How young journalists are helping Berlingske Media grow its audience
What started as a small idea among young Berlingske journalists has grown into a new, more personal style of storytelling where they speak directly to their audience.
Keeping the target audience in the centre of reporting, and letting young journalists experiment with new formats, has helped Berlingske Media strengthen its brand while boosting subscribers and audience attention.
Berlingske is one of the oldest newspapers in Denmark and is now under the ownership of Amedia, the largest publisher of newspapers in Norway.
“We are driving innovation by turning user insights into actionable editorial strategies, standing on a lot of data delivered by our audience development lead,” Nina Brorson, Editor, Berlingske, said during our recent Newsroom Summit in Copenhagen.
Berlingske’s target audience is between 30 and 59 years old, though the journalists are much younger. The company will also be testing this strategy with audiences in their 20s in the coming years.
Taking decisions based on audience needs
A seasoned journalist with more than 20 years of experience knows how to craft in-depth, well-researched stories. But younger audiences consume news differently, which means traditional storytelling doesn’t always reach them. Many don’t read as much, making long-form articles harder to connect with.
Traditional newsroom workflows will not help, Brorson said.
To address this gap, Berlingske puts the target audience at the centre of every decision, breaking the process into smaller steps that focus on what young readers care about.
Brainstorming for each story starts with two simple questions:
- Who do we want to matter to?
- What are we writing about?
“We should ask questions that are relevant for our users. If we ask the same questions as all other journalists, our pieces won’t be unique,” she said.
And unique stories bring in more subscriptions and audience attention. Two such cases from Berlingske illustrate this:
Case 1: When a district in Copenhagen was being closed to petrol and diesel cars, the basic news angle was something any Danish newspaper could have reported.
But the team at Berlingske focused specifically on Copenhagen residents who relied on their cars every day. To make the story truly relevant to the residents, the team interviewed a car expert to explore practical questions such as how drivers could still move around the city, and whether it was a good moment to replace a petrol or diesel car with electric vehicles. The expert said the timing had never been better – a valuable insight for the readers.
By reframing the angle around the audience’s needs, a regular news item became a much more distinctive and useful story.
“This piece had higher subscriber attention time and also created new subscriptions,” Brorson said.
Case 2: Another example comes from Brorson’s team working on stories about relationships and health.
They knew their target audience was likely in a relationship, probably married, and interested in being a good partner, but they also wanted to cover health in a meaningful way.
So they connected these two angles, which led to a series of stories about how couples in their 20s often notice physical changes as they move into their 30s – issues many couples experience but rarely talk about.
A brave couple agreed to share how they faced these changes together, giving the story authenticity and emotional depth. The story was unique, highly engaging, and even drove subscriptions.
One story, multiple revenue opportunities
“The two questions often help us create stories our audience can see themselves in. And as I worked with younger reporters, they started looking for ways to add that sense of identification to their stories,” Brorson said.
The reporters began suggesting ideas that involved putting themselves in the stories. One journalist, for instance, wrote a piece about how intelligence quietly shapes our lives based on his own IQ score.
“For him, and many of his younger colleagues, being personal felt completely normal. They’ve grown up sharing parts of their lives online and are used to reflecting on and expressing what they experience,” she said.
It was also launched as a podcast keeping in mind that most youngsters don’t read.
The result: the story ended up being very popular. It not only drove subscriptions and kept readers engaged for a long time, but also became a topic of discussion on an evening show of a major Danish daily, where both the reporter and one of the experts he had interviewed appeared.
“This is a very great example because it ended up creating a kind of universe around this journalist who would normally be behind the byline, but now he was in front,” Brorson said.
This also helped build the brand of both the reporter and Berlingske itself.
But the story didn’t end there. Berlingske ended up organising a talk, inviting 150 paying attendees to participate, which was moderated by the same journalist. The event sold out in two days.
About half the participants were existing subscribers. The other half were new and hadn’t been familiar with the moderator or the publication beforehand. By attending, they formed a connection with both.
“This way of connecting with our users or with new users is very natural for younger journalists,” Brorson said.
“If we listen to them [young journalists] and listen to their ideas, they can help us shape new formats and connect with new audiences.”
Learning from the journalists
These examples from Berlingske show that putting the audience at the centre of the journalistic process and allowing younger journalists to experiment with new formats can help reach new audiences.
This approach can be applied across different news desks, platforms, and media.
“We want people to come to our journalists, not news influencers. And we can also gain experience with new formats, which are valuable for legacy media,” Brorson said.
