How Boston Globe's B-Side Made Its Journalist the Product

How Boston Globe's B-Side Made Its Journalist the Product

Kerstin Hasse sits down with Emily Schario, Head of Content and co-founder of The B-Side, Boston Globe Media's daily newsletter for young Bostonians. What started as an internal pitch at an innovation day in 2021 has grown into a very compelling young audience product in local news: 60,000 subscribers, a 60% open rate, and a paid membership model built around events and community rather than paywalled content. Emily doesn't just run The B-Side, she is The B-Side. She co-writes the content, films videos - and she is the face of the product. Sometimes literally: she once ran a stretch of the Boston Marathon to test whether you can churn butter while jogging. (Turns out: You can.) In this conversation, she talks about building a media product inside a legacy organization with almost no team, what it takes to earn the trust of an audience that has never paid for news, and what happened when the journalist and the brand became the same person.

How the Washington Post's TikTok Guy Built a Loyal Audience – And Then Left With It

A chart got passed around on LinkedIn last year showing Washington Post video numbers cratering right after Dave Jorgenson left - and how his own numbers were climbing. Publishers looked at it and panicked: Is this what is happening when you bet on a voice in your newsroom? In this episode, Kerstin Hasse sits down with the journalist who built one of the most loyal young audiences in American news media – from inside a legacy newsroom, with a small budget, no blueprint, and a platform his colleagues weren't sure they should be on. Dave Jorgenson and her talk about what it actually takes to grow an audience, why loyalty follows people and not mastheads, and what most publishers still refuse to understand about how trust works. And Dave reveals whether there was anything – anything at all – that could have made him stay at the Post.

Die Zeit vs. Spot On: What Happens When Legacy and Next Gen Compare Notes

What can a media startup learn from a 80-year-old institution – and what can a legacy publisher learn back? In this special live episode from the INMA World Congress in Berlin, Kerstin Hasse sits down with Rainer Esser (Die Zeit) and Sruthi Gottipati (Spot On) for a cross-generational conversation on leadership, loyalty, and the future of media. Including the question neither of them saw coming: what would you do if you had each other's job for one day?

How Podme Is Winning Over Young Audiences With Paid Audio

Publishers have been saying it for years: young audiences don't pay. PodMe has 200,000 subscribers, and more than half of them are under 35. In this episode, Kerstin Hasse talks to Kristin Ward Heimdal, who leads PodMe, Schibsted's paid podcast platform. They discuss why Schibsted started investing in the start-up, what happened when they first tried a hard paywall, and why the true crime genre is now being developed closer to the newsroom rather than acquired from independent creators. Kristin also explains what actually drives young people's willingness to pay — and why the answer has less to do with format and more to do with what publishers are trying to sell them. If your organization is still treating paid audio as a side experiment, this conversation is worth your time. Guest: Kristin Ward Heimdahl, Head of Podme Host: Kerstin Hasse, Young Audiences Initiative Lead, INMA

Der Spiegel's Crossmedia Bet: What Happens When Digital Finally Sits at the Table

One year ago, Der Spiegel merged three digital teams into one. In a newsroom where text still carries most of the editorial weight, what happens when video, audio, and social suddenly sit at the same table? Kerstin Hasse is talking to Aleksandra Janevska, Deputy Head of Crossmedia at Der Spiegel, about what it takes to restructure a newsroom from the inside and what happens when you stop organizing by medium and start organizing by format instead. They discuss what's working, what Der Spiegel decided to stop, including a podcast ending after two years and what that process revealed about making editorial decisions with clarity. They also dig into fact-checking as a format and why "Sagen, was ist" – say what is – turns out to be not just a founding editorial principle, but a natural fit for the platforms where young audiences are. Plus: the growing role of on-camera personalities, and what it looks like when a major investigative story goes viral across every platform at once. This conversation was originally recorded as a live INMA Young Audiences Initiative webinar. Listen, share, subscribe! More infos about the International Media Association and the Young Audiences Initiative supported by Knight Foundation at inma.org Guest: Aleksandra Janevska, Deputy Head of Crossmedia, Der Spiegel Host: Kerstin Hasse, Young Audiences Initiative Lead, INMA