Early in 2022, the Conversation created a small, multidisciplinary team of editors and audience development staff to target younger professionals based throughout the UK.
As part of this work, we started a series called Quarter Life. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of your mental health to the excitement of starting a family, this series explores many crucial questions and brings informed answers to people navigating this period of their lives. You may have read our articles on quiet quitting, renters’ rights, and what is normal baby sleep?
Quarter Life has exceeded our expectations. Articles in the series have gathered consistently higher pageviews (+29%) and seen higher engagement from their readers.
We have also been able to secure multiple republishing partners for the series, including Fast Company, a monthly US business magazine published in print and online, and Público, a daily national newspaper in Portugal which will enable its audience to listen to the articles in Portuguese. Talking of audio, we’re bringing in our audio partners Noa to record articles from the series too.
Quarter Life shows the tremendous impact that focusing on understanding and addressing the needs, interests and problems of a target audience through audience-informed commissioning can have. On the back of these results, the UK newsroom will define more target audiences to work on.
This work has been part of the Table Stakes programme. In partnership with WAN-IFRA, it’s a 12-month initiative to support news organisations in building new skills and capabilities to bring their newsrooms closer to their audiences. Table Stakes is funded by the Google News Initiative.