News publishers are innovating to find new ways to engage their audiences. From digital distribution and subscriptions to real-time analytics and AI, to giving readers a voice, they are using technology to reimagine news — with a focus on growing revenues and quality journalism. Their insights might inspire your own next big idea in the news.

When a new investor purchased the largest Slovak newspaper in 2014, 40 journalists left the publisher and banded together to launch their own newspaper and website. “The question we were trying to answer was, ‘How can we sustain quality journalism independently?’” says Tomáš Bella, formerly of SME and now co-founder and chief digital officer of Denník N.

To answer that question, the cohort of journalists launched Denník N in 2014 as an impartial voice in Slovakia’s news landscape. But with little funding available, they would need to rely almost entirely on reader revenue to keep up their commitment to independent journalism.

“When we were starting, the world was still mostly living in the page views and advertisement era,” Bella explains. “But, when you care about page views, that leads to clickbait… we want to look at subscription sales because it fits better with journalistic values and forces us to provide something of value to readers.” However, the reader engagement and monetization tools on the market simply weren’t geared toward subscription sales — so Denník N would have to build their own.

Denník N began using a CRM system on an ad hoc basis to handle subscriptions, but a grant from Google News Initiative in 2016 allowed them to think bigger. They quickly expanded their development team and built the open-source Readers’ Engagement and Monetization Platform (REMP). Unlike standard tools, REMP acts as a comprehensive customer digital experience platform. It integrates a robust CRM — storing user data, subscriptions, and payments — with a powerful analytics module that tracks real-time on-site behavior. By combining these datasets, the platform enables precise audience segmentation, automated campaigns, and personalized newsletters. This holistic approach delivers enterprise-level personalization that builds deep, long-term relationships with readers. “We were able to replace a lot of the external tools and develop what we needed for the subscription model to work,” Bella says.

Denník N made REMP open source not only to help attract top developers but also to create a solution that would benefit other publishers and, ultimately, advance quality journalism. “For many years, publishers were very good in journalism and very bad in technology,” Bella says. “We see REMP as a way publishers can pool their resources so that we can compete on the quality of our journalism without everyone having to develop their own marketing automation.”

Through speaking engagements and word of mouth, REMP quickly garnered attention among publishers with the help of Google News Initiative (GNI). “We knew what we wanted to create, and Google helped us spread the word,” Bella says. “That combination worked very well for us.”

To help other publishers implement REMP, Denník N enlisted their technology partner, FatChilli, in 2018. Today, FatChilli has helped more than 20 publishers across Europe, Africa, and Asia implement REMP, and dozens of other publishers have implemented the platform on their own — from 10-person outlets to major news corporations. Most recently, Ukraine’s leading independent newsroom, Ukrainska Pravda, adopted REMP with the support of GNI to launch their new paywall and secure a sustainable, reader-funded future. “Everything we earned, we invested back in the tool, and the mission is to make it as accessible as possible,” says Matej Borko, co-founder of FatChilli. Since REMP is open source, the platform is four to 10 times less expensive to implement than other solutions and has earned publishers worldwide more than €40 million in direct support.

As for Denník N, they have grown to become the largest newsroom in Slovakia with 75,000 subscribers and additional outlets in the Czech Republic and Hungary. And, just as they set out to do, 70 percent of their revenue comes from subscriptions, which Bella credits entirely to REMP. “It's absolutely, by far, the most important revenue for us,” he says. “That’s why we keep improving REMP. That’s why I keep developing it to support the business models of independent news outlets.”