerships, events, and formats that are, in his words, “worthy of the journalism.” (If you want to learn more about this, come to INMA Advertising Summit in New York this December. I’ll be hosting it with Gabe!)

Here’s my confession, though: I don’t think young people will ever become super readers — at least not in the way their parents are. But they can become super fans. They listen, watch, comment, and show up.

The Toronto Star reopened a comment section that used to be toxic, and today its commenters stay longer and are more likely to subscribe. B-Side’s most loyal readers buy tickets to dinners. And The Economist, which I wrote about in an earlier edition, has built an entire tier around video, audio, and games without long-form text.

So instead of asking how we turn young audiences into readers, we should ask a different question: What does a super fan of our journalism look like, and what would they actually pay for, show up for, or stay for?

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