By Damian Radcliffe

Amid flurries of light snow and a constant stream of cyclists (all seemingly undeterred by near-zero temperatures) late last year, I was fortunate enough to join a WAN-IFRA Study Tour that offered a valuable peek under the hood of what successful digital transformation looks like.

Our hosts were three leading Danish media companies: JP/Politikens Hus, Berlingske, and Zetland. Each publisher is home to distinctive properties and revenue models, but what they all have in common is an approach to the news business that has moved beyond survival mode to embrace reinvention, reinvigoration, and continued relevance.

At the heart of this are recurring themes such as listening to your audiences, empowering teams to experiment, and deploying technological innovations with a clear purpose.

Here are five key takeaways, offering actionable insights for newsrooms and publishers everywhere.

1. Process over platforms: Why collaboration unlocks transformation

Across all three organisations, new ways of working was a consistent theme. In many cases, a primary factor wasn’t just new technology, but how teams work together.

At Politiken, the creation of an Innovation Desk brought together editors, producers, designers (including motion graphics), data journalists, and video journalists to collaborate from conception on stories with the potential for impact.

Their goal is to create “a digital product that starts in a digital way, not some sprinkles on top of an ordinary article,” said Johannes Skov Andersen, Head of Editorial Innovation.

This approach represented a major shift. Before this, “people were working with themselves, no one worked together with someone on a story from the beginning,” he recalled.

Similarly, Berlingske’s Nina Brorson and Lars K. Jensen shared how important it is to integrate change throughout an organisation. Without this, “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” they said.

To support these efforts, their audience team sits in the newsroom to break down silos, and Jensen produces a weekly internal insights newsletter which is distributed to a number of editors and journalists to keep user needs front of mind.

In doing this, Brorson and Jensen are demonstrating that “audience people are an integral part of what journalism is and should be.” That means not just helping editorial teams produce stories that drive conversions, but also stories that help with retention.

At the same time, they’re endeavouring to build an approach that works specifically for Berlingske.

“If copying things from other media publishers, be aware you may also be copying the way they do journalism, and their culture,” Brorson cautioned, reminding us there is no cookie-cutter model for transformation efforts.

Image via Lars K. Jensen writing for The Audiencers

Zetland demonstrated how publishers can collaborate with their audiences to grow reach, sharing the success of their yearly Ambassador campaign, a crowdfunding-like initiative which asks existing users to encourage others to sign up.

In return, Ambassadors get a tote bag and stickers. Using a unique referral code, they can also see how many people they successfully referred. And when friends come on board, they choose how much they’re willing to pay for the first two months, making the barrier to sign-up suitably low.

Video: Zetland’s Ambassador campaign in action

Collaboration comes in many forms. These examples demonstrate that successful efforts can stem from blending skillsets and teams internally, as well as encouraging your consumers to become your best advocates with new, or hesitant, subscribers.

2. Strategic constraint: How limits can drive focus and engagement

In a world of finite resources, understanding where newsrooms should focus their efforts is paramount. Sometimes, less really is more.

Now entering its 10th year, Zetland publishes just 21 stories every week: two feature stories daily, a 7:00AM morning brief, and a 3:30PM deep dive into the biggest story of the day. At the weekend, they produce just one story.

That’s intentionally a limited range of content.

“Our product has a finishable feature to it,” Lea Korsgaard, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, told us. “You can finish it, consume it all.” And some audiences do.

Korsgaard estimates it takes about 40 hours a month to consume all of the content that Zetland produces, with the average user consuming seven hours of this material each month.

It made me wonder if this figure would be so high if there was more content to consume, or whether it meant audiences risk feeling overwhelmed? The finite nature of this content is, arguably, a big part of its appeal.

All content is available in both text and audio, with the audio version narrated by the journalist responsible for the story. These audio versions have long been part of Zetland’s secret sauce. “Eighty percent of usage goes through the ears,” Korsgaard said.

In a similar vein, Berlingske’s user needs efforts have primarily focused on the best-performing news topics. They intentionally keep the focus of their efforts tight, by homing in on stories related to health, relationships, family life, and psychology.

Alongside supporting these verticals, the team also helps their colleagues understand why some articles fail to generate paywall sales, as well as how to grow subscriber attention time.

Sometimes, a tweak and reframing is all that’s needed to achieve these goals. As the team explained, one way to do this is to make clear what you can get out of the article, and include that front and center in the title of the story.

A different constraint being tackled by the team at JP/Politikens Hus concerns getting their physical product to remote audiences. As of this month, mail is no longer delivered everywhere in Denmark, so the team has focused on ensuring that “we have a last-mile network making sure we get to everyone.”

These examples demonstrate how constraints in distribution, user time, and finite newsroom resources can all be used to shape your content and approach, and the potential success that this might unlock.

3. Building trust through transparency and quality

It’s well known that globally journalism has a trust problem, although this is less acute in many Nordic countries. Some of the tactics deployed by Danish publishers may offer insights into potential remedies for this wider ailment.

For many media organisations, audience trust is intrinsically linked to financial success.

As the team at JP/Politikens Hus put it, “the main reasons that we are profitable … is because people trust us.” Traditional journalistic values such as high-quality, accurate, and objective reporting may be part of this, but other factors also come into play.

For JP/Politikens Hus, story mix is arguably a core pillar of audience trust. Consumers recognise that the teams will provide a mix of what readers want to read and what they need to read.

With 80% of their content behind a paywall, breaking news might be the gateway, but audiences will stick around if you offer them a reason to, often in the form of deeper, unique content.

