The Project

About me

I am Head of Digital at A-lehdet, a family-owned business founded in 1933 with its roots in magazine publishing. I lead the product team that builds and develops eight websites and apps for our audiences. Most of our content is in Finnish, but in early 2025 we launched our first English-language site, Kotona Living, focused on Nordic sustainable lifestyle.

My background is in design and technology. I started building websites in the 1990s at age 14, during an era when there was no clear distinction between designers and developers. I earned my bachelor's degree in engineering and my master's in graphic design a decade ago, when UI/UX was first being introduced to design schools in Finland.

Being an engineer-designer must have something to do with the perspective I see the world. Whenever there is a problem or an interesting concept, the engineer in me wants to dismantle it to understand why it is as it is, where it has come from or how it has been made. After the subject is in pieces, the designer in me tries to shape it into something that anyone seeking the same knowledge can understand.

Most of my working life has been in journalism. After spending a couple of years as a designer for Bonnier Publications, I pivoted to digital products and have been building them since 2012, with some years spent in consulting and SaaS products. Human-centric design frameworks and data-oriented decision making have been core to my toolkit for over a decade. Through these lenses, I have built teams and products for numerous media outlets.

Motivation

Even though audience engagement—as this project defines it—has always been part of my job, the focus on audience engagement has been fragmented. I built my first KPIs and newsroom dashboards a decade ago to help myself and the editorial staff understand the paradigm shift of digitalization and platformization. Throughout my career, I have been part of building successful growth stories based on organic search and engaging social media. As the years have gone by, elements of engagement have been part of what I or my colleagues have been doing, but not the core focus.

It was during the first classes in J+ school that I learned there are audience teams filled with specialized audience roles. All of it came across as perfectly logical. We were kind of doing the same things they were and claiming to work audience-centrically, but not in as structured a way and with far smaller resources. As a Finn, I couldn't help but think about how engineering-driven Nokia lost its market dominance to Apple and Samsung. I see the core reason as the way companies listened to their audiences.

As a product guy, I love frameworks. I had heard about User needs for news a couple of years ago, but had not fully applied it. While I was doing it for the first time in our newsroom, the inspiration to this capstone project came from a simple but provocative idea by Dmitry Shishkin, evangelist of the User Needs model. He argued in a webinar that human needs can be distilled into four core needs – fact-context-emotion-action—everything else is semantics. He repeated the argument in an article from The Audiencers a few months later.

That challenge in mind, I was thinking if the same could be done to audience engagement. What are the unifying elements of audience engagement across this diverse industry regardless of the shape and size of the newsroom? What are the core principles you should be able to define to succesfully lead audience developnent? And can we articulate a shared vocabulary and toolkit that bridges theory and practice, hopefully learning some best practices from the top of the industry?

Audience centricity has become a core principle in many modern newsrooms. From strategic initiatives to operational roles, the focus on serving audiences is not a fringe—it’s the foundation. Yet despite the progress, a common standard for what “audience engagement” actually means remained fuzzy. Definitions, expectations, and organizational models vary widely, even as the concept is universally acknowledged as important.

All of us are building on what others started before us. During my research I came across with public sources like Guide to audience revenue and engagement and Membership Puzzle Project. Both of them are excellent resources for anyone building their audience development strategies. As our ever-changing industry of journalism is in it’s current turmoil with channel turbulence and behavioural and production changes led by AI, my goal was to understand what are the best of the class—mostly the ones that have succesfully adapted from the legacy business to the digital ecosystem—doing in 2025 that we others could learn.

My aim is to surface the foundational elements of audience engagement and offer practical tools that enable teams to define, improve, and champion engagement in their day-to-day work.

Who is this for?

This project speaks to audience‑focused professionals at small and mid‑sized publishers who are ready to move beyond broadcasting for scale and instead build purposeful, engaged communities that sustain their mission—through subscriptions, nonprofit funding, or other revenue models. They want perspective on how audience engagement has evolved, guidance on navigating today’s platform ecosystem, and practical tools to kick‑start or level up their work, sometimes lacking dedicated staff, mature workflows, or a shared engagement vocabulary.

Core audiences

1. Editors, product leads and marketing heads seeking frameworks that align limited people and budget behind clear audience goals.

2. Audience editors who need templates, checklists and metrics they can deploy quickly.

3. Legacy brands reaching new audiences, looking for approaches tuned to today’s habits, values and media behaviours.

4. Anyone keen to build sustainable audience relationships, from early‑stage founders to newsroom trainers.

This is for anyone who wants to…

• grab practical templates, checklists, metrics and resources to launch engagement work quickly

• align editorial, product and marketing resources behind shared audience goals

• borrow big‑player playbooks to attract, convert and retain readers on today’s platforms

• create a shared vocabulary and success metrics understood by the whole organisation

• craft purposeful reach plans that meet audiences where they are—and know when to step back from channels that no longer deliver

• gain perspective on how audience engagement has evolved to anticipate what’s next

Methodology

To explore these questions, I conducted in-depth interviews with 10 professionals working on audience strategies in leading newsrooms across the United States, Denmark, and Finland. Each interview followed a semi-structured questionnaire to ensure consistency while allowing for open-ended discussion.

The interviews explored how organizations define “audience” and “engagement,” how responsibilities are structured, what KPIs they prioritize, and how platform strategies are formed and evaluated. The interviewees represent a diverse range of newsroom sizes and operational models, allowing for a wide-angle view of how engagement manifests in different media cultures.

