During the DRL Korea programme, Kyunghyang Shinmun launched an experiment to better understand how its content aligned with actual reader needs, a crucial step toward improving engagement and setting the foundation for future membership growth.
Historically, decisions around what to publish and how often were largely driven by editorial instinct, without clearly defined audience segments or data-driven frameworks. Although Kyunghyang had never conducted a large-scale reader survey or user research, the DRL programme offered an opportunity to begin closing the gap between newsroom output and audience expectations.
As part of the experiment, the team defined five distinct reader need categories tailored to Kyunghyang Shinmun’s audience, drawing inspiration from the User Needs model for news (see FT Strategies’ explanation here). Over the course of a week, articles were tagged according to these needs and analysed against key engagement metrics such as average page views, time spent, and quality reads. The results revealed a clear disconnect between the volume of articles produced and the types of content readers found most engaging.
Notably, content aligned with the "Update Me", "Entertain Me", and "Connect Me" needs showed high engagement but were underrepresented in the editorial mix. Meanwhile, articles intended to "Inspire" or "Offer Perspective" tended to suffer from readability and length issues that negatively impacted performance.
These insights were shared with the newsroom, sparking important conversations around content strategy, article balance, and the role of data in editorial decision-making. The findings also informed a broader organisational shift: Kyunghyang introduced a new Radar Desk responsible for identifying high-performing content and feeding real-time performance metrics to editors, as well as a Content Lab Editor role to oversee experimentation.
Though these changes are still in their early stages, they represent a major step toward a more reader-informed newsroom. A homepage refresh and further UX improvements are planned, and in April this year, an initial UI update was launched, aimed at addressing readability issues identified during the programme. The layout of ads and content within article pages was optimised, with the goal of improving conversion rates through better content placement. Event tagging was applied to all elements to enable precise performance tracking.
Following the update, the changes received positive feedback both internally and externally for improving readability. The team is now able to quantitatively measure changes in conversion rates for specific areas using the event tagging data.
The newly established Engagement Team continues to uncover insights that are helping to reshape how content is created and evaluated. In parallel, company-wide leadership training has been introduced to build a shared understanding of key engagement metrics. Regular briefings with newsroom leaders have also been launched to align on content strategy and share data-driven insights. To strengthen connections with readers, Kyunghyang has also initiated updates to its newsletter strategy and begun organising offline meetups.
This experiment highlighted the value of reader needs analysis not just as a diagnostic tool, but as a catalyst for newsroom collaboration and strategic transformation - reinforcing the importance of engagement as the foundation for long-term reader revenue success.