As one executive memorably put it, “having a website is like running a café. People come for the coffee but stay for the Wi-Fi.”

Beyond trusting the quality of your journalism and the consumer experience, newsrooms can also actively solicit feedback from their audiences and use these insights to shape and grow their business.

Zetland shared that traditional marketing methods hadn’t shifted the needle in terms of audience growth. The breakthrough came when they told people about their business and financial model, and explained the need to grow and establish a firmer financial footing.

As Lea Korsgaard recalled, “we really engaged people in our business,” and it was this openness that inspired audiences to become champions for the brand and its reporting.

Similarly, the team at JP/Politikens Hus outlined how a recent survey of subscribers – where feedback was solicited directly on their website – yielded valuable insights which can shape editorial content and products. This matters, they explained, because “if we aren’t continuously improving our product… our price just vanishes for us.”

Zetland has taken this a step further, engaging in a series of annual one-hour debriefs with users about their product. “It’s like an x-ray of what works and what doesn’t work,” Korsgaard said.

And from a trust standpoint, in an era of clickbait and AI slop, it’s important that your content follows through on its promise.

For the team at Berlingske, that means offering a clear subtitle “with something actionable… how to use this in your own life,” and ensuring that audiences can “make a connection” to the characters in your story. As part of this approach, they advocate having the user in mind when editing stories, not just when commissioning them.

Trust, as these examples show, isn’t built on editorial quality alone. It can also involve transparency about your business model, consistent delivery on your promises, and active engagement with audience feedback. Actively embracing these elements may lie at the heart of improving and preserving trust, at a time when this is often under threat.

4. Intimacy at scale: Making journalism personal and participatory

The human-centric nature of the stories supported by Berlingske’s audience team helps ensure that content is relatable, so it’s clear “why people should listen to this man or woman and … what people are actually getting out of this article.”

Relatability and intimacy can be further built by leaning more into mediums such as audio, as well as getting journalists on camera, going beyond the byline and making them more accessible.

Zetland has always leaned heavily into audio, a medium which makes their content more personable, a feature which also runs through all of their journalism.

“We don’t subscribe to the notion of the toneless journalist,” Lea Korsgaard told us, a belief found in the style of written reporting, as well as being able to hear journalists telling their own story in audio form.

Alongside being personable, a style which appeals to younger audiences (50% of their paying members are in their 20s and 30s), they also seek to tap into their audience for ideas. That participatory role, whereby “you can do something, interact” in the form of sharing ideas, helping journalists track down documents in investigative cases, and more, also helps build intimate relationships between an otherwise faceless newsroom and individual audience members.

JP/Politikens Hus is also leaning more into audio for many of the same reasons, with about five to six stories a day from Politiken shared in that form, of the 60-70 they produce each day. As their Digital Director Troels Behrendt Jørgensen explained, this format often lends itself well to human interest and features, “the kind of journalism where you can sense the journalism.”

Alongside columnists and journalists, they’ve also got people who’ve written to the editor to come into the audio booth in their offices, to read aloud their contribution.

This emphasis on intimacy reflects three key trends where Zetland believes the “news industry is lagging behind”: participatory (you can do something, interact), personable (building relationships with real people, not institutions), and personalised experiences and products.

These principles are helping drive growth not just in their home market, but in expansion efforts such as Finland, where they now have 30,000 paying subscribers.

As Korsgaard put it, “Our mission doesn’t end with giving people information, it’s giving people information so that they can do something with that information.”

Collectively, the lesson is clear: intimacy can be scaled when journalism moves beyond the byline to create genuine connections. Voice, editorial participation, and content that treats audiences as collaborators, not just consumers, all offer a potential pathway to do this.

5. Why transformation requires patience and purpose

What unites all three publishers is the intentionality behind the experimentation and changes they’re implementing.

Alongside trying new things, the team at Berlingske reminded us of Steve Jobs’ dictum that “focusing is about saying no.”

And where you are saying “yes,” you need to have a clear goal.

“We must drive a paradigm shift,” said Kasper Lindskow, Head of AI, JP/Politikens Media Group, reflecting on the work he leads with a central AI unit of 17 people.

Part of the reason for this ambition is the very nature of AI itself, given its potential to impact every part of the value chain. This is different, Lindskow reminds us, from other digital technologies which tended to have a major impact on one area of the business. (Lindskow highlighted social media and its role in content distribution as an example of this.)

Unlocking the full potential of AI will take time, not just from a technological standpoint, but also from the perspective of culture change within an organisation.

Subsequently, the team is balancing short-term work (augmenting existing products, improving workflow, etc.) as well as scaling tools across the group designed to support areas such as personalisation, the targeting of commercial messages, and “help[ing] stories find the right readers.”

In doing this, digital change and implementation is often incremental, meaning its impact may not be massive year on year, but over a period of time it’s huge, Lindskow reminds us.

As these examples demonstrate, the future of journalism isn’t necessarily about doing more with less, but about doing the right things, really well, with a deep understanding of why they matter and who they serve.

When this is paired with patient organisational change, a clear editorial purpose and the discipline to focus on what matters, that’s when – and where – publishers have the potential to really flourish.

 Note: Some presentations, comments, and data shared during the study tour sessions were confidential and have not been included in this article.

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About the author: Damian Radcliffe is the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism, a Professor of Practice, and an affiliate of the Department for Middle East and North Africa Studies (MENA), at the University of Oregon. He is also a Fellow of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.