Samuel Fatola, auteur chez State of Digital Publishing

The audience development playbook that defined the last decade of digital publishing is no longer fit for purpose. The dominant logic was straightforward: publish quality journalism, optimise for search, build a social following, and drive traffic back to owned platforms. Distribution was a final step. Audience development sat downstream of the newsroom, not inside it. The data now make the scale of the shift impossible to ignore. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, social media and video networks have overtaken both television and publishers' own websites as the most widely used way of accessing news across 48 markets. More telling: use of news organisations' own websites and apps has fallen 12 percentage points since 2020; the very destination the old playbook was built to drive traffic toward is eroding. Among the young, the shift is close to total; more than half of 18-to-24-year-olds globally now name social platforms, video networks, or AI as their primary news source, 32 points clear of anything else. The challenge intensifies dramatically at scale. Most publishers are navigating this shift within a single language and cultural context. Deutsche Welle operates across more than 30 languages simultaneously, spanning dozens of cultural contexts, audience expectations, trust signals, and platform behaviours, where what works in Germany may fail entirely in Indonesia, and what resonates in Brazil may be opaque in Arabic-speaking markets. Managing platform strategy at that level of complexity is not simply an audience development challenge; it is an organisational design challenge of a different order entirely. Erika Marzano, Audience Development Manager at Deutsche Welle, has spent years working at that intersection, developing short-form video formats that measurably improve watch-through rates, co-founding Deutsche Welle's Young Audiences Team, and leading TikTok and X strategy across language services that span continents. Few audience development professionals anywhere have operated at the breadth of scale she has. In this conversation with State of Digital Publishing, Erika sheds light on the challenges publishers face while shaping audience-first strategies. From navigating the expectations of a 14- to 17-year-old audience in journalism to the effective use of analytics in newsrooms to the realities of short-form video, she shares practical perspectives that can help media organisations think outside the box and achieve sustainable growth across markets while remaining locally relevant. You have developed short-form video formats that measurably improve watch-through rates at a global news organisation. Most news publishers entering short-form video are making the same foundational error before a single frame is shot at the level of how they brief, commission, and resource the format. From your work at Deutsche Welle, where exactly does that failure originate, and what does correcting it structurally require? The failure usually starts long before production. Many publishers still treat short-form video as a distribution format rather than an editorial format. A newsroom will often take an existing article, ask a social media producer to "make it into a TikTok," and expect platform-native performance. But TikTok, Reels and Shorts are not simply new distribution channels. They reward a different way of constructing stories. Traditional newsroom workflows are often organised around topics, beats and editorial importance. Short-form platforms are organised around attention, curiosity and retention. The result is that journalists are frequently given content to adapt rather than stories commissioned specifically for the format. Correcting this requires a structural change. Audience specialists need to be involved before production begins. Platform considerations should influence story framing, visual planning and scripting from the start. The question should not be "How do we publish this story on TikTok?" but rather "How would this story be told if TikTok were the primary destination?" Managing TikTok and X strategy across that many languages and cultural contexts is less an audience development challenge and more an organisational design challenge. What has operating at that scale taught you about where centralised platform strategy must hold firm, and where it has to yield entirely to local editorial judgment to produce content that actually resonates? The biggest lesson is that principles scale better than formats. Certain fundamentals are universal. Curiosity drives attention. Strong openings improve retention. Clear visual storytelling performs better than talking heads reading scripts. Audience needs matter more than institutional priorities. But once you move beyond those principles, local expertise becomes indispensable. A hook that works in Germany may fail completely in Indonesia. A visual reference that feels obvious in Brazil may be meaningless in Arabic-speaking markets. Trust signals vary enormously between cultures, as do humour, pacing and audience expectations. The role of a central audience development team is not to dictate content. It is to provide evidence, frameworks and best practices while giving local teams the flexibility to adapt them. The most successful organisations are not those with the most centralised control. They are the ones that combine shared strategic principles with deep local editorial autonomy. Social recommendation algorithms have inverted the discovery model; content now finds audiences rather than audiences seeking content. At Deutsche Welle, leading platform strategy across 30-plus language teams gives you a vantage point few audience development professionals have ever occupied. What has that shift exposed about the structural gap between how most publishers organise their editorial operations and what algorithmic distribution actually requires to perform consistently? Recommendation algorithms have exposed a structural mismatch between editorial production and audience consumption. Most newsrooms are organised around what they publish. Platforms are organised around the consumption patterns. A political reporter may write a brilliant analysis, but algorithms don’t evaluate journalistic merit. They evaluate audience response. That means factors such as clarity, pacing, visual communication and retention become critical determinants of whether journalism reaches people at all. The implication is uncomfortable but important: distribution is no longer separate from editorial work. The story and its delivery mechanism have become inseparable. The publishers succeeding today tend to integrate audience development, analytics and editorial teams into a shared workflow rather than treating distribution as a final step. The tension between algorithmic reach and editorial integrity is not new, but