How the Detroit Free Press is using personas to better gauge readers’ interests

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Consider your readers not just as political junkies or sports nuts, but as multi-dimensional people who love politics and are enamored with baseball (or both). When you do that, you can open readers to a wide range of different coverage they didn’t know you had.

Q: What problem were you trying to solve, and why was solving the problem strategically important for your organization?  

A:  Reader retention. How do we, in the newsroom, positively affect retention? How do we keep more of the people who would otherwise end their subscription? This is important because the Free Press, which implemented a subscription model in August 2020, has been successful in acquiring new subscribers. We wanted to learn more about keeping those subscribers and thinking of ways (other than good journalism) we can use to encourage them to stick around. Growing our number of subscribers and building a strong relationship with them (i.e. retaining them as paying subscribers) is key to our company’s financial outlook. 

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