160-year-old Daily Newspaper Pushes the Boundaries on Storytelling

How you read the news says a lot about you, and the type of sto­ries you’re like­ly to keep see­ing online. Next time you scroll through a news site, notice what grabs your atten­tion and what you nat­u­ral­ly skip—your habits are shap­ing the way sto­ries are deliv­ered to you.

We see this hap­pen­ing in an advanced way at Tele­graph Media Group (TMG), which recent­ly tripled its online reg­is­tra­tion rates after spend­ing even more time get­ting to know its audience.

Hav­ing been around for 160 years, TMG is still thriv­ing with 100 mil­lion read­ers every month and is mov­ing toward its ambi­tious goal of 10 mil­lion active, reg­is­tered readers.

Its will­ing­ness to rein­vent itself in the dig­i­tal age is evi­dent in its pres­ence not just on web and mobile but also Insta­gram, Snapchat, and Twitter—where more and more peo­ple are going for news.

Build­ing trust with read­ers to dri­ve subscriptions

It’s a sol­id bet that read­ers who find rel­e­vant, inter­est­ing con­tent on TMG sites are more like­ly to sub­scribe. That’s why the com­pa­ny is re-imag­in­ing its approach to sub­scrip­tions. Instead of imme­di­ate­ly putting a pay­wall in front of its con­tent, the pub­li­ca­tion allows read­ers to access many arti­cles sim­ply by reg­is­ter­ing. That way, TMG earns the atten­tion of its readers—rather than demand­ing it—and then encour­ages a sub­scrip­tion with care­ful­ly con­sid­ered, per­son­al­ized offers.

Whether they reg­is­ter or sub­scribe, TMG uses Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud to learn about its readers—what excites them, what they don’t like, which ads they respond to, and a whole lot more. Those insights allow them to deliv­er con­tent in ways that keep peo­ple reading.

Empow­er­ing jour­nal­ists to move fast with break­ing news

The mechan­ics of pub­lish­ing are just as impor­tant as the read­er expe­ri­ence in keep­ing TMG cred­i­ble and rel­e­vant as a news source. Time-to-pub­lish is cru­cial to break­ing sto­ries first, and TMG is mov­ing faster than ever. In fact, 350 jour­nal­ists world­wide are empow­ered to pub­lish their own arti­cles through TMG’s media plat­forms, amount­ing to 250 fresh sto­ries and 200 updat­ed sto­ries a day.

“News hap­pens fast, and by encour­ag­ing jour­nal­ists to take own­er­ship of their sto­ries and self-pub­lish, we can deliv­er more com­pelling con­tent to our read­ers as soon as it hap­pens,” says Chris Tay­lor, CIO at Tele­graph Media Group.

TMG is not just sur­viv­ing the dig­i­tal age, it’s thriving—and Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud pro­vides the tools and insights the com­pa­ny needs as it con­tin­ues to rein­vent itself and trans­form news deliv­ery and read­er experiences.

You can read the full sto­ry here and watch the video below