NTM’s “fight and unite” project boosts new mobile front page with higher news density

By Jens Pettersson

Head of Editorial Development

NTM

Stockholm, Sweden

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Journalism is at the core of our local news business. But to get engagement - to get articles read and videos seen and podcasts listened to - demands a lot of the digital distribution and the quality of product.

And, even though the journalism in itself is the most valuable asset a news company has, it is worthless if the product is no good.

At our Swedish local media conglomerate NTM, our subscribers are increasingly consuming our journalism on mobile devices. More than 80% of traffic on our 18 Web sites is on mobile or app. Still, a lot of measures we have taken in recent years focused on desktop. So, when deciding to refresh our front page, we decided we needed to focus on mobile first, for real this time.

Reviewing the old front screen revealed too much messaging.

When reviewing our product, we saw a strong emphasis on advertising in the top two screens on mobile and in-app. Our "top story" was actually not even visible on the first screen on mobile and in-app. Overall, our first screen was crowded by a lot of different messages, a login space, e-shop information, a navigation bar, and an editorial solution. Many small headlines on both important and not-so-important news were stacked on top of each other.

We were also lacking some basic features that subscribers could and should demand from today's news outlet. For instance, all our articles looked the same, regardless of whether they were short notices on a car accident or thorough investigative stories that took weeks to put together.

Also, our super local stories from smaller cities tended to be drowned out on the front page by more important news stories from bigger cities in our areas.

On top of all of this, a recent initial initiative to redesign the product was not really well anchored in all departments and had to be stopped just before launch.

In short, we had quite a big challenge to handle when focusing on product.

Simultaneously, our company decided to enhance its focus on internal cultural change. "One NTM" has been a leading quote in this work of bringing departments coming closer together. It has been important to be able to "fight and unite" and not be stopped or slowed down by different opinions from different departments.

This kind of thinking became the basics for product development for us.

The new front screen is cleaner and more streamlined, which reflected priorities within the company culture as well.

We put together a small team with one representative from editorial, one from advertising, and three from the tech department. The team got a strong mandate in implementing a swift change in product.

This workflow was very efficient, and we managed to institute a lot of small changes on our product. We tried to not aim for a big bang but instead launch smaller changes continuously.

Under the campaign name of "improved news density," we launched a new front-page design. After constructive discussions (fight and unite within the team) we decided to rearrange the first screen. The biggest story at the moment received greater emphasis and is displayed on top. Navigation is moved to the bottom, which is more intuitive and closer to the user's thumb on mobile. We use the same functionality on both apps and mobile.

We also decreased the number of options in the menu to three: home, latest news, and menu/search. This clearer display of the latest news section gave us a direct uplift of 100% in pageviews on that section.

All of this was done in four weeks, with the aim to increase the news density of the product. Now that some time after the launch has passed, results indicate a very high uplift on time spent on the front page. There is also increased visibility and reading of stories published in slots further down on the front page.

When it comes to increasing audience engagement, one way to do that in the product is, of course, to create a more relevant experience. We have done hyper-personalisation on the front page for quite a while. This means we promote selected content for each and every user ID, based on that logged-in user's behaviour (all reading on our news sites requires a login).

The new formatting is more user-friendly for article browsing and reading as well.

Now, we have also developed a new personalisation feature based on the subscriber's geographical residence. This ensures that "small" but locally important news always gets a good position on the front page and isn't drowned by news from bigger cities.

We have also developed another hyper-personalised widget: Internally, we call this one "best story since last time." This ensures infrequent visitors can always access the best stories published since the last time they visited the Web site.

It works like this: The news stories with the highest editorial news value (given by the editor) published since the last time the user visited are saved and displayed in a high position on the front page when they visit again. The selection also takes into account the importance of not displaying obsolete news, so it filters things like traffic accidents and train delays.

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About Jens Pettersson

Jens Pettersson is head of editorial development at NTM in Stockholm, Sweden. He can be reached at [email protected] or @JensPettersson.

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