This is part two of a three-part series about the building blocks of newsroom transformation. In the first part, we looked at why ‘Bridge Roles’ are having a resurgence, and how they help unlock newsroom’s innovative thinking which in turn lifts the ability to grow revenue and subscriptions.
In this blog post FT Strategies Senior Insights Consultant Lamberto Lambertini, interviews Hannah Sarney, former Head of Audience Engagement at the FT and, starting this year, FT Editorial Product Director, a new and exciting role.
We’ll chat about her last 4 years at The FT, the key skills and responsibilities needed for an Audience Engagement team, which metrics to focus on, and of course her new role which she describes as, "taking Audience Engagement to the next level”.
The third part of the series, an interview with Sam Joiner (FT Visual Stories and Investigations Editor), will be published later this month. Subscribe to FT Strategies’ newsletter to be the first to find out about new resources, upcoming programmes and case studies to help grow your business in 2024.
Hi Hannah, thank you for taking the time to sit down with us and talk about all things Audience Engagement. Could you tell us a little about how you joined the FT and your role in the past years as Head of Audience Engagement?
Thank you for having me. I started out in New Zealand newsrooms as online editor, and then garnered a fair bit of social experience as Mobile and Engagement Editor at the New Zealand Herald. I then moved to the UK and wanted to make a switch from reporter/editor to something roughly in this area of Audience, which was only really taking off. The Telegraph took a chance on me, and I ended up running the SEO and Social Media teams. It touched on various things: we launched on Snapchat Discover, experimented wildly in the live streaming space, contributed to a newsroom-wide design rethink, and all sorts of other things. So it was really fun as it was quite a broad remit. Within that capacity, I was part of an off-the-record roundtable of a bunch of us who do quite similar jobs at different news providers, and that's how I met Renee Kaplan (Former Head of Audience Engagement). I was lucky with timing as she ended up looking for a deputy, and I ultimately managed to get my way into that role in 2018 as Senior Engagement Editor. A big motivation for the move was a chance to learn directly from Renee.
In 2020, I took over the team and it's evolved over the years. Nowadays we’re involved in everything from Social Media, SEO, Community journalism (which is largely our commenting space), Audience Diversity, and then data really is the backbone that ties admittedly quite a random collection of specialists together. By that, I mean we own the data narrative and help distil audience engagement metrics so that they are as actionable and insightful to our newsroom editors as possible. Ultimately our goal is to manage initiatives to support the delivery of editorial priorities whether that be via product development, new editorial verticals or just a cracking story.
When I first joined, Audio and Newsletters were also part of Audience Engagement as well, but now they are headed separately. We still work really closely together even though technically we’re not on paper one team - but it’s a testament to how the FT can adapt and create roles on strategic priorities. I would also say we work really closely with the Visual and Data Journalism Editors, and the Video team.
"Ultimately our goal is to manage initiatives to support the delivery of editorial priorities whether that be via product development, new editorial verticals or just a cracking story"
What type of background does the Audience Engagement team you’ve assembled have?
Until pretty recently everyone in the team started out as a journalist, straight reporter, or editor, and then ended up like me where their career morphed into the audience space. Nowadays we don't have any data analysts or at least none of us come from a data background, but it is the bread and butter of what we do.
My advice always is, if you're starting an Audience Engagement team, whether you have tons of resources or you can only hire one or two people, make one of those people are a data analyst. Without them getting you access to data and cleaning it up, you're not going to be able to move anywhere. At the FT, we've got the luxury of our data department which we work really closely with. Then what my team does is what I often refer to as ‘data with empathy’. It's not that they don't do that as well, but we're there to own the data narrative in editorial because we speak the editorial language – every department has its own language so we’re translators, in a way. That helps us build trust in the data, the insights, and our team, which results in lasting, positive culture change required to grow and engage our audiences. Ultimately, data can be queried in different ways and give different results to the same question, and our goal is to stay on top of that. That means:
- Are we asking the right data question?
- Is the right answer being socialised?
- What is the key insight?
- What's the memorable sentence that we're trying to take into the newsroom? Is that clear? Is it being understood and actioned?
To be a little more precise and talk about skills, what I'm looking for in anyone senior in my team is strong communication skills, and the ability to tell compelling (and accurate) data-based stories – especially in the newsrooms and with editorial staff. Then as you go down into the team, we get into the deep specialists, where I need them to have very technical skills. And we can always train them up in terms of communication skills.
So sales, diplomacy, very good active listening skills, and a deep curiosity. Curiosity is really important because you'll never be the master of every role in editorial, but you need as much information as you can get to understand a lot of them, to spot the opportunities and the pain points. Ultimately, Audience Engagement is an editorial team, but we act as the bridge out into marketing/commercial/product a lot of the time. So I’m looking for people who have a natural curiosity to go and learn.
"Curiosity is really important because you'll never be the master of every role in editorial, but you need as much information as you can get to understand a lot of them, to spot the opportunities and the pain points... I'm looking for people who have a natural curiosity to go and learn"
You’ve talked a lot about distilling data into insights, and owning the data narrative. How do you do that at the FT, and what key metrics do you look at?
We have what we call at the FT, the Metrics that Matter framework. This was a year-long project to really distil the key metrics for each department which all lead to our 4 key pillars: Acquisition, Retention, ARPU, Product Health/Cost to Serve. So all departments from editorial, B2C, B2B to Ads or Product, will all have a set of metrics that are available for everyone in the organisation to look at that match up to the pillars.