short-form video sharpens it considerably because the format constraints are imposed externally by platforms, not editorially by the newsroom. How has Deutsche Welle resolved that tension in practice, and where do you think the line sits between format adaptation and editorial compromise? I think the distinction is straightforward. Changing how a story is told is adaptation, while changing what is true about a story is compromise. At Deutsche Welle, we frequently adapt stories to fit platform expectations. We simplify language, restructure narratives, use stronger openings and employ more visual storytelling. What we do not do is exaggerate, speculate or remove necessary context purely to increase reach. A useful test is whether the adaptation improves audience understanding or merely increases audience attention. If it improves understanding, it is usually good journalism. If it only increases attention, we should be more cautious and review the approach. Watch-through rate has effectively become the primary distribution signal on every major short-form platform; it determines reach more than follower count, posting frequency, or even content quality in isolation. What does taking retention seriously as an editorial discipline actually demand of a newsroom's workflow, commissioning decisions, and the way journalists are trained to open a story? Retention is often misunderstood as a platform metric. In reality, it is an audience metric. If viewers leave after three seconds, the problem is usually not the algorithm. It is that we failed to convince them that the next second was worth watching. Taking retention seriously requires rethinking workflow. Journalists need to understand how openings function, how curiosity gaps work, how visual transitions maintain attention and how information should be sequenced. This does not mean turning every journalist into a creator. It means recognising that audience attention is a finite resource and that storytelling techniques directly affect whether journalism is consumed. The best newsrooms increasingly treat retention as a storytelling discipline rather than a social media KPI. The 14 to 17-year-old audience is not simply a younger version of the 25 to 34-year-old demographic; they have fundamentally different relationships with news, trust, format, and platform. Co-founding Deutsche Welle's Young Audiences Team has given you direct operational experience that most publishers theorise about. What is the single most consequential misunderstanding legacy publishers carry into their young audience strategies, and how does it manifest in the content decisions they make? The biggest misunderstanding is that young audiences are avoiding news. Most research suggests they are not avoiding information. They are avoiding formats and experiences that feel irrelevant, inaccessible or disconnected from their daily lives. Young audiences often encounter news through creators, recommendation algorithms and conversations rather than through direct visits to publisher websites. Many publishers interpret this behaviour as disengagement when it is actually a different pathway to engagement. As a result, organisations frequently invest in making news younger rather than making journalism more understandable, useful and accessible. The goal should not be to imitate youth culture. The goal should be to meet young audiences where they already are and communicate in ways that respect their habits without compromising journalistic standards. Publishers approaching TikTok as a brand awareness channel are structurally misreading how the platform's algorithm allocates reach. What is the strategic and operational difference between publishers who have built genuine, sustained audiences on TikTok and those who generate occasional viral moments but cannot convert platform exposure into meaningful audience development? The difference is the consistency of learning. A viral video can happen by accident. Sustainable audience growth requires repeatable processes for analysing performance, identifying patterns and iterating formats. The strength lies with publishers who understand that TikTok is not a broadcasting platform. It is a recommendation platform. Every video is effectively competing on its own merits. They study retention curves, search behaviour, audience comments and format performance. They treat each post as feedback. The result is that audience growth becomes an outcome of continuous learning rather than occasional luck. Analytics culture in newsrooms fails most often not because journalists resist data, but because the data being presented does not connect to decisions journalists are actually empowered to make. What does closing that gap genuinely require at the level of how analytics functions are structured, how insights are communicated, and how editorial leadership needs to change its relationship with performance data? I don’t really see a resistance to data. The problem is that journalists are often shown metrics without interpretation. A reporter cannot meaningfully act on a dashboard full of naked numbers. They can act on specific insights, such as "videos with a presenter retain viewers 30% longer" (example) or "these search-driven topics consistently outperform this other coverage." Analytics become useful when they answer editorial questions. The most effective audience teams act less like data providers and more like translators. Their job is to turn performance information into practical editorial guidance. Final Thoughts Reaching audiences in 2026 is no longer a distribution problem; it is an editorial one. The structural gap most publishers are struggling to close is not about platform choice or content volume. It is about the fundamental mismatch between how newsrooms are organised and what sustained audience reach now requires. Stories and their delivery mechanisms are no longer separable, and publishers who continue to treat them as such will keep losing ground regardless of content quality. Three deductions follow from that reality. First, analytics fail not because journalists resist data, but because data is rarely connected to decisions journalists are actually empowered to make; closing that gap is a structural fix, not a cultural one. Second, young audiences are not disengaged from news; they are disengaged from formats that feel disconnected from their lives, a distinction that changes the entire strategic response. Third, local editorial autonomy is not a constraint on centralised platform strategy; at scale, it is the only thing that makes centralised strategy perform. The publishers who internalise these shifts earliest will not simply adapt to the algorithmic era. They will define what credible, platform-native journalism looks like for a generation that may never visit a publisher's homepage at all.

SODP

SODP Media

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