A new batch of six APAC news media companies will embark on the second edition of the Newsroom and Business Transformation Asia (NBTA) program. It follows the success of the last year’s groundbreaking initiative. The programme starts this week and will run until November 2021.
The following news media companies will participate in the 2021 program – BeritaSatu.com (Indonesia), Kompas.com (Indonesia), Maeil Business Newspaper (South Korea), Sun (Fiji) News Pte Ltd (Fiji), SunStar Publishing Inc. (Philippines), The Dong-a Ilbo (South Korea).
The program is designed for news companies in APAC that plan to launch their first paid-content product or activity soon. It brings together one senior editorial and one senior commercial executive from each publisher for four months of training and coaching.
The curriculum equips them with the insights, know-how, and tools to help execute their organisations’ transformation and reader revenue strategy. It covers strategic thinking, planning and implementation, rebalancing print advertising and reader revenue, creating new audiences and retaining existing ones with new products, content, features and services, pricing, marketing and building data capabilities.
There will be case studies from around the world, guest speaker sessions and hands-on project work by participants. These projects will be framed to produce an actionable plan to deal with a go-live challenge at participants’ companies. A US$ 10,000 grant from Facebook supports each project. Participants can use the grant for various purposes such as technology, IT or software purchases, content experimentation, prototype development, etc.
“We welcome the second year of participants to the Wan-Ifra, the Newsroom and Business Transformation Asia 2021. Our partnership with WAN-IFRA is an important part of our commitment to support the region’s news industry build sustainable business growth and engaging content that serves and informs our region.” Anjali Kapoor, director of News Partnerships, Facebook Asia Pacific.
“Reader revenue is a cornerstone of sustainable digital news models. We hope the Newsroom and Business Transformation APAC program will help accelerate the transformation process and equip media companies with the skills needed to survive the disruption to the traditional media business,” said Thomas Jacob, COO of WAN-IFRA.
Digital strategy consultant Gregor Waller and former Managing Editor of The Times of London, George Brock, helm the program.
For Maria Benyamin, editor-in-chief of Bisnis Indonesia, getting advice from the programme leads to develop a holistic reader-engagement strategy to drive her publication’s subscriptions made NBTA 2020 an invaluable learning experience. With their advice, her publication executed a content audit, adjusted its prices, improved its payment systems to minimise friction, started a marketing campaign, re-evaluated its social media engagement tactics and launched a daily email newsletter for readers.
“In the last eight months since we completed NBTA, we saw our subscriptions rates increase more than sixfold (per December 2020). In addition, we found that email newsletters are very effective for incentivizing reader registration and driving traffic to our website,” said Benyamin.
“The ideas discussed during NBTA 2020 about designing experiments, using the right tools and drawing the right conclusions from the data convinced us of the need to develop better data competencies, said Wong Shau Meng, assistant general manager of audience growth at Malaysia-based publication Sin Chew Daily. “We realised we have a lot of data, but it was not very well organised. We have since implemented those ideas to improve our data capabilities,” he said.