I think, if you look at any metric in isolation, you'll get into trouble. So it is always key to, whenever possible, pair value with volume. Let’s take homepage click through rate (CTR) for example which we we’re debating earlier. What's the value or the health check metric that can go with that? You don't just want to be in isolation looking at homepage CTR because you could do something absolutely ridiculous with the homepage, like kill views to the homepage and then your click through rate may go up. But that’s not a success story – just a few loyal readers hanging in there. Similarly, you don’t want to only focus on value because then you might kill important reach considerations. It doesn't mean everything has to be 50/50, but you overall need to find that balance to move yourself forward.
The big ticket metric we’re looking at, which is our new North Star, is GPA or Global Paying Audience. For editorial, our big metrics are number of digital subscribers (B2B and B2C volumes) over time; number of engaged users (using the RFV metric) over time. Importantly, we tend to not look at this at an article by article level (although we can), but more at a topic, genre or format level to really guide our thinking and planning.
We also of course still have Quality Reads (read more here), which was a metric we really launched at the beginning of our journey to try and capture the value aspect of content for our journalists in one metric. It has really helped us and pushed the understanding of engagement within the newsroom, and ultimately it has been a really helpful tool for cultural change. However, Quality Reads, which isn’t a super complex metric behind the scenes, is just complicated enough that I still find myself having to define it to teams years after it launched. So, one thing we’re looking at this year is to improve this metric and go into a phase of 2. What’s the next step of Quality Reads? How can we give our reporters a snapshot of whether the story is genuinely engaging our readers in an even more meaningful way?
Before moving on to asking you about your new role as Head of Editorial Product, would love to hear any of your key successes of the past 4 years as Head of Audience Engagement?
Always good to look back, let me have a think.
To be honest the thing I am most proud of is that in the last few years, the visibility and the understanding of my team has increased in a positive way. It’s really hard starting a brand new team - a brand new concept - in a legacy newsroom. I think we've really increased trust in our team, to a point that senior editors actively listen - it doesn't mean that we get to dictate, that’s not how it works at all - but when we say something it's considered and informs decisions. And when, for the most part, strategic decisions are being made, we've got the data in there, and we're trusted to go find that information and help feed into the conversation. So I would say it's the buy-in of Audience Engagement, that's the thing I'm most proud of.
With my management hat on, I love watching a group of really different specialists coming together as one unit, all with one goal: all this amazing journalism at the FT that is produced every day is genuinely read and engaged with. And that is indeed happening through a lot of different initiatives, and we see some success already: the number of engaged FT subscribers is up year-on-year, and I am proud we’ve played our part in that.
Overall, and again I think we play a part in this but are not solely responsible for this, the FT being a data-informed company, where we really put the readers first, and do what I talked about before, combine value with volume without resorting to cheap tricks.
There are so many other things I could mention: Search traffic is up massively, FT Instagram is way up, we’ve smashed our engaged women readers targets ahead of schedule, and so on.
"...we really put the readers first, and do what I talked about before, combine value with volume without resorting to cheap tricks"
Let’s finally move on to talk about your new role, Editorial Product Director. In your Linkedin post you described this as “taking Audience Engagement to the next level”. Can you tell us a bit about what this will look like?
There’s always a question when you’re Head of Audience Engagement around what you do next, as you shouldn’t be in this role forever if you want to allow fresh ideas to come to the surface. My interest really peaked last year around the consumer-facing product strategy, audience engagement with the FT beyond or around the content, and I’ve been lucky to be supported by senior leadership to dig deeply into this space. It’s very much about helping editorial to prioritise our product and tech needs, informed by audience data, and clearly (and regularly) communicating that to our Product & Tech colleagues – and vice versa. It’s about increasing the understanding on both sides… again, I’m back to being a translator and diplomat, but in a new environment.
Looking at my career, Head of Audience Engagement was the first role that already existed before I took it on – everything else has been a newly created role. It’s exciting to be back in a slightly-unknown space. And to be given the chance to corral all the expertise, all the wants and needs of the newsroom into a cohesive view to inform our product strategies – and that we steadily deliver new, improved and enhanced experiences for our audiences.
On a practical level, the intention is that over time, feels like too big a word to say, but it's to become the “linchpin” in the newsroom when it comes to how editorial plans its product strategy, communicates its strategy, works with the different leads so we’re prioritising where we need to. It’s also about being the point person through the product life cycle, from the research & development, to delivery, and being the primary point of contact for product managers at the FT. I can’t get stuck into everything, but I can help to make sure the right editorial experts are involved and contributing at the most useful moments.
A lot of the role’s focus will be on improving collaboration and creating common language/terminology - it's especially important given where the FT currently finds itself in its digital journey. I think it's a really important moment to be looking to the future, to propel more of our thinking into new products whether that’s by Q4 2024 or Q1 2026. Much of my role before was about looking backwards and distilling learning. We have really become much more experienced in doing that, and we will continue to do that - but this role is more positioned to the future. If you want a news analogy, it’s like moving from a beat reporter into the investigations team.
To close off, what are some trends you’re looking for in 2024?
With an Audience hat on, I think looking back at the last 10 years, we kind of always knew we had to rapidly pivot given how quickly new social platforms were emerging or how meaningfully they were changing. It almost became a running joke how much pivoting there was on a month-by-month basis - it was a really fun space to work in, because you were always breaking new ground. It then became quite steady for a period, where our focus was really on these platforms and adapting to changes they would make.
Yet, over the last 12-24 months, the pace of change suddenly has come back again. AI obviously is a whole new ballpark but that's the exciting bit. It will create a lot of new challenges and opportunities in Search and how people find news, but in terms of our internal workflows, I am excited to see where AI can help us unlock new work and scale existing work.
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