Greetings from Finland!

This is the second part of a newsletter series that will be published throughout the Carl project. The newspaper Karjalainen is one of the participants.

We are from Finland and proudly the northernmost participants in the project.

Karjalainen is a regional newspaper. Our paper is published six days a week in print and seven days a week as an e-paper. For several years now, our newsroom has operated with a digital-first approach.

Currently, we are focused on gaining more digital-only subscribers. We want our content to especially attract the interest of people under 45 years old.

What Works for Us

According to our metrics, our subscribers are active visitors to our website. Our owner, the media group Keskisuomalainen, has set us goals based on population and subscriber demographics regarding how we should reach our subscribers online. Karjalainen easily meets these goals every day. We measure the number of different subscribers and the time they spend on our site daily.

We are also able to conduct detailed analysis of what our subscribers read. For example, we compare the articles read by those under 45 and those over 45 every day and can identify differences between these groups, allowing us to target our efforts even more towards the under-45s. Examining the reading habits of those under 45 is especially important, as they make up a very small portion of our subscribers. If we only track the most-read articles, we are essentially following the reading habits of people over 65, as they are by far the largest group among our subscribers.

In any case, based on our analytics, we can claim to know our subscribers quite well.

Weakness

Karjalainen has a strong brand in our region. However, acquiring new subscribers under 45 is very slow, even though we have worked hard to make our content more youthful in recent years. The number of young subscribers has increased and the trend is positive, but we wish the pace was much faster.

It would help us if we could use data to learn more about the reading habits of website visitors under 45: what they read, what they would like to read, and how. Currently, we only get detailed data on reading habits from our subscribers, among whom there are still few under 45s. Therefore, making summaries is risky, as the group being analyzed is currently small.

Sometimes reaching young subscribers feels like fighting windmills: some young people consciously want to avoid all news because it causes them anxiety. It is difficult to sell a digital subscription costing nearly 20 euros a month to such a person.

What We Accomplished in CARL and Next Steps

Since the last newsletter was published, all participants of project CARL continued with their educational sessions, which have started in person at the beginning of the project. In one-on-one meetings, we discussed the state of online media and how to fight the crisis, media houses and social media outreach from a data perspective, autotagging, AI content generation and recommendation systems. In addition to these CVC led sessions, we also had the opportunity share our perspectives on the data-based approach in a series of knowledge sharing sessions, where we approached topics as: “How to build an editorial strategy without enough data”, ”Audience activity segmentation”, ”Creating and using dashboards for effective data analysis and reporting”, ”How to build, iterate and surface meaningful metrics for a newsroom” and ”How can we encourage digital journalists with a print-era background to work with data, and what can we gain from it?“

Our partner Tulodz has finished the Digital Whitepaper on Data Analytics for Media, which you can read on the project website as well. The Whitepaper is a foundational resource, offering insights into the transformative potential of data analytics within media practices. It aims to bridge theoretical concepts with practical applications, providing a framework for media professionals across Europe to harness the latest in data analytics, content creation, and distribution strategies.

The second leaflet by our friends at Louie Media is also live on the project website. It offers practical insights into how they target Gen Z audiences through podcasts — a growing and powerful medium for younger demographics.

The A/B testing results of the virtual CARL Assistant, conducted by CVC, have been published as well. These findings highlight how conversational technology can support newsroom workflows and audience engagement.

Together, these resources form the next building blocks in our shared journey to make data-driven journalism future-ready.