Automation, print to digital strategies and news app rankings: 5 must read news stories

This week’s Twipe Weekly Publishing News Digest takes a look at stories from across the world of publishing and news tech, touching on topics like article automation, print to digital strategies, news app rankings in the UK and more. Read our top 5 stories of the week below.

1. What types of local news stories should be automated? The Toronto Star is figuring it out

Automating news stories is becoming commonplace across the publishing industry. The move is far cry from the world of robot journalism many newsrooms feared would come and steal their jobs. Instead, these automated stories have freed up time and resources for journalists to dive deeper into the stories that really matter. Toronto Star have recently experimented with the technology to boost their crime reporting looking at break and enter reports across Toronto’s six districts. Nieman Lab‘s Hanaa’ Tameez caught up with them to see how it’s going.

Read the full story here.

2. News alone is no longer the driver of New York Times subscription growth

The New York Times grew by 180,000 in the third quarter of 2022, taking their overall subscriber numbers to 9.3 million. But what is most intriguing about NYT‘s growth is their ability to reclaim the utility that started to bleed away from journalism so many years ago. Poynter reported that much of the Times‘ recent growth has come from their “Bundle” subscription, the all access subscription including Games, Cooking, Audio and The Athletic. The bundle alone now has over 1 million subscribers.

Find out more from Rick Edmonds in Poynter.

3. Successful tactics for turning print readers into digital readers

Rising paper and print prices are accelerating publishers’ need for digital transformation. In this context, bridging print subscribers to new digital habits is more important than ever. Our weekly article took a look at tactics that have proven successful for publishers in this journey including changing subscription offerings, providing devices and training to subscribers and utilising new digital-only features to build new digital habits for print subscribers.

Check out our full insights here.

4. September’s Most popular news apps in the UK

Whilst Apple News remained the most popular news app in the UK in September, the aggregator app still lags behind in engagement time per user. With their focus on engagement over scale, The Telegraph ranked first for average time per user for September. Telegraph app users averaged 565 minutes of consumption time per user in September. This is great success story following The Telegraph‘s integration of their Live and Edition news apps which you can read about here.

You can get more of September’s news app stats in Press Gazette from Aisha Majid here.

5. What publishers can learn from first news media Web3 experiments

Despite the infancy around the new technology, Web3 experiments are creeping into the mainstream in publishing. At WAN-IFRA‘s recent World News Media Congress, publishers from across the world shared their learnings and provided lessons from their experiments with the new technologies.

Find the full story from Teemu Henriksson on WAN-IFRA here.