The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using qualitative methods. AI-assisted tools (Co-pilot & GoodTape) supported transcription, thematic analysis, and the organization of key insights throughout the research process.

Interviews

The purpose of the interviews was to map out how different organizations define, prioritize, and operationalize audience engagement. They explored questions around structure, success metrics, evolving trends, and the role of editorial and non-editorial teams in shaping engagement.

Interviewees

• Craddick Mariah, Executive Director of Product at The Atlantic

• Dubenko Anna, Newsroom Audience Director at The New York Times

• Hakaniemi Kirsi, Chief Digital Officer at Keskisuomalainen

• Hannukka Sami, Sales and Marketing Director at Keskisuomalainen

• Hansen Sofie Flagstad, Membership Manager at Zetland 

• Hicks Jennifer, Director of Audience Development at The Wall Street Journal

• Maghielse Ross, Deputy Managing Editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer

• Smith Alexandra, Chief Strategy Officer at The 19th*

• Vilkman Anu, Executive Editor at Yle-app & yle.fi

The questionnaire

1. Who owns the main responsibility of audience engagement in your organisation? Who do they report to?

2. What kind of roles are there around audience engagement in your organisation? Is there a centralised or decentralised structure?

3. How do you define “audience”? Eg. Do you have segments, target audiences or other ways to speak about your audience?

4. How do you define “engagement”? Is there a funnel, segmentation, or some other way to distinguish the levels of engagement?

5. How do you measure success in audience engagement? What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you prioritise, and how do they align with broader organisational goals?

6. Can you describe your channel strategy in 2025? How do you manage it and which channels are the most important for you? How do you differentiate between channels that drive traffic to your site and those that primarily build brand engagement? How do you measure success on platforms that don’t generate direct traffic?

7. Where will you put your audience engagement effort in the coming year? Are there any emerging trends or technologies you're particularly excited about?

8. What did I miss? If you were in my shoes building up audience engagement capabilities, what would you ask?

9. What are your favourite resources on audience & engagement? Who should I follow or interview?

Data Collection and Analysis

Interviews typically lasted about an hour and were conducted both in person and remotely. All were recorded and transcribed with participant consent. AI tools assisted in quote extraction, source review, and follow-up analysis. Each participant brought unique perspectives based on their role, organization size, and strategic goals, which added depth and nuance to the findings.

Results and Findings

The final output is both conceptual and practical. On one hand, the project outlines a framework of four core elements of audience engagement:

1. Audience – Who are we doing this for? And why should they care?

2. Engagement – What does meaningful interaction look like?

3. Goals and Metrics – How do we define and measure success?

4. Utilization – What roles, tools, and strategies support sustainable engagement?

These elements are described in detail in the accompanying Elements of Audience Engagement framework, which is designed to be modular and adaptable for newsrooms of different sizes and capabilities.

To make the insights and tools accessible to those who may not have the time or energy to read a full report, I built a dedicated website: www.audienceengagementforjournalism.com. The site presents the framework in an interactive, user-centered way, making it easier to navigate, explore, and apply.

In working through this research, I found that retracing the story of how we got here. The rise of audience roles, the shifts in platform influence, and the tools we built in response. For me, was essential to understanding where we stand now.

Role of AI in the Project

AI tools played a supporting role throughout the research process. They were used to:

• Transcription of all interviews. The transcripts required quite a bit of editing, as the AI still made some mistakes.

• Quote extraction and thematic mapping. "Engaging in a ‘dialogue’ with the interviews was helpful. Because the interviews took place over an extended period, it was valuable to access the content thematically without needing to recall everything from memory."

• Source discovery and comparison.

• Content editing for grammar and clarity, particularly valuable as English is not my first language.

AI functioned as a tool and a memory. Speeding up manual work, surfacing new sources and enabling deeper thinking. This is particularly valuable in a long-form, multi-stage research project such as this.

What's Next?

This is version 1.0 of the project. My hope is that it grows through feedback, collaboration, and continued exploration. I don’t yet know what happens next, but I do know that the field of audience engagement continues to evolve, and so must this work. I invite others in the community to explore, critique, and build on this foundation.

If this toolkit helps even one newsroom better serve its audience, the project has already been worthwhile.

Credits

Huge thanks you Mary Nahorniak for being an incredible coach and encouraging me to trust the process (or maybe just to trust myself). The Californian sun helped me untangle a few challenges during the darkest part of the Nordic winter.

Thank you, my capstone buddy Gabriel Boylan! Your insight and expertise in audience development are phenomenal. Your perspective truly elevated this project.

Thanks to everyone I got to interview during the process, including Mariah Craddick, Anna Dubenko, Kirsi Hakaniemi, Sami Hannukka, Sofie Flagstad Hansen, Jennifer Hicks, Ross Maghielse, Alexandra Smith, and Anu Vilkman. If there were more people like you, no one would be talking about journalism being in crisis.

Thank you, Niketa Patel, for your big purple heart and for connecting me with the top talents in the industry. Your support made all the difference.

Thank you Anita Zielina, Kyle Plantz & Emma Myint for your support in every step on the way.

Thank you Helsingin Sanomain Säätiö and A-lehdet for making this possible.

Thank you, family ❤️